WHEN NEW CHIPS ARE DOWN, RUN.

Byline: PHIL ROSENTHAL 

I have snacked on the future, and it has a wicked aftertaste and may cause cramping.

Welcome to the brave new world of olestra, a fat substitute developed by the fine people at Procter & Gamble, best-known for its shampoo, dishwashing detergent and other delicious products.

Procter & Gamble is going to test-market olestra under the brand name Olean. It adds no calories to snacks and keeps them free of fat, despite being derived from vegetable oil and sugar, because your body's digestive enzymes cannot break it down. This is the sort of thing for which they used to pump stomachs.

By a 15-5 vote of its scientific advisers, the Food and Drug Administration last week approved the fake fat for use in snack foods. The FDA did this even though studies reportedly found a "statistically significant increase in gastrointestinal disturbances" among those who sampled the stuff.

A note on the bag of chips that Procter & Gamble sent warned of how "olestra inhibits the absorption of some vitamins and other nutrients."

Now, if you're wolfing down potato chips, crackers, cheese puffs and other junk - even without fat - nutrients aren't exactly your top priority. You just don't want to have to buy bigger clothes, which you probably wouldn't have to do if you didn't keep having the McDonald's people Super Size your order.

But no one knows what lost nutrients will do to us in the long run.

The Olean label also cautioned that "olestra may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools," however, and that did sound serious here and now. Maybe the Procter & Gamble people are looking to peddle some detergent in some kind of cross-promotion, but it sounds positively gross.

All would be forgiven if this Soylent Green-ish product tasted all right. And, on first crunch, a fat-free Olean potato chip isn't half bad. Looks like a chip. Tastes like a chip. Feels like a chip. A little oily perhaps. But then...

Deep thinker George Will said on TV the other day that the aftertaste reminded him of "very old fish in a very new oil spill."

The consensus of people I conned into trying this salty, potato-flavored tidbit of potential Ex-Lax with me said it had a distinctly chemical aftertaste. "Like plastic," said one.

Others mostly just made faces.

Not everyone thought it was wretched, though an editor who tried some earlier and didn't mind the taste remarked that one chip in the afternoon wound up ruining her whole evening.

That's unfortunate, because the point of this faux fat, apparently, is to make us feel better. It's to relieve us of the guilt we supposedly get from eating chips.

That, however, is a lost cause. I don't know about you, but it's not the eating of chips that causes me guilt. It's the opening of the bag. You have to bite the top and rip. There's a lot of effort involved, and you just know that you're going to pay for it later one way or another.

The chips themselves are great, fat and all. Always. Once a bag is open, it's as good as empty. Eating chips is easy. Especially with a dip.

Call me old-fashioned. I just don't want a snack that cramps my style - or anything else.