Original subtitles

Do you remember when it was okay

to sell candy in a syringe?

Kids were buying 'em in middle America,

and then all of a sudden mom looked over his shoulder

and is like, "What is Johnny playing with?"

Do you remember when bananas could get you high?

Suddenly everybody's going to the store

and buying bananas, not for the potassium,

but to scrape the banana peels and smoke 'em.

At their next show, they hand out 500 banana joints

and a fad is born.

Or when fat-free potato chips backfired spectacularly.

Over the course of six years,

the FDA receives over 20,000 individual complaints.

Because although this thing seems great on paper,

it also is just running

through your body like a freight train.

These are the things we used to do, for fun, for money,

or maybe out of boredom, that we'll never see again.

Were they dangerous? Certainly.

Deadly? Occasionally.

But boy, wasn't it exciting?

Long before energy drinks like Red Bull

and Monster became household names,

Americans were introduced to a beverage

that not only gave you energy, it actually contained it.

The radium craze begins in 1898,

when Marie Curie discovers radium.

It's a new entry on the periodic table,

which is very exciting to a chemist,

but it's even more exciting to the public,

because radium glows.

Manufacturers start putting radium

into any consumer product they can imagine.

We're talking about toothpaste, hair

cream, skin products. There's even radium suppositories.

Woo! Not how I'd like to get my radium.

But one idea outdoes them all, Radithor.

Radithor is literally the world's first energy drink,

because it's supposed to transfer the energy from radium

into your body.

It's supposed to do all sorts of things,

yes, give you general energy

and help your organs function better,

but also help constipation, asthma, exhaustion, headaches.

The drink isn't that complicated.

It's literally just radium dissolved in water,

and it's sold in tiny one ounce bottles at $2 a pop,

but that's like $15 in today's money.

People believed that you were born

with a finite amount of energy,

almost that you had like a battery

and that that would wear down over your life.

So the idea that you could buy in a bottle,

an energy drink that would give you more,

seemed like the perfect biohack.

Radithor becomes a big seller,

but only for those who can afford it.

One of those people is a golf champion

and industrialist named Eben Byers.

In 1927, a doctor recommended he try it

because he had an arm injury,

and he thought this might help his recovery.

Byers becomes convinced it's helping him,

and that he's recovering quicker because of it,

so he makes it part of his daily regimen.

Byers loves this stuff so much,

he's actually drinking it three times a day.

Three times a day he is giving himself radium.

I know what you're thinking. "How's this gonna go for him?"

Spoiler alert, not so great.

Radium comes from decayed thorium

and uranium, two types of radioactive metals.

Sure, radium has energy, but it's radioactive energy.

Byers is singing the praises of Radithor

to anyone who will listen.

He's sending cases to his friends,

pretty soon, whatever effect he thought it was having

actually goes away, and he starts to

experience weight loss, he's got terrible headaches, things are

not looking good. - By 1930, things start turning severe.

Byers' teeth fall out, he develops holes in his skull.

Eventually his jaw has to be surgically removed.

What do you think he thought?

Honestly, when his jaw came off?

Do you think he was like, "Well, crap.

I'm starting to think this stuff isn't working."

On December 19th, 1931,

the Federal Trade Commission orders that Radithor

cease and desist from representing

that the drink is therapeutic or harmless,

but it's too late for Eben Byers.

On March 31st, 1932, Eben Byers dies.

His body ravaged by radiation poisoning.

Byers' death makes national headlines

when the Wall Street Journal writes,

"The radium water worked fine until his jaw came off."

But Byers' story doesn't end there.

All human bodies have naturally occurring radiation,

but Byers actually has to be buried in a lead lined coffin

to contain the radioactivity of his remains.

Here he is thinking he's found like the Fountain of Youth.

Turns out it was the fountain of death.

The wildest thing is in 1965, they exhumed his body

because they wanted to do some testing on it,

and they found his body at that time, 30 years later,

was still five times more radioactive

than another human being.

Think how popular energy drinks are today.

Think how many brands there are.

Maybe if it wasn't so expensive,

there could have been many, many more Eben Byers.

