Metrecal was temporarily yanked off the shelves, along with all of its competitors. Sales in liquid diet products dropped 95% between 1977 and 1978. As of 1982, the FDA required that all very low calorie liquid protein diets (those with fewer than 400 daily calories) come with a label, warning that the product may cause serious illness or death. Offering approximately 900 daily calories, Metrecal and Sego would technically have been able to avoid the warning label, but they were and remain recognized as unsafe. To this day, regulators refer to this scare as a turning point the first weight-loss fad to be treated as an outbreak. In his address marking the 60th anniversary of the CDC, Director Wiliam H. Foege, MD, wrote: During the late 1970s, the world appeared faced with a new, emerging infectious disease (e.g., Lassa fever, toxic shock syndrome, and Legionnaires disease)...However, increasingly, outbreak investigations involved noninfectious health problems, such as those involving baby foods and diet preparations. The deaths of women attempting to lose weight while consuming liquid protein diet products led to an understanding of the risk for physiological consequences on cardiac function posed by such products.
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Before Soylent There Was SlimFast And Before That There Was This - Refinery29
