Oh man remember Olestra?

See in the ‘90s the big thing in mass-market prepared foods was “lite” food. This was kind of the corporate co-option of 70s-80s “health” culture trends, kind of a way for big conglomerates to compete through new product lines rather than the zero-sum “ad wars” of the ‘80s (the other factor in the background was supermarket consolidation and the rise of Wal-Mart leaving outlets nibbling at the manufacturers’ share of the value stream).

At the edges it seemed like you could just cut the serving size (knowing that customers would just eat more servings) and put your product in a green box, and the notion that the key to health and fitness is a diet of the right highly processed supermarket snacks and microwave dinners was a little farcical, but it was a thing.

So anyway in the middle of the decade you started hearing about this amazing new breakthrough that was going to make all the so-terrible-for-you-but-so-tasty plastic bag snacks okay for you, and it was Olestra, it was a fat that was safe for human consumption, and functioned the same way as far as shortening and mouthfeel and whatnot so it wouldn’t be like the shitty low- or no-fat versions of things on the market already, but it was chemically structured in a way that humans couldn’t digest it so it wouldn’t, like, raise your cholesterol (which was then the Class A badthing in popular nutrition, associated with fat consumption and heart attacks, this was right before the big statin boom)

And so there was big hype, in all the weekly newsmagazines and wherever press releases got rewritten in those days, then after this hype it turned out that eating Olestra gave you greasy diarrhea, because of course it does, because that’s what eating a fat you can’t digest means, and so nothing became of it