If the zap provided by Radithor was a little too much,

you couldn't go wrong with a classic staple,

a cool, refreshing glass of milk.

But back in the 1800s,

milk wasn't always so pure or safe.

Our milkman can bring us man's perfect food,

milk.

Everybody drank milk growing up at every meal.

That's just what you did.

But in the 1800s,

getting your hands on milk isn't so simple.

Milk was produced in rural areas,

and when that milk was brought to the cities,

one, it incurred travel costs,

which made it more expensive,

but it also sometimes would spoil.

So instead of milk,

many Americans are drinking something else.

In the 1820s, the price of whiskey

is cheaper than the price of beer, milk, tea.

At its peak, alcohol consumption

is literally three times what it is today.

The average American

was consuming about two bottles of whiskey a week.

Because of the incredible demand,

whiskey makers have hundreds of thousands of pounds

worth of byproduct

that they don't really know what to do with.

To make whiskey, the distillers would

take their wheat, their corn, or their rye,

they'd boil it and then they would ferment it.

Anything left over is called swill.

It's not completely devoid of nutrients,

but you wouldn't call it nutritious.

Suddenly, some innovators have an idea,

that there's a real need for milk in American cities.

How is milk made, by cows?

What do cows eat? Grain.

So these city distilleries,

they build stables and buy dairy cows,

and they start feeding them

with the leftover grain from their distilling process.

This sounds really good and really progressive.

Except the dairy cows aren't as enthusiastic.

Those cows did not want that industrial waste,

but they get so desperate that they start eating it

and they start producing a ton of milk.

But there's a problem,

it's ghastly blue milk and it's very runny.

So they call this stuff swill milk.

It looks very unappetizing.

How do you sell runny blue sludge?

Well, you gotta make it look like real milk.

You have to thicken it and you have to turn it white.

How they do this

is what takes things to a whole other nasty level

Innovating American entrepreneurs decide,

"Well, we just need to make it look white."

So they start adding substances to it,

like flour and eggs, which isn't that bad I guess,

but then they start adding plaster.

Milk naturally has a layer of cream floating on top.

So how do they replicate that?

Well, they grind up calf brains.

Yes, the brains of baby cows,

and add it to the milk.

To preserve this swill,

distillers add formaldehyde, which keeps it fresh

and also actually adds a weird bit of sweetness.

Just what babies like best.

Today, formaldehyde is found in a lot of things.

From particle board to insulation to dishwashing liquid

to insecticide.

These distillers sell this swill milk to local distributors

who rebranded it as pure country milk.

By the late 1830s, swill milk makes up 50

to 80% of all the milk found in the large northeast cities.

This milk is sold in open containers on the street,

which make it a breeding ground

for all kinds of bacterial diseases like cholera,

tuberculosis, and scarlet fever.

So Frank Leslie, an investigative journalist,

did this huge expose on what was actually going on.

He was like the TMZ of the time.

This expose causes a public backlash

that leads to the New York State legislature

issuing milk regulations.

So the history of milk wasn't so wholesome,

but what about white bread?

For generations of American kids,

it was all about white bread.

Dependable, comforting, a lunchbox staple.

So what could possibly go wrong

with something so simple?

The 1950s is the heyday of white bread.

Sandwiches are eaten, lunch and dinner,

toast on the breakfast table.

You can help them grow bigger

and stronger with Wonder enriched bread.

Wonder supplies vitamins

and protein to help your child grow bigger and stronger.

But America's obsession with white bread

starts a century earlier.

For a long, long time,

the bread people ate was brown bread,

because wheat is brown.

But in the 19th century, there's a move towards white bread.

A lot of people associate the color white

with cleanliness, purity, overall higher quality.

As a result, white bread becomes a status symbol.

This presents a problem to commercial bakers

because white bread weighs less,

and this is in an era when bread is sold by the pound.

So commercial bakers feel like they're losing money

because they're baking bread that weighs less.

So they start cutting the wheat

with different ingredients like sawdust, plaster, and chalk,

and something else called alum.

Yummy

Alum is an aluminum based compound

that is tasteless and is heavy.

