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

What would the title of this video have been if you had made it instead?

Copper shot and some glasswool/aluminum foil topper works pretty well Used to use that in the glovebox back in my undergrad days. Though if you are willing to fork over a few bones, Ika Aluminum blocks were the best.

Very cool. While watching I thought: "I wonder what Nile thinks of sand baths?" ... there you go. I love our filter bubble :)

I'd like to know more about bleaching earth

Fluidised sand bed instead? Have memories of using the same when tempering metals.

I actually got an ad for some weight loss stuff so it seems he triggered *something*.

That naughty smile every time he says it is priceless

As someone with IBD anal leakage is real. But i dont see how this compound would cause it speccificallly

lol😆

Identify a problem that could be solved by a change in people's habits: Most refuse to change. Develop a tool to mitigate the problem: Many declare the tool is "unnatural" and refuse to use it, and/or declare the problem isn't even real. Seems humanity has a habit of playing out this scenario.

@@sub-vibes it can, offer an alternative technology to a vaccine.

Need to ask yourself, what could possibly go wrong? Is that stuff bad for the environment? I assume that if you cannot biodegrade it then it must be harder for other organisms to process too? And what if the biosphere does adapt genetically and those genes make their way into your intestinal microbiota, would you then end up getting the calories anyway?

@@DanielSMatthews that would be incredibly ironic if we evolve our way into unhealthiness after trying to avoid it.

sadly you're probably right

I wonder if you could balance this out with some form of dietary fiber.

Sadly, this was also the fate of my CrunchEnhancer. See, it's a non-nutritive cereal varnish, it's semi-permeable, it's not osmotic; what it does is it coats and seals the flake preventing milk from penetrating it. In trials it caused explosive colon prolapse though so marketing made us drop it. Anyway I have a new non-caloric silicone based kitchen lubricant that's 500 times more slippery than any cooking oil in the works that seems to have some promise in setting new sledding based land speed records.

@@Muonium1 "caused explosive colon prolapse so marketing made us drop it" Yeesh, people see everything as a problem these days.

"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." Found this out the hard way by consumption of Diet Coke. I only ever drank it at my in-laws' house, and always wondered why I became super gassy whenever we visited them until I made the connection. Also I used to chew a lot of sugar-free gum, and only after learning about my intolerance to sugar alcohols was I able to put 2 and 2 together as to why I was so gassy pretty much all of the time. Bonus: I'm also lactose-intolerant. Pretty much anything with either lactose or sugar alcohols (maltitol, xylitol, etc) gives me bloating and other issues. It's interesting to me that while I thought my lactose intolerance was responsible for all of this, it may perhaps be a combination of things. Learning what I can eat safely (and comfortably) has been a 20-year process, and I am still learning. I can get by without all the sugar-alcohol lace foods, but I just wish cheese wasn't so dang delicious. It's my crutch.

thats random and kinda cool! hahaha

Did you mythic raid with him?

@@wqqdcraft I figured you needed more random...your Bacon number in Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, is at most 3. I know his Chef. Bacon's diet secret? Chili made with ground turkey. Pretty tasty.

This has HUGE comedic potential this, thread here 👏 👌 😂

This reminded me I played Guild Wars with a food chemist but I forgot where they worked.

This stuff is not healthier than saturated or even polyunsaturated fats, it is however probably equally as bad as trans fats.

@@hyperboreanarchives7299 I am not sure if this is true. Olestra is completely indigestible. This is reason the anal leakage fun occurred. I would be interesting to see long term studies.

@@hyperboreanarchives7299 There is no evidence for that statement, other than people convincing themselves that something this good can't be true and must have a catch.

@@hyperboreanarchives7299 How is that nutritionally possible if it cant be digested and/or absorbed?

How is it, that your comments are voiced in my head, by you?

We will call him on that promise!!!

If he needs someone to volunteer to eat a family sized bag of chips, I volunteer as tribute lol

@@zyeborm for family sized laxative calamity

Ha! Great comment.

It's been 3 weeks so how long are we giving it to call him on that

what kind of magic is this, +1 to make a video about this

Is that bad for you in any way? I make the caramel for my egg pudding by burning sugar with orange zest in the microwave (with just a few drops of water).

