Word: olestra
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...market and let consumers decide its fate. Chef John Folse, who runs a food-products company as well as his restaurant, thinks he already knows the answer. "If people have the option of going to the grocery store and choosing from 10 oils, one of which is olestra," he predicts, "olestra will fly off the shelves...
WHETHER OR NOT FDA COMMISSIONER DAVID KESSLER decides to approve olestra, his ruling is sure to be bitterly attacked. That's nothing new for the maverick scientist (and, by training, doctor and lawyer), who in his fifth year as the U.S.'s top health official has achieved a rare combination of public controversy and political longevity. He heads the agency everybody loves to hate, yet he's outlasted most of his predecessors...
OKAY, NO MORE JOKES ABOUT FECAL URGENCY AND ANAL leakage. It's mouth-feel time. We have been standing around, five slightly nervous Time journalists who have volunteered to taste potato chips cooked in olestra. Because the stuff has not been approved by the FDA, each of us has signed a Procter & Gamble "informed consent" release, which we notice with some discomfort bears the 800 number of a doctor to call in case of emergency. This fellow, whose name is Sweeney, will chopper in with a medevac team if something goes wrong. Or so we assume...
...there is an aftertaste. Not of chemicals and not really unpleasant. With beer and football, you wouldn't notice it much. But it's there. The olestra chips don't slide down the pallet like regular chips. "Cloggy," says one woman tester...
...that's it. There's not much more to say. There will be other olestra products, if and when the FDA gives P&G the green light. But right now the chips are all we have, and the chips are all right. Nobody experiences digestive uproar, so we don't get to find out whether Doc Sweeney is really standing by his phone...