Trust me, people, when I, Mona Sternstein-Fernandez, tell you that the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s legendary Michael Jacobson has never been reticent about saying the unsayable.  He was the first person (that I know of) to heroically utter the term “Anal Leakage” in polite company, back in 1997, when the horrifying fake fat substitute “Olestra” attracted his much-deserved ire.

Today, According to the National Digestive Diseases Information Clearinghouse, more than 5.5 million Americans suffer from fecal incontinence, which is caused by diet, damage to the anal sphincter muscles, pelvic floor dysfunction, loss of storage capacity in the rectum, and even diarrhea.

Sadly, we still don’t talk about these 5.5 million sufferers in polite company—and that’s just the way the Prock Chocolate Corporation likes it.

Why?  Because caffeine-laden chocolate relaxes the internal anal sphincter muscles and can cause bowel leakage and release.

Even more disturbing, Big Chocolate’s sugar-free “healthy offerings” (an oxymoron if ever there was one) can wreak even more havoc on the delicate intestinal systems of adults and children …. children such as my daughter, Tempy.

As part of our most recent weight-loss strategy for Tempy (whom I recently wrote about after an unfortunate O.D. episode involving Paula Deen’s reckless and irresponsible Triple Chocolate Pudding), we switched her over to sugar-free chocolates.

Boy, was that a mistake!

Big Chocolate boasts that their sugar-free offerings deliver the “Same famous taste, only sugar-free! And did we mention it has about 20% fewer calories!”

What Big Chocolate conveniently forgets to mention, however, is that the most common sugar substitutes in candies—sorbitol, mannitol, xylitol and malitol, for example—are absorbed slowly and incompletely.  As a consequence, they attract water into the lower digestive tract that can cause explosive diarrhea in children and other vulnerable populations.

It just isn’t fair, people, that no one at Big Chocolate warned my daughter that consuming these products would doom her to more than six hours a day on the toilet, for three straight days.

Evidenciary Photograph:  Tempy Sternstein-Fernandez’ bathroom

Nor did anyone at Big Chocolate warn Tempy that her favorite holiday present—a pair of electric-lime roll-cuff sweatpants with a PEACE sign stitched on the thigh, purchased at her favorite Tween apparel retailer, Justice—would be rendered un-wearable in the aftermath of her colonic catastrophe.

I wish Big Chocolate could have been there to see the tears welling in Tempy’s eyes when, clad in my surgical gloves, I loaded the odiferous sweatpants into an (empty) 1.5 gallon empty bucket of Maldon Sea Salt, sealed the container with duct tape, and hauled it out to the dumpster like so much radioactive waste.

Memo to accounts payable at Big Chocolate:  Be on the lookout for a letter from me demanding full reimbursement ($37.82) for my daughter’s sweat pants.  Oh, and be on the lookout, too, for a certified letter from our General Counsel at COCOH …  as the filing of our “Failure to Warn” lawsuit is imminent.