Olestra Causing Diarrhea, Group Says

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

A consumer group charged Monday 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,” Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, wrote in a letter to Frito-Lay, the potato chip maker. The consumer group also asked the 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 Co., which developed olestra, called it “the most extensively reviewed new food ingredient” in the federal government’s history. “People experience GI [gastrointestinal] effects all the time,” the company said.

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.

The FDA said it will examine the consumer group’s data.