Olestra-Laden Chips Off And, Well, Running

Eating potato chips with olestra, the new fat replacement, may have some couch potatoes running to the bathroom more often than expected.

Monday, a consumer group charged that 192 people who ate chips with olestra in three Midwestern cities where the olestra chips are being test-marketed - Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Grand Junction, Colo.; and Eau Claire, Wis. - later suffered diarrhea and other stomach ailments.

“Your products are making some of your best customers sick, some of them very sick,” wrote Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, in a letter to Frito-Lay, the potato chip maker. The consumer group also asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ban olestra based on these new findings.

But Frito-Lay said only 67 people have complained of gastrointestinal side effects from the 200,000 bags of Max chips sold so far.

Procter & Gamble, which developed olestra, called olestra “the most extensively reviewed new food ingredient” in the federal government’s history.

“People experience GI effects all the time,” the company said in a statement.

P&G spent 25 years and more than $200 million developing olestra, a chemical made of sugar and vegetable oil that looks like regular fat but has molecules so large and tightly packed that it passes straight through the body without being digested.