So it accomplishes the task

of making the loaf of bread heavier

but not affecting its taste.

You know where you find alum today?

In laundry detergent, in household cleaning products.

It's just like that laundry pod eating challenge,

except these people don't know they're doing it.

It's snuck in their bread.

If you're eating this alum bread regularly,

it could lead to some really bad digestive problems.

It could go from constipation

and diarrhea to like full system failures.

In 1860, the use of alum

and other additives is banned in England,

but in the United States,

that doesn't happen until the 1900s.

Nobody likes spoiled milk or moldy bread

or rotting fruit, which is why companies came up

with ingenious ways to preserve food.

Well, maybe ingenious is a little too generous.

The 1800s is an incredibly exciting time in America.

You've got trains, you've got mass transit.

Meat can come from Chicago's meat packing plants

and land in Boston.

Fresh fruit from the peach orchards in Georgia

and South Carolina

could come all the way up to New York City.

But there are no refrigerated trained cars,

which means fresh fruit, fresh produce,

fresh meat all arrive at their destinations

in varying states of decay.

So food manufacturers are looking for ways

to keep food fresh, or at least keep it looking fresh.

Without modern refrigeration,

food manufacturers turn to an exciting new field, chemistry.

Canning companies discover

that copper sulfate can be added to rotting peas

or wilting green beans

to give them a bright green appearance.

They discover salicylic acid is great

for preserving canned fruit.

As meat begins to rot, the proteins break down

and the fibers begin to separate.

Meat packers have realized that with the addition

of a chemical called borax,

they can actually make the proteins contract,

which in turn makes the product look fresh.

Underneath all those bright colors and crisp appearances,

the food is just as rancid as before.

Furthermore, the manufacturers never tested any of this,

so no one knows what these additives can do

to the human body.

In 1902, Harvey Washington Wiley is head chemist

at the US Department of Agriculture,

and he comes up with an experiment to identify

some of the effects of these additives.

He recruits 12 volunteers,

and in a basement of the USDA headquarters in Washington DC,

Wiley creates an experimental restaurant.

Wiley provides menus

and ingredients to a chef who then prepares the food,

but laces it with one questionable

preservative at a time. So he's essentially poisoning these

volunteers to find out what's gonna happen if they eat

this stuff. - This little supper club gets a nickname.

It's soon known as the Poison Squad,

and it starts to make national headlines.

The American public is enthralled.

They know that the foods his volunteers are eating

are the same foods on their own plates.

When you consider how unregulated the

whole situation is, the study is nuts.

These are serious chemicals.

Copper sulfate is used in pesticide.

Borax is used to kill ants.

Formaldehyde is an embalming fluid,

so these are not things that you should be ingesting.

Can you imagine the stomach aches these guys must have had?

Everybody back then was eating poisoned food.

Everybody, we were a society of Poison Squads,

we're all Poison Squad.

Of course, Wiley finds continued evidence

of well, poisoning.

Nausea, headaches, confusion, stomach aches,

all sorts of ailments from consuming poisons.

The study only lasts six months,

but that's long enough for Wiley to realize

that all of these additives are building up in the body,

making people sicker and sicker the longer they eat them.

Thanks to Harvey Wiley

and his work with the Poison Squad,

in 1906, Congress enacted the Meat Inspection Act

and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

These are some of the very first consumer protection laws

in the nation's history, food or otherwise.

There's gotta be a monument somewhere to these guys

who make it that I today can eat cheddar cheese

without paint on it.

These are heroes.

The Poison Squad took one for the team

and we're all much safer for it.

But how could you go wrong

with an early version of a very famous soda.

It had lemon, lime and something to take the edge off.

I think now people look at soda as a quick fun drink,

but in the early days of sodas, they were created

and sold as health tonics with curative properties.

Coca-Cola is one of the best examples.

It contained cocaine,

and was sold as a product that could handle

all kinds of things, including headaches.

But this doesn't last very long,

because in 1914,

Congress bans cocaine in over the counter products

like Coca-Cola.

That doesn't stop other manufacturers

from getting creative.

