[cab]

I'm fairly sure that all of us here share a fairly similar ethical code, it's just that we don't share a view as to how we can best live to that code.

These guys selling bags, oddly packaged health foods and chitosan pills (processed and chemically treated crustacean shell that chelates fats that you eat, giving you oily stools but causing you to absorb less fat) probably share the same ethos as us. They are doing what they think is the right thing, but for them (as for so many) the 'health food' factor is synonymous with the 'environmental' factor. I'm firmly of the opinion that they're wrong, but their heart is probably in the right place.

Incidentally, when tucking into a Mars bad a couple of years ago a thought struck me; we need something that gives all the sensualsatisfaction of a sweet, sticky chocolate bar with none of the fat. But the fat is integral to the product, that's why it's good. So we need a product that's just the same but with fat that doesn't count. Obviously that can be achieved with biscuits (everyone knows that the broken ones don't count), but then it struck me that it's easy to produce a chitosan colloid that would be flavourless and integrate it in the chocolate bar; the result being a bar of chocolate that would cause you to secrete more (or as much) fat than you get in the bar of chocolate.

Rushing back into the lab, I fired off a few patent searches, to discover that some Japanese guys had beaten me to it.

Bang goes anotherfortune