Please make this in the next video!

@@CanalTremocos I don't see why it would be. I'm not a chemist though. The effect ultra violet light has on a substance shouldn't effect the way your body handles it.

He had the same look on his face that Doc Brown had after he built that huge machine in the 19th century and out popped a single ice cube...

Username checks out

@Casey Lewis it's a salt sugar molecule, it's like tongue crack, and acts as a neurotransmitter when doses are enough that a significant amount makes it past the blood brain barriet, stimulates nerve cells and increases brain glutamate so that's the hype I guess.

@Casey Lewis MSG... is the reason meat, cheeses and tomatoes taste good. It can be found (some examples) in walnuts (0.8%) Parmesan (1.6%) Tomatoes (0.4%) and Breast Milk (0.02%) Edit: We consume between 10g and 20g of glutamate per day from our diet, of which glutamate from seasoning or condiments is less than 10%. The U.S. Food & Drug Administration notes that a typical serving of a food with added MSG contains less than 0.5 grams of MSG.

Some early studies suggested that MSG is associated with increased blood pressure and heart disease, but that linkage almost totally went away in later studies. It's fine to eat a little bit of MSG and it really does make food taste better if you are able to taste it. Don't use it on everything obviously, but don't completely avoid it either. It's really great in soups or with spicy foods.

@Casey Lewis but uncle Rodger says it's the King of flavour.

:) Yeah, I noticed that too. I suspect contamination -- probably also the additional foaming. I honestly tasted no difference in the chips. Earlier, and off-camera I tasted a few drops of the oils neat, and I could just detect some caramelized sugar flavor in the olestra that I made, so I suspect it's that. Er, I hope it's that :)

@@AppliedScience cool haha, thanks for the info! This was a really fun and informative vid to watch. I appreciate your effort and time sharing it with us. 👍👍👍

@@AppliedScience I couldn't help but think that the foaming looked like the effect soap would have ;)

When using new oil to fry chips, it foams a lot (but with a lot of chips thrown in). Though, not as much as the olestra you made. At least that happens with the oil we use. The second time we fry chips, it won't do it (and yes, we change it regularly, burnt oil is bad).

Could be the kerosene from the sodium chunk

I'm a long time viewer and fan but it is disappointing that the discussion of the implications of synthetic food substitutes is so impoverished - both in the video and in the comments. Leaving aside the story of trans fatty acids (now known to be harmful but once touted as a solution to the perceived saturated fat problem - a concern largely sponsored by the sugar industry as is now widely acknowledged), the fact is, we already have non synthetic foods that are healthy and satisfying. The problem and the solution is as usual, is economic and social, not technical. On the social side, rat models have demonstrated that pathological consumption behaviour is largely determined by, and solved by, the quality of social interaction in the subject's daily life and by early life trauma. Thus because of both of those factors, shame is usually the last thing that a person with an unhealthy diet needs. Yet low fat foods are marketed in a way that reinforces negative self perception and negative feelings about food. We need less marketing of food, not more marketing of marginally healthier substitutes. On the economic side, fatty foods are cheap, quick to prepare, and fill the hole left by a lack of quality social time. And food deserts are a widely acknowledged problem. If we all spent less time at work and more time at home including in the kitchen, then even though the proportion of our daily lives that were part of the Free Market would shrink, we would be much richer and much healthier when it came to what matters. I'm an engineer by profession, but if you ask me it's a shame that a lot of viewers of this channel still regard technical solutions as anything other than a means to delay the inevitable, when it comes to contradictions like this. We can't engineer our way out of social problems in the long run. We need to start asking ourselves why we have these problems when traditional solutions already exist. And the answer is that we pay no regard to the social foundation or the ecological ceiling of economic activity, and we talk about the economy in a very reductionist way.

@@jimcrelm9478 there's a lot of difference between rats behavior and human behavior. rats life is solely focused on primal instincts like food and reproduction whereas humans society has progressed beyond these base survival instincts. in short, what may not work in rats works in humans. there are plenty of fat loss regimes that have shame factor incorporated into it and they work. you cannot change someones behavior by wearing coddling them

Butterfish?

