Word: olestra
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...life. Thus, says the commissioner, decisions on food additives "are among the most important the agency makes. There's an enormous responsibility to be thorough and to be vigilant." Acknowledges Wayne Callaway, a George Washington University nutrition expert who chaired P&G's scientific review council on olestra: "I'm very sympathetic to the FDA. They're in a very tight position because if they're wrong, everyone knows about...
THAT'S ONE REASON WHY THE process of getting olestra approved has taken nearly a quarter-century, a pace some in the food industry consider outrageously glacial. It was way back in 1959, in fact, that biochemists at P&G's Miami Valley research campus, near Cincinnati, Ohio, began trying to understand how the body digests fat. In particular, they were trying to identify a kind of fat that premature infants might digest more easily...
...Health Network, the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Ralph Nader's Center for Science in the Public Interest have come out against approval. Despite scores of clinical trials in animals and humans and hundreds of thousands of pages of studies, they argue that no one can be certain that olestra won't be a danger to public health. Besides, says Michael Jacobson, cspi's executive director, "we don't need olestra potato chips. It's crazy to add a substance to the food supply that makes people sick...
...Whether olestra is needed isn't the FDA's concern, however. Like all food additives, fat-free fat falls under the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 and the food-additives amendment of 1958. According to those laws, olestra can be approved if it carries a "reasonable certainty of no harm" when used as intended. If olestra really makes people sick, as Jacobson and others assert, the agency might well reject it. But after much fretting over the precise definition of harm (and diarrhea as well), a majority of advisory-committee members decided that while the gastrointestinal...
...does the body digest and absorb triglycerides but not a sucrose polyester such as olestra? Both types of molecule, explains P&G chemist Ron Janacek, are too large to pass unaltered through the mucous membrane of the small intestine and into the bloodstream. With triglycerides, an intestinal enzyme known as lipase acts as a kind of molecular scissors, fitting into slots between the fatty acids and snipping them apart. But when there are too many fatty acids clumped too close together, as happens with olestra and other types of sucrose polyester, these slots are concealed and the enzyme cannot...