Along comes a man named Charles Grigg.

He's gonna open himself a beverage company

in St. Louis.

Grigg decides he wants to create something

to help with people's vitality and wellness.

He's going to make it a lemon lime flavor,

and he's going to add seven different ingredients

that he thinks will lift you up.

And his new soda's name? 7 Up.

But this 7 Up is different than the one we drink today.

It has an extra ingredient.

We add lithium and sodium citrates.

Lithium, they put lithium in 7 Up.

So lithium based compounds are known to have a calming,

even sedative effect,

and in this particular case, it's gonna enhance your mood,

it's gonna make you happier.

Sounds a lot like a narcotic.

Lithium, in the modern era,

is an extremely controlled substance

that's used to treat bipolar disorder.

As scientists do more research into lithium,

they realize that this is a powerful drug

and probably shouldn't be in soda pop.

So in 1949, there's a ban on lithium products

and Grigg has to remove the lithium from 7 Up.

Up to this point,

7 Up is promoted as a medicinal tonic.

So now without lithium,

it is forced to do a total rebrand.

My the youngest baby boomers are toddlers,

and they wanna hit that market,

so they decide that a great thing to do

is to market soda to babies.

The company is even kind enough

to provide recipes for mothers

The 7 Up milk cocktail.

By the way, mom, when it comes to toddlers,

if they like to be coaxed to drink their milk, try this.

Add 7 Up to the milk in equal parts,

pouring the 7 Up gently into the milk.

It's a wholesome combination, and it works.

This isn't so far off from when sodas

were considered medicinal.

They would have good health benefits

if you drank it regularly.

So while today we look at this and go,

"It is absolutely nuts to give sodas to babies."

Back then, not so much.

When I was a baby, my parents took whiskey

and rubbed it on my gums.

I think we all know everybody's parents

that did this were just getting their kids buzzed

so they would pass out.

The opposite of that is to give them sugar.

It's a terrible idea.

These ads appeared through the 1950s and then fade away.

Did advertisers think better of it,

or was it just time for a new marketing campaign?

We don't know.

What we do know is that 7 Up

has been one of the top selling sodas for nearly a century.

The 1960s were all about pushing the limits.

Hair got longer, cars got faster,

and even something as simple as candy

underwent a cultural makeover,

but one company created a product

that might not go down quite as easily today.

By the late 1960s,

candy has sort of undergone another stage of evolution.

They just started to press dextrose

into all sorts of shapes.

There are some familiar names like Starburst,

Swedish Fish, Lemonheads, Cadbury Cream Eggs.

The shapes and the types of candy

are definitely interesting,

but more interesting still

are the containers and the marketing campaigns.

Any trend that was going on,

a candy manufacturer would say,

"Hey, we can glom onto that."

A New York based candy importer

called R.L Albert and Son import a candy from Japan,

but they rebrand it to play off of the rise

of the anti-war counterculture movement,

and that candy is called Hippy Sippy.

It comes in this plastic container.

You don't eat the container,

but it's filled with these little candy beads.

The design is no accident.

It doesn't come in the shape of a peace symbol

or a flower.

No, no, no, no, this candy comes in a very unique vessel.

The container looks like a heroin needle,

and it's meant to poke fun

at the sort of counterculture movement, the hippie movement.

It's super groovy,

and it comes with pins that say, "We sell happiness,"

and "I'll try anything."

"We sell happiness." I mean, there's a subtext there, right?

So did drug dealers.

It's a heroin themed candy treat

meant to be sold to children.

The Albert Candy company made this,

sent them out to Woolworths and Rexall Drugstores,

and kids were buying 'em in middle America.

And then all of a sudden mom looked over his shoulders like,

"What is Johnny playing with?"

Government representatives climb on the campaign

to oppose Hippy Sippy.

Famously, the mayor of Elizabeth, New Jersey

declares the candy absolutely diabolical

and says that it connotes loose moral values

among the youth.

The thing about the kids are, they're probably thinking,

"Oh, it's like I'm gonna play hospital or whatever."

They're not thinking heroin.

