Olestra / Olean

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Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts because this is the internet and that's how it works now.

Speaker 1 I'm No Illusions and I'm afraid I might be about to host a 30-minute poop joke.

Speaker 1 And arousing those suspicions are two men willing to do their duty, Tom and Eli.

Speaker 1 You know, really, every deck is the poop deck if you try hard. Absolutely.
Or if you try the shrimp.

Speaker 1 And group number two two consists of Heath and Cecil. Oh, we're shitting, buddies.
Yeah. You want to hold on? Yeah, let's do it.
Advance. Cheers.
Heart eyes contact. It's a double deuce.
Let's do it.

Speaker 1 There you go. And before we get started, I want to acknowledge how fortunate we are to be able to make poop jokes for a living.
Right?

Speaker 1 Like, most jobs would frown on us doing this kind of shit during work hours, but thanks to our patrons, we can roll around in it.

Speaker 1 And, of course, if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around to the end of the show.

Speaker 1 And with that out of the way, way, tell us, Tom, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today? Today, we will be talking about Olestra.

Speaker 1 Okay, Eli, this one has no doubt been building up in you for quite a while. Are you ready to let it loose? I'm overflowing with it, no illusions.
All right, so tell us, what is Olestra?

Speaker 1 Podcast listener, I'm fat, and I'm always going to be fat. I got chubby pretty early in childhood, and though my well-meaning parents kept me away from sugary cereals, soda, and candy, I just

Speaker 1 ate a bunch of fucking craziness and got fatter.

Speaker 1 Didn't really change things.

Speaker 1 Yes, exactly. That's the thing.
Fruit has sugar too. What that means is that I, like so many of my fellow Americans, have spent most of my conscious life feeling, at least in part, like a failure.

Speaker 1 Media, ads, and even my own doctors have spent my whole life telling me that if I just tried hard enough, if I just ate the right things or stopped eating the wrong things, I could be thin, that I would be sick, that I was greedy, that nobody would love me, all because of the size of my body.

Speaker 1 But today is not about the body dysmorphia culture gave me. No, no, no.
At least it's not about that anymore than any other day is.

Speaker 1 No, today is about a product that resulted from that dysmorphia that I and millions of other Americans experience.

Speaker 1 A miracle substance that at last would let you eat as many cookies and cakes as you wanted without gaining an ounce. Today, we'll be talking about Olestra.

Speaker 1 Okay, you might gain some ounces, but if I remember correctly, they're coming right back on, whether you like it or not. Yeah, man, it's like pressing the NOS button on your bowels.
Just

Speaker 1 right? Like introducing Snack Wells, new gone in 60 seconds chocolate chip cookies.

Speaker 1 Why does it say furious on this side? What is happening here? You're mixing franchise. So, Olestra.

Speaker 1 So, Olestra, also known by its brand name Olean, was discovered accidentally by Procter ⁇ Gamble during an unsuccessful 1968 search for fats that could more easily be digested by premature infants.

Speaker 1 Quoting from the 10th edition of Food Politics, quote, food conventional facts, I know, right?

Speaker 1 Know who to vote for. Conventional fats are composed of a

Speaker 1 bone.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, if it's food-based entirely, yes.

Speaker 1 Conventional fats are composed of a backbone of a small sugar, glycerol, to which three fatty acids are attached, one to each of the three linking sites on the sugar.

Speaker 1 PNG scientists replaced the glycerol with sucrose, common table sugar, to which up to eight fatty acids could be attached.

Speaker 1 The resulting olestra molecule is so much larger than natural fats that it cannot be broken down either by normal digestive processes in the small intestine or by bacterial digestion in the large intestine.

Speaker 1 The molecule is too big to be absorbed across the intestinal wall to any appreciable extent. It cannot be metabolized and therefore produces no calories.

Speaker 1 In addition, PNG scientists were able to manipulate the fatty acid composition of alestro to give it the thickness, cooking properties, and taste of natural fats and oils.

Speaker 1 Hence, it could substitute for any conventional oil to prepare fast foods, restaurant meals, or for that matter, foods cooked at home. End quote.
Okay, it was about premature infants.

Speaker 1 So, like, a guy in a lab coat walked into a focus group. What up, fat preemies? Great

Speaker 1 news.

