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Fat Replacers

Why foods need fat

Until the development of fat replacers, few lower fat or fat-free foods were available and those that were often did not taste very good. That's because fat cannot be taken out of food without compensating for its various properties. For example, fat gives dairy products their rich and creamy texture. It lends crispiness to fried foods and helps them retain their moisture. Also, many of the flavor components in foods dissolve without fat; a food doesn't taste the same without fat because its flavors do not blend in the same way. Increasingly, people are turning to fat replacers to help cut fat while maintaining the tastes and sensations they are used to in their foods.

Fat replacers have been around awhile.

Fat replacers aren't new. In fact, water is the oldest fat replacer. Health-conscious bakers have long used apple sauce and fruit purees instead of oil. Dextrins, modified food or corn starch, polydextrose, zantham and guar gum--fat replacers all--have been familiar to label-readers for years. What's new is the process we've discovered to turn vegetable oil into a whole new kind of cooking oil, Olean^®, which isn't absorbed by the body.

Carbohydrate-Based Fat Replacers

Most of the fat replacers now available are based on carbohydrates -- specifically cereals, grains, starches and sugars. While carbohydrate-based fat replacers are much lower in calories than fat, they often contain a lot of sugar. And although they are heat-stable for baking, they do not melt and cannot be used for sautéing or frying.

Protein-Based Fat Replacers

Other fat replacers are based on proteins, which, like carbohydrates, contribute half the calories that fat does. Protein-based fat replacers are generally made of egg whites, whey protein or soy. Their texture, appearance and "mouth-feel" make them particularly suited for use in dairy products. They can be heated in foods like pizza and baked into cheesecake, but they do not work for frying or sautéing.

Fat-Based Fat Replacers

The third group of fat replacers are those based on fat, usually vegetable oils. These oils undergo a process that reduces their caloric value while retaining the creamy "mouth-feel" of fat. Olean is the first fat-based fat replacer that entirely replicates all of the uses of fat, including frying. This means that, for the first time, savory snack foods fried in Olean taste like their full-fat counterparts but have substantially fewer calories and little or no fat. Unlike the oil in regular fried foods, Olean has no calories because its structure prevents digestive enzymes from breaking it down.

What's special about Olean?

Other fat replacers have to be mixed and matched into "systems" because each mimics only one or two functions of fat. Olean is the first non-fat cooking oil that has similar properties to fat and also does not have to be a part of any "system" to work -- it does what it is supposed to do by itself. Plus, since Olean is not absorbed when eaten, it travels through the body unchanged like other poorly absorbed foods, such as high-fiber bran. That means it does not add any fat or calories to fried foods. This is something no other fat replacer can do.

Olean has been approved by the FDA.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) won't let any fat replacer into the food supply until it's been proven safe to eat. To date, Olean is the only fat-based, calorie-free fat replacer that has received this approval. The main ingredients used to make Olean come from soybean oil and cottonseed oil and sugar. The ingredients are then processed in a special way to create a new oil that travels through the body unchanged, adding no fat or calories.
In January 1996, the FDA authorized Olean for use in "savory snacks" --potato chips, tortilla chips, crackers and cheese puffs. The FDA reviewed 25 years of research on Olean, an effort that involved more than 150 studies and nearly 20,000 human subjects.