The kids are oblivious to sort of all the drama,

sort of, that adults are having with this product.

Less than a year after it was introduced,

Hippy Sippy is pulled off of the shelves

and it is banned nationwide.

Ultimately, it's not these culture wars

that kill the Hippy Sippy,

it's because it contains cocoa butter,

and there's concern that that cocoa butter can be inhaled

through the straw and get lodged in children's lungs.

It's a safety hazard.

But some people insist that this candy was so controversial

that the FDA needed an excuse to ban it.

In the upheaval of the 1960s,

a controversial candy might have missed the mark,

but what if you could find a new way

to enjoy something natural, like bananas?

A central component of the counterculture

of the 1960s is drug use,

but the people who are members of this counterculture,

they're young people and they don't have a lot of money,

and drugs are expensive.

In March of 1967,

a counterculture newspaper called the Berkeley Barb

hits on the idea,

what if we could get high from banana peels?

The belief was that the serotonin

in the banana peel would get you high.

Serotonin is the body's feel good chemical.

It can stabilize emotion and it can elevate mood.

And this is exactly what people

in the counterculture are looking for.

Apparently if you scrape out the white spongy parts

of a banana peel

and then dry it in a 200 degree oven,

you could roll it up and smoke it.

The phrase, "Smoke 'em, if you got 'em," in the 1960s,

sometimes applied to banana peels.

♪ I'm Chiquita banana

You would think that the big banana corporations

were the one that spread this rumor,

'cause they wanted to sell more bananas.

But it turns out it was this band called Country Joe

and the Fish.

Country Joe and the Fish

are a popular psychedelic band from Berkeley.

They're on tour in Vancouver, Canada

and they decide, let's give the banana joint a try.

At first they feel nothing,

but then it hits them really hard,

and they get so high that they are playing the same song

for like 45 minutes.

At their next show, they hand out 500 banana joints

and a fad is born.

Suddenly for some reason, you can't get bananas.

Everybody's going to the store

and buying bananas, not for the potassium,

but to scrape the banana peels and smoke 'em.

It's Easter Sunday, 1967,

and in New York City, 10,000 people have gathered

to celebrate the banana.

They wear Chiquita badges.

They recite the banana pledge,

one nation, under banana,

with liberty and justice for all.

Although banana smoking seems like harmless fun,

it starts to have real world consequences.

According to counterculture newspapers,

people are taken into custody

for being in possession of banana peels.

There is even one case where a man is arrested

for driving under the influence of banana peels.

New Jersey representative, Frank Thompson,

tells Congress apparently it was not enough

for this generation of thrill seekers to use illicit LSD

and marijuana and airplane glue.

They now have invaded the fruit stands.

He urges the adoption of the Banana Labeling Act,

that will actually warn people of the dangers

of smoking banana skins.

Thompson's bill is a bit premature though.

Researchers at both the FDA

and New York University start investigating

the chemical composition of banana peels,

and they come to a conclusion.

There's nothing psychotropic in a banana peel.

Banana dean doesn't exist.

I remember as a teenager,

we were promised that if you inhaled some cinnamon,

you might get a little bit stoned.

So it seems entirely believable that a generation

of thrill seeking counter culturalists

would consider rolling up a banana peel and smoking it

just in the off rumor

that you might get a little bit of a buzz from it.

But if bananas don't get you high,

what happened with Country Joe and the Fish?

Country Joe and the Fish had been also drinking water

laced with LSD.

The banana joints didn't get them high, it was LSD.

As soon as young people realized there was no hope

in getting high from bananas, the craze went up in smoke.

From the 1920s to the 1980s,

the number of cigarettes smoked in America quadrupled.

During that same time,

candy became a multi-billion dollar industry.

Typical of American ingenuity,

someone had the idea to combine them.

Candy cigarettes originate roughly at the same time

that regular cigarettes are booming.

8-year-old Negin definitely smoked candy cigarettes.

We would just pretend we were like the ladies in the movies,

smoking cigarettes, talking like this,

but we were like eight.

These candy cigarettes looked like cigarettes.

They were wrapped in a wrapper

that looked like it had a filter.