Speaker 1 That's weird. It's a weird experiment you did.
Fucking capitalism makes you say shit like an indigestible molecule is too big for the human body to break down.

Speaker 1 Why, we could make a fortune selling it to people to eat.

Speaker 1 That's what I like. It's the crux of this story is that someone was like, poison? And they were like, put it in ships.

Speaker 1 In 1971, P ⁇ G met with the FDA to ask what kind of testing would be required to introduce alestra as a food additive. And the answer, unfortunately for them, was a lot.

Speaker 1 So the idea was temporarily shelved because during initial testing, PNG noticed a decline in blood cholesterol levels as a side effect of the alestra replacing natural dietary fats.

Speaker 1 So in 1975, PNG filed a new request with the FDA to use alestra as a drug, specifically to lower cholesterol levels.

Speaker 1 The problem is, drug is right there in the name of the Food and Drug Administration, and they were just as picky about what you could call a drug. After even more butting.
A magical item.

Speaker 1 That's not in your name.

Speaker 1 After even more boring studies failed to demonstrate the required 15% reduction to be approved as treatment, the project was abandoned.

Speaker 1 But then came the glorious 1980s: Back to the Future, pop rocks, laser tag, Noah and Cecil's 40th birthday, and best of all, 45th birthday, fad diets.

Speaker 1 I love that they really wanted to get it passed as food, but they'd settle as a drug for a safe school. That's amazing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, man, Olester has a very weird pledge with him.

Speaker 1 It's not that different. Not that different.

Speaker 1 Get out the slipping side, folks.

Speaker 1 Now, don't get me wrong. Fad diets didn't get their start in the 80s.
Fad diets have been around as long as there have been fat people, and fat people have been around since

Speaker 1 people. But Eli, you ask, do you have some examples to make this essay long enough for our podcast? I'm so glad you had on yes.

Speaker 1 Yes, I do. Our first example dates all the way back to 175 BC, the cabbage and urine diet.
Quoting from dieteticallyspeaking.com here.

Speaker 1 Only the best sources for you, podcast listener. What can I say? I'm a man of food politics.

Speaker 1 I'm a man of research and science. Quote, Cato the Elder was a Roman statesman, writer, and public speaker who was a massive fan of cabbage.

Speaker 1 He not only promoted eating plenty of cabbage, but also drinking the urine of people who had had a diet. This is a fetish.
This is just your fetish, man.

Speaker 1 Okay, I want to point out the thing I'm most offended by in that sentence is the fact that the source that Eli's quoting from ended that sentence with an exclamation mark.

Speaker 1 Jesus fucking Christ.

Speaker 1 Maybe. I don't know.
I didn't check anything about this.

Speaker 1 It's a lot like a citation needed, essay.

Speaker 1 Cato the elder is rolling in his grave.

Speaker 1 Citation needed. Citation provided.
End of job.

Speaker 1 Cato believed that cabbage could cure ulcers, dysentery, warts, indigestion, and even drunkenness.

Speaker 1 It's reported that Cato continued to believe in the power of cabbage even after his diet failed to save the lives of his wife and son.

Speaker 1 Yeah, cabbage, it's really healthy, but I don't like flavor that much. Hey,

Speaker 1 Faustus, you like cabbage. Follow me to the other movie.

Speaker 1 I think I agree with Tom about the cane. I am definitely staying away from Cato's asparagus diet.
That is

Speaker 1 yikes. Hey, guys, I think I just found Bear Grylls, great, good, good, good, good, good, good, great, great-grandfather.
Yeah, so I don't know, probably.

Speaker 1 Moving ahead to the 1800s, arsenic diet pills were all the range.

Speaker 1 Again, from dietechnically speaking.com here, quote, these Victorian diet pills were advertised as miracle cures, which could speed up the metabolism.

Speaker 1 Although the amount of arsenic within the pills was small, they were still very dangerous and posed the risk of arsenic poisoning, especially when the pills were taken in high doses.

Speaker 1 It also didn't help matters that the labels of these pills didn't always declare that they contained arsenic. Oh, Jesus.

Speaker 1 You know, these really aren't all that dangerous. I guess I should just take a bunch more of them.

Speaker 1 Hey, we'll cause weight loss. Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's also the tapeworm diet of the early 1900s and the reach for a lucky diet of 1929.

