Teflon Diet Won Ig Nobel

In 2025, an anesthesiologist named Rotem Naftalovich, a materials scientist named Daniel Naftalovich, and an obesity specialist named Frank Greenway won the Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize for proposing Teflon as a zero-calorie food additive. They cited 1960s DuPont research in which rats ate a diet containing 25% polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, for 90 days and lost weight without showing signs of toxicity. The Naftalovich brothers patented PTFE as an indigestible meal additive intended to increase fullness without adding calories. They abandoned the idea after the US Food and Drug Administration refused to approve PTFE as a food additive and their attempts to organize human clinical trials failed.

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