They even put a red tip on the top

so it looked like it was lit,

and then when you puffed it,

powdered sugar came out the end.

It was like you were smoking a cigarette.

In some cases,

they would actually use the real trademarks,

the real designs of the real logos

of actual cigarette companies.

But in other cases, the packaging would look

to mirror the actual cigarette companies.

They not only would take a name like Viceroy,

a very popular brand and name these Viceray,

but the packaging is almost identical,

right down to the cellophane that encloses the package.

Tobacco companies turned a blind eye

to something that would normally be trademark infringement.

They are perfectly willing to let the candy companies

use or simulate their names because they know,

or at least they believe, that this is gonna condition

young kids, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 year olds,

to become future smokers.

Imagine selling Hires Root Beer,

but it's Budweiser root beer, you know?

But the bottle would look exactly

like a bottle of Bud Light or something.

The idea is simple, they want kids to emulate mom and dad.

Pretty much any and every nicotine delivery system

that adults used,

was replicated in child form, delivering sugar.

I mean, candy cigarettes were everywhere.

It wasn't a big deal.

Nobody thought about like what this means for children.

What are we teaching them about cigarettes?

We would go to the deli, we'd get the quarter drink

and a pack of candy cigarettes,

and we'd stand around drinking and smoking,

and we felt cool.

We felt like we were doing something adult.

But not everyone is on board

with candy cigarettes.

In 1970, a Pennsylvania congressman

introduced the Candy Cigarette Act,

to make candy cigarettes illegal.

It failed to pass.

The same thing happened in 1991.

Kids who puff away on candy cigarettes

are twice as likely to become smokers

when they become adults.

Thanks to the Tobacco Control Act of 2009,

you could still actually sell the same little sugary stick,

you just can't call it

or make it look anything like a cigarette.

Of course, technically candy cigarettes were harmless,

and that's exactly what the makers

of something called Ginger Jake

said about their product during prohibition.

The era of prohibition creates this underground

of mobsters and gangsters and smugglers,

and an entire generation of people who are looking for

an alternative way of getting their fix

Instead of a bar or a liquor store,

America's new watering hole of choice is a pharmacy.

Jamaican Ginger is a patent medicine

that's been around since the 1800s.

Most people just call it Ginger Jake.

It's used as a pain reliever

and sold in two ounce bottles at roadside stands

and pharmacies across the country.

It's got a little ginger in there,

but it's like 70 to 80% alcohol.

It does have some temporary pain relief

like much alcohol does.

Thanks to prohibition,

now thousands of Americans are turning to Ginger Jake

as a cocktail rather than a cure.

The government quickly recognizes

that the sales of Ginger Jake go through the roof,

and they can't do anything to restrict it,

and that's because it's medicinal.

What the government does is it imposes a requirement

that the producers of Ginger Jake

now have to up the levels of solid by 50%.

Ultimately, the state's gonna take the liquid

and boil it down,

and that's how they can figure out

what the alcohol content is.

Government inspectors don't care

what solids are left behind.

They just want there to be enough of something else

in there to dilute the alcohol content.

And so enterprising individuals realize

that these solids don't have to be ginger.

They can be anything.

So in 1929, these two brothers-in-law,

Harry Gross and Max Reisman,

decide to kind of come up with their own Ginger Jake,

something that can skirt around the law,

but essentially be a way to sell alcohol to customers.

They go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

and they ask a chemist there what they can do

to boost the solid content of a liquid.

He suggests adding tri-ortho-cresyl

phosphate or TOCP. - TOCP is a colorless, odorless liquid at

room temperature. But when you boil it, it turns into a solid,

which makes it completely undetectable to the consumer,

but satisfies government testing.

Within a year,

Gross and Reisman sell nearly 64,000 bottles

of Ginger Jake from coast to coast.

The problem is that when Gross and Reisman go to MIT,

they don't tell the chemist what they're actually making.

TOCP is in polystyrene, it's in vinyl, it's in plastics,

it's in gasoline.

It's definitely not something you want to ingest.