Soon after I arrived in Australia I unwittingly got some of these Butterfish fillets from a local fishmonger (no warning!) about 3 hours later I had the rear end equivalent of projectile vomiting. On top was a yellow oil about 1/2" deep (not that I measured it!) the 'symptoms' lasted about 24 hours; thanks to google I found out what I had eaten. The fish did have a wonderful flavour and very creamy but the pleasure of eating does not balance the discomfort of the after effects!

@@michaellinahan7740 Hahaha I have only heard of them. Never tried and never will.......unless i ever need a means of rear end propulsion.

@@jayytee8062 It certainly did give the work colleagues a great deal of amusement at my expense when I graphically retold the story! Thankfully I was never caught short!

Yes, I experienced the effects of a similar fish (served as Butterfish, probably Lepidocybium flavobrunneum). It was not good.

NileRed in a nutshell:

Bloody French! So, that's why they all to know if there is water on Mars. I'm Belgian, so I'm allowed to pick on the French

Common misconception; if you grind up the mars rock you'll end up with a carousel red 1969 Pontiac GTO "Judge" convertible. If you want a baguette, you have to hit the mars rock with a 3lb engineer's hammer

There's a proposal that goes something like grind up moon rock add carbon nanotubes add epoxy and rotate to make a telescope mirror on the moon.

@@anullhandle that's actually a sensible idea. If you spin a container of fluid around its centre of mass and the same axis as the one force of gravity is pointing, the surface will naturally take the shape of a parabola. If you do that to epoxy while it cures, you just made a parabolic mirror blank. (Lots of other material science hurdles but that's the gist of it)

Yeah, google MCT oil empty stomach, does not work out well.

He did make soap!

My mother used to put baby powder on oil stains to absorb the oil. It actually works with clean oils (like olive oil, not dirty motor oil stains).

this is the coolest outcome of such a product

@@gnatdagnat Yes, it will be very cool outcome, but it will defeat the purpose of the product lol.

One could easily imagine that a species not typically found in the gut would invade the gut to utilize this new carbon source though it doesn't necessarily follow that it will play nice with the rest of the resident microbiome. The interloper has the potential to cause pathology - consider H.pylori, first thought to be benign flora but more recently found to be cause of gastric cancer and ulcers. If you build it, they might come...

Maybe over 10s of millions of years. That is a pretty complex thing to evolve.

​@@Dr.HowieFeltersnatchI don't think so. If you think about gut bacteria being literally in the billions and reproducing multiple times each day, considering it only takes one functional copy of a gene that is able to decode an enzyme for it, it probably already has happened

I didn't know you're background was in chemistry. What made you decide to switch to optics? What was the beer killing joke ? ;)

@@AppliedScience No it were the funny looks I got at parties when I told them I was a chemist. I suspected that they assumed I made my own cooking oil and might be leaking.... 😂 No seriously, optics is just a side track like most things are in my life.

Agreed. Also, I hope the move went well. Your work is pretty awesome, and I am still looking forward to seeing more, if your life ever permits.

Seconded!

Thanks for the detail lol

That makes me wonder what the effects would have been on sewage treatment, were the product successful. It seems there are always unintended consequences when you make something that existing biology can't break down.

Why is that a bad thing? oil in the toilet is better than in your arteries

@@seephor The problem is that if you have a lot of undigested fats in your colon it's going to come out of your butt when you don't want it to lol. Still, I wish this oil was available to purchase. I'd be frying food for dinner every night.

@@seephor Oh yeah? Tell that to the people that have to unclog your pipes after hardened fatbergs form in them, they'd rather you had heart attack than murder those poor pipes >:(

Sorbitol is a laxative. You must really hate your underwear.

Sounds something one would find next to the ultra-vinegar flavour lol

Rabbit hole with an atypical ending :D

Yes, but remnant cooking oil that was undigested all of the way through the GI tract isn't among them. I suspect that oily stool was the biggest issue. Even for those that suffered no leakage, if the results of using the toilet were sufficiently unpleasant then that would turn them off of the product. And of course based on volume, that's the person that would benefit most from the lack of calories.

Haha but then you have to eat more so that you can get calories.

Never heard of it, I don't think this stuff was ever sold here in Germany.

@@LegendLength No need for a strainer; it floats right to the top.

