Opening up a bag of gastrointestinal adventures

Alex, I'll have Reckless Corporate Negligence for $1000."

For most of the 1990s, Procter & Gamble invested millions of dollars into fusing these two entities into a successful commercial marriage."

"Wei-Ling"

"What are peanut butter & jelly?"

"Wrong . . . Colin"

"What are tofu and duck sauce?"

"No . . . Laetitia?"

"What are Prozac and chewing gum?"

"Sorry. We were looking for potato chips and diarrhea. Our judges would have also accepted chips and uncontrollable flatulence, chips and projectile vomit and chips and incontinence. Colin, pick again."

Well, you heard the man. But I bet you've also heard of Olestra, the miraculous vegetable oil derivative that promises the never-never land of fat-free frying to millions of Americans watching their weight. If you haven't, then get a hold of a bag of Frito-Lay's "Wow!" fat-free version of its potato chips and Doritos.

I picked up a bag of "Wow!" Ruffles last week at the grocery store and, boy, did I go, "wow!" That stuff tastes exactly like its conventional counterpart. And I am proud to confess that even a bag full of "Wow!" did not induce my body to venture into the abdominal cramping and loose stools that the package subtly warned that it could/might tangentially inspire. In fact, so fascinated was I over this innovation that I bought another bag and offered to split it with my friend Conrad (NOTE: all names have been changed to protect the gastrointestinally wronged).

Just as awestruck as I was, Conrad ate about 10 of the chips as we listened to an '80s CD; with mile-high hope for the future, he vowed to buy a bag of his own some day, perhaps even BBQ. In any case, as he later confessed, he retired to bed with visions of fat-free miracles dancing in his head: french fries, onion rings, veggie stir fry, you name it. Procter & Gamble – a titan of the consumer goods market – suddenly became a dietary Santa Claus . . . until Santa became Montezuma the next morning.

To make a long and literally gut-wrenching story short, poor Conrad took to the toilet for two full days, missing all of his classes while wishing plague on P?'s management and your humble narrator.

Get the best of ‘the Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

"Loose stools and abdominal cramping?" I asked the pale-looking lad a day into his Olestral ordeal. He replied, "Go to hell. I only had a handful, but I can't hold anything in. It just won't stop."

"Dude, I ate almost two bags and I'm fine. It's probably all in your head."

"Go to hell."

I felt pretty dirty for robbing this man of his intestinal fortitude. But still convinced that he was the exception to the safe norm of Olestra (or Olean) consumption, I resolved to do a little fact-finding. It turns out that this "fat-free natural cooking oil" is actually a synthesized consortium of sucrose molecules so large and fatty that they cannot be metabolized by enzymes and bacteria in the gut, and are neither absorbed nor digested. It is so resilient to the human digestive tract that it can force itself out of the body via violent diarrhea or the more silent killer of – and I quote a Frito-Lay memo – "anal oil leakage," which gives rise to a "statistically-significant (incidence) of underwear spotting."

Mmmmmm. Can anyone eat just one?

Moreover, the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest discovered that hundreds of individuals who consumed the chips in an Indiana test market called its Olestra hotline with symptoms ranging from bloating to uncontrollable flatulence to severe gas to seven-day-long bouts with diarrhea (often euphemistically diagnosed as "fecal urgency").

Now I don't know about you, but where I come from fecal urgency is about as "natural" as a cow giving birth to a laptop. Was Indiana victim to a psychosomatic frenzy? Maybe. But was this event grounds for moving ahead with the national release of "Wow!" chips alongside a huge ad campaign touting the farm-raised goodness of Olean? Methinks not.

Yet I have to stop short of calling for Procter & Gamble's head in a vat of Olestra. Instead, I blame myself, poor Conrad, and the tens of million of other Americans who are chronically obsessed with the notion of experiencing maximum gratification without its naturally-designed consequences.

Think about it. This fixation has engendered unscrupulous corporate cure-alls like Sweet 'n Low, Methanol gasoline, birth control and breast-augmenting implants.

Let us not forget this country's unparalleled penchant for beef and full-bodied hamburgers, which not infrequently gives rise to Jack-in-the-Box-type scares. And what about the myth of "light" cigarettes, or even that almost-manufactured, battery-powered pocket smoking gadget that promised smokeless and uninhibited drags of your Marlboros?

That much said, I propose that excess, and not corporate negligence, is the root evil. But as long as we delude ourselves into believing that the corporate cutting edge and pioneering consumerism can bail us out of the reality of consequences, we will continue to set ourselves up for hard-earned realizations like Olestra's revenge. Just ask Conrad.

Now I don't want this to sound like the Unabomber's manifesto; I'm only calling for a larger espousal of moderation. I say eat your Doritos, but don't scarf down a whole bag while watching Seinfeld. Savor a Fuddrucker's half-pounder every now and then, but steer clear of Pay-What-You-Weigh all-you-can-eat night at the Jolly Artery Steakhouse. And try dancing lasciviously to Human League's "Don't You Want Me Baby" with your significant other in lieu of a marathon night of unprotected copulation. Think of it as a healthy throwback to America's puritanical roots.

As for Conrad and the Little Intestine that Couldn't, I offer my wholehearted apologies. Having learned from his nightmare, I hope we can all find the courage to reach for a bag of standard 14-grams of fat per serving salty snacks instead of mortgaging our gastrointestinal stability for a bag of "Wow!" Alas, battering an old proverb, you should be able to eat your chips and hold 'em too.