TOCP can affect the nerves,

will create pulmonary edema, stomach issues, diarrhea,

and lower limb paralysis.

This was an alcohol

that would literally make you lose feeling in your body,

and people still drank it.

More than 20,000 Americans ended up

with what they referred to as the Jake Leg,

where they had one leg that just wasn't working as well

and they kind of had a limp because of it.

The Food and Drug Administration finds

that it's only this version of Ginger Jake

that's causing the problems,

but at that point it's too late to differentiate,

and so the name Ginger Jake is ruined once and for all.

Well, it looks like Gross and Reisman weren't as clever

as they thought.

They were each given a suspended two years sentence

and a fine of a thousand dollars.

How many of us wish we could eat

as much as we want without gaining weight?

Well, in the 1990s, a new potato chip hit the market

and developed quite the reputation.

Enjoy as much as you want and not gain a pound.

But there was a catch.

I'll tell you as both a historian

and a teen of the nineties,

the diet culture back then was all about low fat

or no fat as much as possible.

Rather than figure out what foods would be better for us.

No, no, just take the same foods

and then just replace what was fatty with something else.

So when food manufacturers decide

to take the fat outta the food,

you're actually pulling the flavor out as well.

So you've gotta make up for that loss of flavor,

whether it's fast food, whether it's snacks.

How do you do that?

Typically, you just add a bunch of sugar,

and that doesn't really help.

Then a game changing product hits the market.

In 1996, the FDA approves a compound

that has zero calories,

zero cholesterol, it tastes just like fat.

This product is called Olestra.

Olestra really does have a similar flavor

and mouth feel to actual fat,

but it's engineered to have larger molecules

than natural fat.

So the body cannot absorb or digest it,

which makes it calorie free.

It's really kind of a miracle.

Olestra is quintessentially American.

Americans will not give up

their fatty fast foods and snacks,

but they also don't wanna pay the bodily price to them.

Olestra is what this stuff is,

and Olean is sort of the company name

that they use when they start pairing it up

with salty snacks.

So you start to see like a bag of potato chips

and it would say, "Now with Olean,"

and there's no fat in there.

So you go, "Oh, this sounds great. I should try it."

So marketing these products, it's exciting.

It's a miracle, you can overindulge, right?

You can have all that flavor and none of the bad effects,

But if your body doesn't digest Olestra,

it's going to do something else with it.

What they don't tell you is once you try it,

you can't leave the house.

Because although this thing seems great on paper,

yeah it's no fat, it also is just running

through your body like a freight drain.

This causes some people to get so sick,

it requires hospitalization,

in some rare cases, colonoscopies.

Do you know of any snack food today

that requires a colonoscopy?

Because the GI issues were potentially so significant,

the FDA requires a warning label

to be placed on any product that includes Olestra.

Olestra might cause abdominal cramping

and loose stools, not very appetizing.

What's crazy is that everybody knew of these side effects,

but when you spend $200 million on research,

the companies push it, the FDA approves it,

and now everyone is using it.

I was excited to try Olean chips,

but I also looked at it as a bit of a science experiment,

you know, and I made sure I was gonna be

in a controlled environment,

like I wasn't gonna have a date or have to be going out.

Over the course of six years,

the FDA receives over 20,000 individual complaints

of people saying they suffer from cramping

and diarrhea, fecal incontinence,

and arguably one of the worst two word combinations

in history, anal leakage.

Very quickly, we went from Olean being this amazing thing

to being the butt of every joke, literally and figuratively.

I mean, anal leakage was the joke

that every late night show, every standup comedian,

everybody was making fun of this stuff,

in such a short window of time.

By 2000, sales of Olestra products

have actually dropped by 50%, and they never rebound.

So there is an attempt by the food industry

to reformulate Olestra into a product

that doesn't cause stomach problems.

Unfortunately, that comes with a brand new side effect.

They actually cause you to gain weight.

In 2010, Time magazine names Olestra

one of the top 50 worst inventions,

and it's banned in many countries.

Today, nutrition experts

tout the benefits of healthy fats.

Of course, that still doesn't give us a diet potato chip.