Some oils are simple just that, like olive oil. However, the ubiquitous and misnamed 'vegetable oil' is highly processed, usually made from soybeans. I think hexane is the typical solvent used to do the extraction.

This video made my day.

I feel like having Ben as a neighbor would be like Wilson Wilson from home improvement from the 90's. Only here, there is a non-zero chance of being launched into low earth orbit should one of these experiments go awry... worth the risk in my book though...

I know, very rare traits in people these days. Good thing is, anyone can become good at different things, just takes a lot of effort, passion and not giving up. But we live in a world of instant gratification and not many want to dedicate themselves to anything.

@@bnasty267 highly processed means nothing if you don't know the process behind it... It's just a cop out to say "I don't like it because it's bad"

OMG.... I remember those infomercials!

xenical?

Ally, and it was an awful experience.

@@mytmousemalibu god their pamphlets literally mentioned having an "ally-oops" and had the worst descriptor I have ever read: "Stool may look like it has a layer of grease similar to what you would see on a pizza"

@@douglaslangley9251 The pills, Ally.... It's more than just a laxative effect, it was blowing a stream of straight vegetable oil out of your ass! Oil floating on top of the toilet water, beyond disturbing and completely disgusting! Imagine pepperoni oil/grease. You couldn't trust a fart, it would 100% feel like gas but it was a nasty surprise. End up blasting your pants with sh!t oil. Horrible experience on that crap.

I can confirm. It is an excellent solution to any parent with a constipated kid. But usually 3-4 nuts is enough.

All I could think about after seeing the title to this video is that Robin Williams bit about anal leakage he gave in his stand up years ago. "Oh just a little anal leakage, Ted but I'm fine" lol.

There’s a ton of magnesium in cashews. Magnesium is also used in laxatives and if you ate over a pound of cashews, that’s like taking a triple dose of a laxative.

@@Typhoonbladefist Makes sense, not something Im ever going to do again lol

There's a few - the freeze drying series had a couple and there's a vacuum/pressure frying video

@@zakhenry Thanks Zak, I'll have to go back and find them . I must have missed those.His work is fascinating to me .

Airgun BBs are steel. The copper-colored ones are only plated. (Easily confirmed with a magnet.) The thermal conductivity is a lot lower, so that aluminum shot may actually be a good deal.

As EE I feel the same way when looking at modern antenna designs.

orgo(o-chem) does that to people

I've seen those Amazon reviews for gummy bears made with sugar alcohol, it's hilarious cause they also pass straight through the system

My favorite sugar alcohol is xylitol

@@1224chrisng that. Keep in mind different sugar alcohol have different tolerance levels.

Yes but mineral oil probably doesn't have the added bonus of recalibrating your brain's calorie recognition so regular oil doesn't make you feel full anymore. Why would you deprive the world of super fat lab rats that kinda look like tribbles

Search for "smoke point": that'll give you what you're looking for.

Avocado oil has a stupid high smoke point of like 500F

@@NotProFishing yeah avocado oil is amazing. I started using it in a lot of things instead of vegetable oil and it can get insanely hot without smoking at all

@@talideon Smoke point is absolutely not the whole story. For example extra virgin olive oil has a low smoke point, but due to the presence of polyphenols and other antioxidants the formation of hydroperoxides and other toxic products is very low (due to it terminating the radical mechanism). Thus making it an excelent cooking oil. Ultraprocessed seed oils on the other hand, marketed with "high in polyunsaturated fattt acids (wich are very unstable when heated and also not healthy in the first place" are absolute garbage and should never be consumed

That's not what she said

Nothing here is particularly concerning

Honestly sounds like a good product. People drink diet coke after all, this can't possibly be worse.

That's an open family. I mean my dad shit with the door open, but he didn't describe his excrement to me at any point.

@@chrisjacobsen1659 if he was regularly eating food that was widely criticized for causing "anal leakage", the rest of the family probably asked him how it was doing for him lol.

I mean, people are also against wearing masks during a pandemic. That's just laziness for you - trying to force people to make changes in their lives, no matter how small they are, is going to face with a massive wave of protests and opposition. That's just humanity for you.

You would absolutely get sick if you did that regularly. There are things in most motor oil that produce permanent damage to PNS, resulting in motor dysfunction.