Speaker 1 The latter is an ad campaign for lucky cigarettes and it featured slogans like, reach for a lucky instead of a sweet and light a lucky and you'll never miss sweets that make you fat.

Speaker 1 Yeah, tapeworms are just harder to light. They're just

Speaker 1 constantly moving. And last, and almost certainly my favorite, the sleeping beauty diet.

Speaker 1 This diet was popular in the late 1970s and involved putting yourself under heavy sedation for several days at a time so that you should

Speaker 1 sleep the pounds away. It was apparently a favorite of none other than Elvis Presley.
Oh, yeah. No, because when I think of successful weight loss strategies,

Speaker 1 all right, I'm just one more coma away from my ideal weight.

Speaker 1 Then I can have all the peanut butter, bananas, honey, and bacon sandwiches that I want. I'm Elvis Presley.
And then another coma after that because I ate more of the sandwiches named after that.

Speaker 1 I just worked by. Oh, yeah, I'm sorry.
I can't come into work today.

Speaker 1 Work tomorrow or Wednesday. I'll be in on Thursday, though.
I'll be in Thursday. I'm taking a long lunch.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I plan to catch salmon in a stream with my teeth. I'm a bear.

Speaker 1 This is how bears eat

Speaker 1 what bears do. So back to our story.
Olystra seemed dead in the water, but a new fan fad diet would change all that. And it all started with a few dead senators.
Okay, I'm listening to you.

Speaker 1 I know you are, baby. I know you fucking are.
See, in the 1960s and 70s, it wasn't uncommon for men to just drop dead of heart attacks at the ripe old age of 40, as God intended.

Speaker 1 But according to NPR, eight U.S. senators died in office of heart disease during that 20-year period, which was enough to catch the attention of their colleague, Senator George McGovern.

Speaker 1 McGovern called a hearing, and two witnesses were key in pointing the finger at fat.

Speaker 1 Nathan Praticklin, a longevity guru who believed that heart disease could be reversed with diet, and a Harvard University professor who pointed to the harms of overconsumption of fat as outlined in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967.

Speaker 1 The problem is their answers were too technical for the American people. See, both Prichton and the professor were talking about the harms of saturated fat, which is extremely high in calories.

Speaker 1 And reducing your saturated fat intake is good for your heart and can reverse heart disease, as proved by at least one number of our cast.

Speaker 1 But all this saturated, unsaturated hullabaloo didn't get through to the public. What they heard was fat bad, carbs good.
And by the late 1980s, the low-fat craze was in full swing.

Speaker 1 Food companies pumped out hundreds of high-sugar products, labeled them low-fat, and sold them as healthy.

Speaker 1 The low-fat craze even changed how we drink milk, introducing the the popularity of 2%, 1%, and skim milk. Though, luckily, these watery horrors have dwindled in popularity in recent years.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and Young Heath was like, okay, got it. A dozen bagels and some 2%

Speaker 1 milk.

Speaker 1 The food pyramid, healthy breakfast.

Speaker 1 Bread and ketchup is a vegetable. It was a great time to be alive.

Speaker 1 So, what does all this have to do with Elestra? Well, in 1984, the FDA allowed Kellogg to claim publicly that their high-fiber, low-fat breakfast cereals were effective in reducing the risk of cancer.

Speaker 1 And PNG saw their in. They began another three-year series of tests to once again have Elestra listed as a food additive, this time as a fat-fighting one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you must be mistaken, doctor. You see, I've been eating two bowls of cinnamon minibuns cereal every day for years.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 in skim milk.

Speaker 1 Go check your chart right there. You definitely got his milk.

Speaker 1 Right there at the bottom. Camp.
Now, the FDA was reasonably hesitant.

Speaker 1 Food additives are usually included in tiny amounts, but P ⁇ G was recommending Olestra for up to 35% replacement of fats in home cooking and 75% in commercial uses.

Speaker 1 This meant that A one-ounce serving of potato chips would include two teaspoons of Olestra.

Speaker 1 By contrast, diet sodas contain only milligrams of artificial sweeteners, and the brand fortified Kellogg cereal that inspired PNG contained only 2.4 grams of psyllium husk per serving.

Speaker 1 This high amount per serving led to what was probably Olestra's biggest problem, insufficient testing.

