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Like natural oils, olestra also has a creamy, tongue-pleasing texture. "From a sensory standpoint," observes Adam Drewnowski, director of the Program in Human Nutrition at the University of Michigan, "foods that are rich in fat are pure taste and pleasure." The fact that humans get such pleasure from fat-filled food is believed to have its roots in evolution. Primitive hunter-gatherer societies had unpredictable food sources; those with a taste for calorie-rich fat were thus more likely to survive.
In the beginning, remembers P&G's Janacek, "there was certainly not a groundswell to develop olestra as a product. It was more like, 'This is a curiosity. Let's see what we can do with a zero-fat fat that has the look, taste and feel of normal fat. Can we make chocolate ice cream with it? What else can we do with it?'" Plenty, as it turned out. "We tried out all kinds of foods, and this material was just a perfect substitute for fat," says Fred Mattson, a member of the original research team and now a professor emeritus at the University of California at San Diego. "It made cakes very nicely. It made pies. And when we heated olestra and added potatoes, we got fine French fries."
The company soon realized it had a potential blockbuster product. So in 1971--the year Procter & Gamble took out its first patent on sucrose polyesters as substitutes for fat in foods--the company started talking with the FDA about filing a formal petition to approve its use. Officially, a review of a food additive is supposed to take 180 days. In fact, most take three to six years, partly because the FDA has an informal policy not to reject an application out of hand. The FDA requires exhaustive studies before it will approve a new food additive. But, says William Schultz, its deputy commissioner for policy, "petitions sometimes come in very unsatisfactory shape, and we tend to work with the companies and tell them what studies they need."
With olestra, the process was even more complicated because no one had ever come up with a food additive that would be used in such large quantities. Normally, for example, the agency requires toxicology tests in which animals eat 100 times as much of the stuff as humans ordinarily would. But that would have required rats to eat a diet composed entirely of olestra--and would have killed them by malnutrition.
So instead of 180 days or even six years, the agency and the company have batted olestra back and forth for the past 21/2 decades. At one point early on, P&G switched to calling olestra a drug rather than a food; it seemed to lower blood cholesterol in test subjects, and the company thought it might have a better chance at getting the go-ahead that way. As it turned out, the oil didn't do a good enough job to win approval as a medicine, so P&G went back to its original strategy.
In 1987 the company submitted a formal food petition. P&G's initial application proposed using olestra not just in chips and other salty snacks but also as a major additive in commercial cooking oils. The petition set off FDA requests for more studies. Finally, to expedite the process, the FDA in 1990 asked P&G to narrow its request to such snacks as chips.