The Potato Chip That Destroyed the Bowels of America

fun fact a similar fat substitute now used in products like David Bars to hack the nutrition label, as it were.

I worked at a company that handled transcription of customer service calls for those chips. Even though I started there well after they were discontinued, stories about the things people said were passed on by the old hands. A few choice snippets of the transcripts survived.

The thing is, many people loved them. They ate small amounts of the chips and were fine.

Others had less than stellar experiences and their messages relayed a mixture of confusion, frustration, fear, and body horror.

But the people I feel the most compassion for were the people who called to say that these chips changed their lives. How? Sometimes a side effect is a cure.

A surprising number of callers said that these chips saved them from chronic, painful constipation. To them, a bag of these chips was a delicious and highly effective form of medicine unlike anything else they had tried. Losing access to something like that must have been a horrible loss.

As I recall, the phrase in the literature at the time was "greasy, hard to wipe off fecal matter".