Loose Food Rules Can Loosen Us All Up

Procter & Gamble may still be the Marine Corps of marketing, but not since the Edsel has a product come to market against more challenging odds than Olestra, P&G’s synthetic wonder fat that goes right through you.

Since P&G has $200 million riding on this one, it would be irresponsible - even unsporting, I guess - to suggest, especially in today’s deregulatory climate, that they should not have a fair go at trying to get people to eat the stuff. The Food and Drug Administration has approved snacks cooked in Olestra, though over protest from some of the pure-food folks.

It’s hard to blame P&G for wanting to recoup such a huge investment in a market so starved for obesity cures and at a time when the government is lecturing everybody not to get fat.

And it’s hard to blame the FDA. For one thing, it is under intolerable pressure from Congress, which wants to butcher its budget, and from Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., in particular, who has called the FDA director a “thug” for his zeal in protecting people from things that are bad for them. For another thing, the FDA insists snack foods made with Olestra carry a warning that says: “Olestra may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools. Olestra inhibits the absorption of some vitamins and other nutrients.”

Now, of course, what most of us demand of the food we buy is that it not make us sick. It’s one of the reasons we’re glad to have an FDA. And if we get abdominal cramps, loose stools and signs of vitamin deprivation, most of us would call in sick. But of course, P&G insists exhaustive tests show hardly anybody gets these things from Olestra, which is why the FDA gave it a pass. Anyway, Olestra will have vitamins A, D, E and K added to it.

Besides, even if people wanted to fry their food in motor oil, it would be their choice. It’d probably give them cramps and loose stools, too, but there’s no law stopping them.

Nor is there a law making them buy Olestra.

And Lord knows it could have been worse. More bluntly put, the required label might have been: “May be harmful if swallowed” or “This stuff could give you a stomach ache, the runs and pellagra,” even “Eat at your own risk.”

But we must not sneeze at this triumph of science at a time when Americans stuff themselves with 22 pounds of potato chips and other such fatsaturated snacks each year. We are, after all, in the early stages of a revolution bringing us mutant fruit, irradiated vegetables, meat laced with growth hormones, bioengineered livestock and artificial sweeteners. Merely to define such terms as “lite,” “light” and “reduced fat” requires increasing vigilance.

The larger question is: Is this a time to put on a starvation diet the agency that makes sure all this stuff is wholesome?

Republicans who disparage the FDA may have mounted a tiger on this issue. It could devour them quicker than all their cuts in programs for the poor and exploited. Upton Sinclair wrote his hugely successful novel “The Jungle” as a socialist plea for justice for exploited stockyard workers laboring in filth and misery. The public was incensed, not at the wretchedness of the poor workers but at the wretchedness of the meat they were producing. This led to passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Meat Inspection Act of the same year.

“I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” moaned Sinclair.