V. Vemuri
In India, a constant preoccupation of people is to get food on the proverbial dining table. Most Indians do not even have a cot to sleep, where would they get a table to dine? In America, a preoccupation of men and women is to constantly cook up bizzare strategems to lose their weight - without actually cutting down on their food intake. There are television shows devoted to this task. Health clubs constantly dispense advice on what to do to lose weight. There is a whole industry whose sole job it is to peddle products that are cholesterol-free, sugar-free, fat-free, and quite often taste-free.
Take a look at fake fats. Sucrose polyester, also called Olestra by Procter & Gamble, is made from sugar and edible oils. This has the same taste and cooking properties as regular fats and oils but has no calories and no cholesterol. The trick is to make the molecules so large that they go through the digestive track unchanged. Developed first in 1968, Olestra recently received approval from the U. S. Food and Drug Administration. Another synthetic fat, developed by NutraSweet Co. in 1979, goes by the name Simplesse. This fat-like compound, made from the proteins of milk and eggs by a process known as microparticulation, has about one calorie per gram and has no cholesterol. Regular fats have nine calories per gram. Simplesse cannot be used in frying or cooking because the heat would destroy the microparticles.
How safe are these? We do not know, as yet. Are there any side effects? Well, people allergic to milk and eggs will be allergic to Simplesse. Too much of Olestra may interfere with the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins. You see, the body does need fat, but not too much of it.
What the overfed Americans are really looking for is something else to eat in order to cut down their weight. Their prayers, it seems, are going to be answered - soon. Now they can have their proverbial cake and eat it too. This boon comes in the form of a pill - a pill that makes you thinner, not by suppressing apetite or speeding up the metabolism, but by preventing the fats from entering the blood stream - and from there to the hips, to the belly, to the buttocks - one greasy molecule at a time.
This dream-drug that Americans have been praying for, is being develped by Hoffmann-La Rouche. Its chemical name is tetrahydrolipstatin. Promoted under the trade name Orlistat, it can prevent fat uptake up to 270 calories a day. For a scientist, the interesting thing about this drug is the way it works. It targets a pair of key enzymes, essential to the digestion of fats, and blocks their action. You see, most of the fat we eat (pardon the pun) is too fat to enter the body's blood stream! Before it can cross the intestinal walls, it must be split into its three constituent parts, namely three fatty acids along with their glycerol backbones. The body does this job with the help of two fat cleaving enzymes, called lipases. One of these does its job in the stomach and the other in the small intestine.
According to Dr. Jonathan Hauptmann, director of therapeutic research at Hoffmann-La Roche, the body produces the said enzymes in such a quantity that the drug is only 30% effective. That is, if you take a dose of Orlistat and ate 100 grams of fat, 70 of those grams would be absorbed as usual and 30 would pass, undigested, through the digestive system. Indeed, in a recent test on 100 Americans, each lost an average of 11 pounds (remember, United States still uses the archaic British system) in over a three-month period - a figure that is nearly twice as much as the control group. The subjects did experience greasier stools and diarrhea as side effects. It is not known how many of these subjects promptly gained their weight after the experiment. What Americans probably need is not a pill to pop into their mouths; they need a kind of drug that can be mixed in their water supplies so they can keep on eating without the worry of remembering which pill to take!!