College is that time of your life

when you get a taste of freedom and real responsibility.

Between classes, sports and parties,

it can feel like there aren't enough hours in the day.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a way

to get a little boost?

In a legal way, of course.

Early energy drinks like Radithor

contained radioactive materials to give you energy.

We found out the hard way

that this was dangerous and deeply crazy.

But then in the nineties and the 2000s,

energy drinks make a huge comeback coast to coast.

Red Bull had really sort of opened America up

to this world of energy drinks,

and you started mixing Red Bull and vodka, right?

So it starts to become part of the party culture.

Chris Hunter, Jason Freeman and Jeff Wright.

Three fraternity brothers from Ohio State University

see this alcohol energy drink trend,

and they see a business opportunity.

They begin experimenting with their own mixtures

of energy drink and alcohol.

In 2005, these budding entrepreneurs

come out with a pre-mixed energy beer.

It's genius.

It's the first time a beer and an energy drink

are available pre-mixed together.

They soon realize

they found an eager customer base,

and they figure they're onto something big.

They decide to call the Four Loko.

Four, because it has four main ingredients.

It has alcohol, it has caffeine, it has Guarana,

which is a seed that has like double the caffeine of coffee,

and Taurene, which is an amino acid that helps boost energy.

And so they add Loko

because well, that mix of four ingredients is insane.

The drinks become very popular across college campuses

and they actually acquire an unofficial motto,

horny, hyper and happy.

I guess technically that's only three Loko,

but as a college student,

those are three things I didn't mind being.

Each 23 ounce can has the same amount of alcohol

as five beers

and the same amount of caffeine as two cups of coffee.

You don't drink Four Loko, you survive Four Loko.

It is like a can of Red Bull

and a bottle of tequila met and had a baby.

It's madness.

Within a few months, this drink is everywhere.

It's in convenience stores, it's in liquor stores,

and it's even in rap songs.

But soon it starts to garner attention

for the wrong reasons.

The reason kids drinking it is, 'cause it's really cheap.

You know, it's like 2.50 and it's 12% alcohol,

so it'll get the job done.

Caffeine masks some of the effects of intoxication.

By the time you drink two of them,

you may be more drunk than you realize.

There are so many people passing out

from drinking too much Four Loko

that it starts to get the nickname, "Blackout in a can."

I remember when Four Loko was both captivating

and terrorizing New York.

Teenagers were found unconscious at school.

People are falling into subway tracks.

My friend's restaurant had a Four Loko night

and a young woman actually went through a glass door

that she didn't realize wasn't open.

This stuff is crazy.

At Central Washington University,

nine students who drank Four Loko

are hospitalized in a single night.

Their blood alcohol concentrations

range from 0.12 to a 0.35.

That is over four times the legal limit.

I mean, anything over a 0.3 can lead to like coma or death.

Then it turns out alcohol isn't even

Four Loko's biggest problem.

In November of 2010, the FDA sends a letter,

warning of the danger of the levels of the caffeine

in these alcoholic beverages.

Brooklyn politician, Felix Ortiz, goes on TV

to demonstrate exactly how dangerous this product is.

He drinks as much Four Loko as he can within an hour

with a doctor measuring his vitals.

After just two and a half cans, his vital signs have spiked

and the camera crews have to cut

to prevent from filming him vomiting.

With the FDA bearing down,

the Four Loko team preemptively states

that they will remove caffeine, Taurene

and Guarana from their beverages.

In December of 2010,

the caffeine-free version is released,

but that's not the end of the story for the original recipe.

Wholesale distributors across a number of states

buy a bunch of this unused stock.

They send it to a processor in Virginia,

and they distill thousands of truckloads of Four Loko

to get the alcohol out of it.

The alcohol then is mixed with gasoline and sold as a fuel.

So you can't drink Four Loko, but your car can.

Looking back at the foods we once enjoyed,

from fat free chips to candy cigarettes,

to radioactive energy drinks, there was always something new

and exciting to try.

Now sometimes it was toxic

or it might have had some bad side effects,

but that didn't stop our "Hazardous History,"

from being hard to resist.