Speaker 1 See, the way we test food additives is by giving animals an incredibly high, like 100-fold dose and seeing if any side effects appear.

Speaker 1 But you can't feed a mouse 12 and a half cups of Olestra to test your one-ounce bag of chips. Well, not twice, you can't.
Yeah, no, not twice.

Speaker 1 So, the long-term effects like diarrhea and vitamin loss were not included in PNG initial studies. Yeah.
Also, the whole concept of the low-fat craze was wrong.

Speaker 1 When you eat natural fats, like you eat an avocado, the body's not like, oh, nice, it's perfect. Gonna run that straight through to Heath's love handles, that entire avocado.

Speaker 1 It's more like, dude, a dozen bagels? We got to fucking put that somewhere. Like, all right, we'll make some fat, I guess.
We have to put it somewhere. I knew you were keto.
I knew you were keto.

Speaker 1 I read between the lines. He's keto.
Now, that doesn't mean the FDA didn't notice the diarrhea and the vitamin loss.

Speaker 1 By the time they approved Alestra, 6,600 anecdotal complaints of gastrointestinal problems had already been filed with the organization.

Speaker 1 So they approved it with a condition, quote, to avoid being misbranded, Olestra-containing foods would need to bear a label statement to inform consumers about possible effects of Olestra on the gastrointestinal system.

Speaker 1 The label statement also would clarify that the added vitamins were present to compensate for any nutritional effects of Olestra rather than to provide enhanced nutritional value, end quote.

Speaker 1 But as any of the smokers on this podcast can tell you, a label on the side of a product doesn't mean shit to the American people.

Speaker 1 So Alestra was ready to explode onto American grocery shelves in a major way. Yeah,

Speaker 1 they should do what they do in other countries and show people like what happens with the item, like with cigarettes in the UK. They show graphic throat cancer on the cigarette pack.

Speaker 1 So here for Elestra, you'd be someone with a geyser of shit shooting out of their pants.

Speaker 1 That's your warning.

Speaker 1 It's known to California that this is what.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, exploding onto shelves is not the explosion that we were thinking of. So

Speaker 1 before we meet our waiters, we're going to pause for a quick break and some apropos of nothing.

Speaker 1 All right, everybody, thank y'all so much for participating in this focus group for our brand new chip line. Poison.
I shat my pants like 100 times.

Speaker 1 All right. All right.

Speaker 1 Now, I understand that a few of you have some concerns about the food additives in the chip, and I promise you we will get to those, but I need to cover all of these questions on my list, okay?

Speaker 1 Literally the worst part of my life. I thought I was dying.
Okay, so question one. How would you rate the cheesiness of our nacho cheese flavor on a scale from one to ten?

Speaker 1 I shat myself at my daughter's wedding. Could not stop pooping.
Could not.

Speaker 1 All right, so guys, how do you numbers for the cheesiness? Six.

Speaker 1 Dude, really? Well, what? They weren't that cheesy. All right, six.
Thank you, Kyle. Question two: Which of the following price points would make these chips more appealing to you as a consumer?

Speaker 1 Seriously. $4.99, $5.99, or $6.99.
I lost my fucking job, man, because of shit. It's like you guys are allergic to letting me finish a question.

Speaker 1 I got fired for shitting.

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Speaker 1 All right, when we left off, Elestra was approved with a big sticker that said, this gives you the shit. So

Speaker 1 how did that work out, Eli? All right. So Procter ⁇ Gamble introduced Elestra to the market under the brand name Olaine.

Speaker 1 It premiered in partnership with Frito-Lay in their brand new wow brand of potato chips. Wow chips? Wow, I can't stop shitting.

Speaker 1 Wow chips came in. Wow.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 Wow chips came in all of America's favorite flavors. Nacho cheese, original, sour cream and onion, but importantly, they contained half the calories of regular chips and none of the fat.

Speaker 1 As one early reviewer put it, quote, The beauty of Olestra is permission to overindulge in perfectly crunchy, salty, good-tasting potato chips that merrily leave your finger shiny without the fat and half the gill.

Speaker 1 End quote. Sorry, your finger is normally shiny.

Speaker 1 But now I wonder what you're eating your potato chips with, Heath. Of course you're.

Speaker 1 The bag is the vegan.

Speaker 1 All right. So to show you how are you guys eating?

