Epic Fails by Salvador Jimenez Murguía

Author:Salvador Jimenez Murguía [Murguía, Salvador Jimenez]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-05-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

WOW Chips

Just as every generation has a fitness craze, each fitness craze has its accompanying recommendations for dietary changes: eat less; drink less; eat more of the good stuff and less of the fatty, salty, and sugary stuff. Yet every so often, the science behind food manufacturing offers a bit of relief for those missing their snacking habits. In 1998, they received a crunchy little respite when Frito-Lay went national with its WOW chips containing the nonfat wonder ingredient Olestra. Largely marketed as versions of Doritos, Ruffles, and Tostidos,1 WOW chips maintained their junk food flavor by using Olestra as a substitute for the fat proscribed by popular healthy dietary standards, creating a chip with no fat, no cholesterol and few to no calories. The name WOW was actually putting it lightly, as the label generated a snacking revolution, doing for the image of the potato chip what some believed saccharin and other alternative sweeteners had done for the soft drink.

Yet by the end of the decade most of the hype had—both figuratively and literally—gone down the toilet; the gastrointestinal side effects associated with Olestra caused painful and uncomfortable bowel movements, with the attendant embarrassment of rushing to restrooms and frequently failing to arrive in time. In contrast with the company’s slogan that “No one can eat just one,” for those chips containing Olestra, it would seem that Frito-Lay failed to give consumers enough reason to keep coming back for more.

Few epic failures in this book are as clearly and wholly attributable to consumer dissatisfaction as Lay’s WOW chips. This product, which had the potential to enable guiltless snacking, simply couldn’t pass the rudimentary test of cost-benefit analysis: consuming the chips simply wasn’t worth the pain—and potential embarrassment—of digesting them.

Although Olestra turned out to be a flash in the pan, it had rather interesting beginnings. According to Marion Nestle, Olestra was discovered unintentionally in the late 1960s when two Procter & Gamble (P&G) researchers were seeking readily digestible foods for premature infants. Though it is a bit on the technical side, Nestle’s explanation of Olestra’s origins is worth reading:

Conventional fats are composed of a “backbone” of a small sugar (glycerol) to which three fatty acids are attached, one to each of three linkage sites on the sugar. P&G scientists replaced the glycerol with sucrose (common table sugar) to which up to eight fatty acids could be attached. 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. 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. In addition, P&G scientists were able to manipulate the fatty acid composition of olestra to give it the thickness, cooking properties, and taste of natural fats and oils. Hence it could substitute for any conventional oil to prepare fast foods, restaurant meals, or, for that matter, foods cooked at home.

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