Olestra (zero calorie cooking oil) - chemical synthesis and taste test

I synthesized olestra from biodiesel, sugar, and soap with a sodium metal catalyst. I also describe some of the history of olestra's development.

Other resources:

Epogee fat substitute:

Potassium oleate soap synthesis:

Studies on gastro distress and calorie compensation:

[NileRed]

That was a fun video! Also, I share your hatred for sand baths. I have never had a good experience with them.

[thethoughtemporium]

This was a lot of fun! What a cool idea. If we can't change peoples habits, give them the tools to succeed anyway

[ChefSalad]

My mom really loved those Wow! chips when they first came out. After a while of eating them regularly, she started eating more in one sitting. One night, she had a few too many drinks and ate an entire giant bag, and got the dreaded laxative effect the next day. She said it wasn't all that severe, but annoying. I suspect that the effect is similar to taking those fat blocking pills and then eating a bag of chips. If you do that, all the oil from the chips passes right through and acts like a laxative. The same thing also happens to people who eat large amounts of fat after having had their gall bladder removed. This whole "too much non-digestible stuff=powerful laxative" effect is well-known to diabetics, since a similar phenomenon occurs when you consume too much sugar-free candies based on sugar-alcohols. While some sugar-alcohols are fully digestible, most are only partially digestible or non-digestible and will give the laxative effect. This laxative effect is caused by the undigested sugar-alcohols absorbing large amounts of water, loosening your stools. I also suspect that the sugar-alcohol laxative effect can sometimes be made worse by gut bacteria which can often digest those sugar-alcohols that your body can't, giving you a large amount of gas to go with the loose, watery stools, producing a serious explosion hazard, so to speak.

I think this "non-digestible=laxative" effect makes non-nutritive foodstuffs basically a non-starter for the general public. This is mostly because the general public has already proven to be poor at regulating their intake amounts, which will inevitably lead to publicity problems after gluttons gives themselves an unintentional intestinal flushing.

[bigclivedotcom]

I wonder if the olestra food would have been less "moreish" than the current sugar-fat offerings. The food industry wouldn't have been pleased if it was going to encourage healthier living at the expense of their profit.

[Wombbatts]

I used to play WoW (World of Warcraft) with a food chemist from Frito-Lay who worked on Olestra, whose character name was Octaester.

[mahill]

I feel like Ben was testing the algorithm to see how much he could say “anal leakage” without getting demonetized.

[marxxVx]

Oh, I just noticed you have NileRed beakers! Nice!

[halcofdrops]

Speaking of caramel, have you ever looked at microwave synthesis of carbon dots? You can microwave some sugar water with citric acid or polymer to make carbon dots that fluoresce blue to green on UV excitation. Purification from precursors can be done through dialysis or gel filtration. Pretty cool kitchen chemistry.

[CatacombsBC]

i love how happy you got when you announced you were trying the olestra chips. you can definitely see the appreciation you have for your hard work

[MikeOrkid]

I love how versatile this channel is. One episode is electromechanical, next vintage auto radio repair, then cooking chemistry. Thanks for being awesome, Ben!

[leovalenzuela]

Ben: I'm not going to eat so many as to find out the threshold for anal leakage...
Me, indignant: and you call yourself a man of science!?
Ben: ...I'm going to have to save that for another video.
Me, choking back tears of pride: that's my man...

[BreakingTaps]

I love the deep frying with tweezers and a beaker of salt. Science!

[Thee_Sinner]

Potato chip making pro tip: Grind up the salt like you did for the sugar at 7:42.

Bonus tip: Grind a 1 to 10 ratio of MSG and salt for best flavor

[buddyrevell]

This is very interesting. Years ago I worked in an R&D polymer lab and I did a lot of work with fatty acids. We were incorporating unsaturated fatty acids into a polyurethane backbone that is dispersed into water to be used on wood coatings. Once coated out, these unsaturated fatty acids react with themselves via oxidation in the presence of a metal catalyst (cobalt, manganese etc.) forming a crosslinked polymer coating with properties that are on par with that of solvent based alkyd coatings.

We looked into using Olestra as it would be a great way to incorporate a higher percentage of fatty acid into the polymers that we were looking at. We were unsuccessful as most of the methods we were using were done at higher temperatures which caramelized the sugar that we were using.

[HuygensOptics]

As a chemist by education, I can really appreciate how much effort you put into this. The human aspect is also very interesting though. Here in the Netherlands in the 1990s, an alcohol free beer brand went out if business because of a single joke by a comedian on TV. After that joke, you could not be seen any more drinking that beer on parties. Maybe the leakage joke had the same effect...

[TacohMann]

Your videos are always so incredibly interesting, and they span such a large range of subjects. Thanks for sharing!

[timmccormack]

There's a soapmaking (and maybe general chemistry?) technique called "salting out" that helps recrystallize the soap and drive out excess lye and impurities. I wonder if it can also be used to speed up the process of producing dry soap.

[mahill]

I remember as a kid, my mom bought olestra pringles. I personally had stomach problems and can attest that it did, in fact, come out in the end. There would be a layer of fat that would float on top of the water after a #2.

[zachariahmiddleton]

I'm so happy you did this. Literally last week I listened to a podcast about the history of Olestra and how it was unfairly maligned, and I thought "I hope NileRed or Applied Science does a segment on Olestra some day." You read my mind!

[peasley]

This is great. I work next to the giant chemical plant p&g built to manufacture Olestra. I believe they spent $500 million to build it but after giving up sold it for something like $100-150 million. Marathon petroleum now operates this plant as one of the largest biodiesel facilities in North America in Cincinnati. I think they use soybean oil and canola oil as their feedstocks like you used in the video