Speaker 1 So to give you an idea of how popular this was in 1998 their first year of sales wow charted 400 million dollars for that product line alone in sales now look part of this was no doubt thanks to their countless marketing campaigns right frito lay purchased full store wraps of grocery stores tv ads radio ads as well as a little print ad featuring a solitary farmer that reads as follows.

Speaker 1 Tom, you mind lending us a little bit of your smoke here?

Speaker 1 Doing good starts in your own backyard. Of course, mine is 250 acres of soybeans.
Let me tell you about the problem with America before I tell you about this product. I remember the day.

Speaker 1 Fully subsidized soybeans.

Speaker 1 How soybeans like mine were going to be used to make a new kind of cooking oil. Now, usually a day like that wouldn't be so special, except this was something that had never been done before.

Speaker 1 Seems the folks who make Crisco would come up with Olean, an oil that would fry up fat-free snack chips without adding any calories.

Speaker 1 You know that amazing company called Crisco that makes healthy fruits. They picked some top fruits, make them taste especially good, yet still a little healthier to eat than regular snacks.

Speaker 1 It only goes to show good things can start from anywhere, even your own backyard.

Speaker 1 Olean.

Speaker 1 I think I'm shitting right now. Can we cut it?

Speaker 1 What is that?

Speaker 1 Did you guys Google it? Did you see the picture of the farmer staring into the distance?

Speaker 1 It rules. Whatever you picture when Tom does his citation-needed intros, that's what that farmer's doing in that print.

Speaker 1 And it wasn't just chips. There were fat-free wheat thins, Ritz crackers, light lays potato chips, and even Olestra-coated microwave popcorn followed suit.
No, I didn't put in popcorn.

Speaker 1 That's just the sound of my large intestine.

Speaker 1 But sadly, this honeymoon period was not to last. More than 20,000 people contacted the Center for Science in the Public Interest NPNG with complaints that were forwarded to the FDA.

Speaker 1 Symptoms included cramping, diarrhea, oily discharge, and fecal incontinence. Some who consumed cholesterol products were so ill that they required colonoscopies and hospitalization.

Speaker 1 Guys,

Speaker 1 consider how bad you have to be shitting before you like

Speaker 1 call somebody about it.

Speaker 1 Right before you're like, honey, there's got to be a FDA number for this amount of shit. Honey, bring the long corded phone in here.

Speaker 1 I want to talk to the government about this.

Speaker 1 I'm cracking the door. Just slip the phone in.
Don't look at me. ACLU, I need to report a hate crime.

Speaker 1 Hey, George Bush Sr., it's me, Quan.

Speaker 1 These chips went away

Speaker 1 for me. You got to do something, W.

Speaker 1 I need you to take these out like you took out JFK. Oh, don't throw away the rest of the chips.
I'm going to want some more when I'm done in here. What are you doing?

Speaker 1 I'd like to speak to Ralph Nader.

Speaker 1 He's in the bed. Tell him not to run for president.

Speaker 1 Mad TV, The Onion, and even Jay Leno took cracks at the product. And by 2000, sales of products containing Olestra had fallen by half.
And the brand had a reputation for anal leakage.

Speaker 1 By 2002, the FDA was receiving more complaints about Olestra than all other food additives combined. Oh, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 The FDA claims that it required PNG to periodically disclose these, but failed to hold the company accountable. And Olestra was allowed to stay on the market.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Lots of stuff happened in the late 90s. Heaven's Gate, the assassination of Princess Diana, Columbine.
I remember anal leakage most vividly. And it never even said that on the label.

Speaker 1 It said may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools. But like, it's bad for sales when a food has a warning that's adjacent to anal leakage.

Speaker 1 And of course, America is going to, well, they're going to keep eating it for years, but then definitely stop way later when it can't take it off the market so many years later.

Speaker 1 We'll stop and we can't buy it anymore. Yeah, right.
Right. No, the Olestra term that really echoes through the years for me was fecal urgency.
Fecal urgency. Yeah.
Yeah. I liked that term.

Speaker 1 I feel like anal leakage always overshadowed fecal urgency.

Speaker 1 Did.

Speaker 1 But did Olestra actually give you the shits? The answer is more complicated than you might think. No, it's not.

Speaker 1 Progressively, it just makes it more urgent.

Speaker 1 So, PNG argued and still argues that the warning label was actually the problem.

Speaker 1 Citing a study of 3,000 people had ate either Olestra or regular chips for six weeks and had little difference in gastrointestinal experience, PNG claimed that consumers were attributing other gastrointestinal problems like stomach bugs and other health problems to the chips because the warning label had prepared them to do it.

Speaker 1 No, that's just placebo leakage.

Speaker 1 You just clean up your fun.

Speaker 1 You were gonna, your ass was gonna leak anyway.

Speaker 1 You shit yourself. Sometimes you do shit yourself.

Speaker 1 So you guys don't seem convinced, but the FDA was.

Speaker 1 And in 2003, they allowed the labels to be removed.

Speaker 1 Sure. By then, the damage was already done and sales never recovered.
In 2010, Time included Elestra on their list of the 50 worst inventions in history.

Speaker 1 Our chips are best paired with a modium brand Ranch Dip.

Speaker 1 We tested in a double bind setting.

Speaker 1 All right, so I looked at this list, guys. Time magazine has this one space better than asbestos

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 six spaces worse than leaded gasoline.

Speaker 1 I feel like that's harsh. I mean, I'm not saying I buy their excuse, but I feel like that's harsh.
Someone had some wow chips and they really, they had an axe to grind.

Speaker 1 I didn't get fired for mesothelioma. Whatever.

Speaker 1 To add the final nail in the coffin, Olestra, even without the explosive diarrhea, didn't make you healthier. Quote from Weird History Food here.

Speaker 1 In 2011, Purdue University published a study that suggested Olestra may cause people people to gain weight.

Speaker 1 Not only did researchers find that fat substitutes may induce people to overindulge in calories, they also determined that olestra consumers may gain weight because of the way the substance interferes with food digestion and metabolization.

Speaker 1 In the study, rats that were fed olestra potato chips for a period of time gained weight when they began eating regular fats again.

Speaker 1 Consuming olestra apparently changed the rats' physical response to food, altering their natural ability to regulate fat. That seems healthy.

Speaker 1 According to Purdue University professor Susan Swithers, when we get the cues that something is fatty, but no calories arrive, our body gets confused.

Speaker 1 This confusion can make the body stop preparing to digest fatty food when it does come. Olestra essentially plays a biochemical ding-dong ditch with your digestive system.

Speaker 1 So it turns out the only reliable weight loss offered by Olestra was the pounds you'd leave behind in the bathroom. End quote.
Well, jokes on you. I wasn't trying to lose weight.

Speaker 1 I was trying to shit like the fountain at the Bellagio. So mission accomplished.

Speaker 1 The press was so bad that WoW rebranded their Olestra products as light potato chips and Pringles, which were still on sale till anybody have a guess? That's right, 2016.

Speaker 1 Fantastic. Once you pop, you can't stop shooting.

Speaker 1 Bet you can't just go one. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, what happened to all of the Olestra? Well, today,

Speaker 1 Olestra is marketed under the brand name Cephos for use as an industrial lubricant and paint additive.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 1 According to Wikipedia, quote, it is currently used as a base for deck stains and a lubricant for small power tools. And there are plans to use it on larger machinery.
Oh, there you go.

Speaker 1 We've defeated like drills ahead of time and see if they

Speaker 1 don't want to pigeonhole it to just the small people.

Speaker 1 So, if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? Here we go, V again.

Speaker 1 And are you ready for the quiz? That's like a miracle drug, isn't it? Of course, no, no, nothing will go wrong with this one. It's going to go this one, yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm ready,

Speaker 1 okay. Uh, so Eli, what are a bunch of people thinking right now after hearing about the new branding of Olestra?

Speaker 1 A,

Speaker 1 that's why my deck is constantly shitting itself, itself, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1 It's a oh, it's a all right, Vincennes. A

Speaker 1 all right, Eli, what's the best sweet treat with Elestra added? A feces cups, B,

Speaker 1 a shit chat, C

Speaker 1 pop sharts, or D,

Speaker 1 peanut chunky. Oh,

Speaker 1 I'm gonna go with

Speaker 1 chat. It's so hard.

Speaker 1 I'm gonna go with feces cups. I think those are my favorite.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's all

Speaker 1 Feces cups. All right, I got one for you, Eli.
Which of the following historical fad diets am I the most disappointed at you for leaving out of your essay?

Speaker 1 A, Fletcherism, a fad diet at the turn of the 20th century that consisted of chewing your food to extract all the important essence and then spitting out all that silly sustenance that was left over.

Speaker 1 B, the vinegar diet, which was promoted and popularized by Lord Byron and consisted of consuming so much vinegar that your body acted like it was on Olestra.

Speaker 1 Or C,

Speaker 1 the rubber diet,

Speaker 1 which consisted, well, you didn't eat it. It consisted of wearing rubber underwear so that you could ass sweat your way in your dream body.

Speaker 1 A diet which arose in the mid-1800s and did not stop until the rubber demands of World War I made it too expensive to continue.

Speaker 1 Oh, man. I'm rubber and you're poo.

Speaker 1 Bounces off me. I need them all to be real, so I'm going to go with secret answer D, all of the above.
It is secret answer D, all of the above. Well done.

Speaker 1 All right, Eli, kind of a long one for you here.

Speaker 1 The FDA is responsible for making sure the drugs you take are safe and work and that the food you eat isn't an industrial lubricant that just makes you fatter.

Speaker 1 Which is why which of the below is the most worrying?

Speaker 1 A, if you just say something is substantially similar to something else that was previously approved, you get to skip much of the approval line like you have a Disney FastPass. That was true.

Speaker 1 I know that. B, medical devices, you know, the stuff they put in your body forever has a very sketchy history of dangerously lax oversight.
You lose one trachea.

Speaker 1 C, drugs approved by the FDA that were approved despite evidence of their dangerous presence in the approval data include fenfen, meridia, and oxycontin.

Speaker 1 D. Benzodiazepines were known by the FDA to cause severe, protracted, and sometimes fatal withdrawal syndromes 50 years before the FDA put a warning on their label in 2020.

Speaker 1 I think you made that one up. I did.
Phenolepherene, an ingredient in literally hundreds of over-the-counter cold medicines, which was approved by the FDA since the 1960s, does nothing at all.

Speaker 1 The FDA, after 20 years of being asked to review the data, finally agreed to allow it to be phased out. However, it is still on sale right now.
in pretty much all of those same medicines or F.

Speaker 1 How are you going to make meth, Tom? Isn't that the stuff you need to do? No, it's not.

Speaker 1 this is not it's that's the meth out and they gave you the not stuff that doesn't work doesn't work at all so maybe that's good or f 20 of the fda was just fired this april so i'm sure that will help they're trimming the fat trimming the fat yeah uh i'm gonna go with another secret answer e all of the above

Speaker 1 E was a different one. We were up to F.
There were problems up to F. Let's go with G.
You got it right-ish. You hate to be.
Or wrong. I don't know.
G is the letter F. It is the new F.
Yes.

Speaker 1 G. G.

Speaker 1 All right. Well, I guess somehow our winner is Eli, despite not knowing which letters the alphabet would give him.
But I'm still the winner. You have to say it on recorded media.
I do. I do.

Speaker 1 I was like, because I was like, just, it was just like, I'm sure Cecil will take out the long-beard pause of me just going, well, how the fuck do I say you won now when you got the alphabet wrong, man?

Speaker 1 Say I won so that the AI consciousness absorbs it and thinks it's a true thing about you forever as we float with solar power in space.

Speaker 1 Who would you like to think, or sorry, who would you like to have do the essay next week, Eli? I would like a Tom essay.

Speaker 1 As would I. All right, well, for Tom, Cecil, Heath, and Eli, I'm Noah.
Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week, and by then, Tom will be an expert on something else.

Speaker 1 Between now and then, you can hear more from us every day of the fucking week.

Speaker 1 And then some of if you check out Cognitive Dissonance, TND Minus, Dear Old Dad's God Awful Movies, The No Rogan Experience, The Scathing Atheist, and The Skeptic, I have to miss at least one there.

Speaker 1 And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com/slash citationpod or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can.

Speaker 1 And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media, or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citationpod.com.

Speaker 1 Okay, thank you all for participating. If you'd like, we have a free gift bag of our products for you to take home.
Um, are the diarrhea chips in the bag? Oh, well, yes,

Speaker 1 for sure. I'll take snacks.
Yeah, sure. Score, snacky.

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