Also, your body is actually better at processing MSG than salt, so supplementing your food with MSG can allow you to get good flavor with a considerable salt reduction.
The oral lethal dose to 50% of subjects (LD50) is between 15 to 18 g/kg body weight in rats and mice respectively, five times greater than the LD50 of salt (3 g/kg in rats).
Is the LD50 relevant in food except for stuff that is actually likely to kill people? The dangers aren't that anybody is going to have so much salt (or msg) in their body that it kills them like that.
I think it can be used as a relative scale of toxicity though, but I'm not a chemist, so if anyone with a background in it knows better, I'd like to know.
I didn't think it was relevant, as my assertion was just that it was easier on your body than salt, but thanks for pulling that out if you think it will help.
Differences in LD50 does not directly imply that one is easier on your body to absorb than the other... It says that one will kill you faster, by eating absurdly large amounts.
This is only one half of the story. To make an apples-to-apples comparison you also have to consider how much you need for the same effect on taste. Hypothetically, if you need 10 times as much glutamate as salt to achieve an equally tasty food, then salt would be a better option. Also LD50 only takes into account short term effects.
This is the same story with aspartame vs sugar. Aspartame has an LD50 of around 5 g/kg, sugar 29.7 g/kg. You can say "wow, aspartame is 6 times as toxic as sugar!", but you have to take into account that it is 200 times sweeter than sugar.
Of course in reality you can't really compare salt with glutamate since they stimulate different receptors. In the end we can probably conclude that neither salt not glutamate pose any real danger to a healthy person in doses that are not completely ridiculous, so add both to your food!
Sorry if I'm being insensitive, but how is Chinese Restaurant Syndrome "absurdly racist"? If people were having health problems as a consequence of eating corned beef, I would, as a Jew, have no problem with that condition being called "Jewish Deli Syndrome".
I think "absurdly" is a bit too strong, but the problem comes down to 4 things:
1. Only small percentage of people was afflicted with physical symptoms.
2. These symptoms were vague and so variable that they had to refer to as "syndrome", rather than "symptom".
3. Ultimately, MSG allergy proved to be largely false.
4. MSG is found everywhere.
"Jewish Deli Syndrome" could be considered racist depending on the surrounding circumstance.
However, if there is set of ingredients that are unique to Jewish deli meat scientifically proven to cause problems for non-trivial percentage of population, then I would agree with you that it wouldn't (and shouldn't) be racist to call "Jewsih Deli Syndrome".
I completely agree with the OP; there's no reason to suggest there is anything racist about the label Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. It appears a few people have been hyper-sensitized to a bad definition of racism.
That's quite naive -- and dare I say a little racist -- to assume that all chinese restaurants are owned by Chinese people, or that Chinese people only run chinese restaurants.
Evil bankers exist of lots of ethnicities and faiths but lots of people do (often but not always subconsciously) link greedy bankers and jewish people.
Just like using unhealthy or even dangerous additives is often linked to Chinese cuisine even though they're used just as much in tons of other cuisines as well.
Equating an existent stereotype with one which doesn't actually exist and saying "it's not that bad, I wouldn't be offended by that" is the false analogy. Because then it doesn't have the personal impact a prejudice or misconception you've actually been exposed to has.
A white person might say that if someone joked "all white people are lazy", they wouldn't be offended so a black or latino person shouldn't either. A black person is much more likely to be offended by "all black people are lazy" because that's something that's actually rooted in societal prejudices. Change it to "all white people are racist" and suddenly by their defensive tone, you'll note that you've hit a nerve and they're actually uncomfortable and/or offended.
Your reading just seems wilfully tortuous and unnatural.
"Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" has nothing to do with Chinese food being bad or unhealthy or dangerous. It's just that is is (was?) fairly common for there to be more MSG in Chinese Food. So it was a natural shorthand. It hadn't even occurred to me that someone would think it was racist before today.
I'm torn between finding this funny and finding this irritating. There's enough genuine problems that people face based on race, nationality, gender or sexual orientation that debates like this just make it harder to get people to take us seriously on things that matter.
I didn't originally see the connection between MSG and Chinese food as coming from a place of racism, but you might be right. I'm still not so sure though. If somebody said to you "I got food poisoning from a Chinese restaurant last night", would you say "That's racist! An Italian restaurant could have just as easily given you food poisoning."?
It's pointless to try to tell people what is and isn't offensive. Normally, I err on the side of thinking that if somebody is offended, they must have reason to be and I should be sensitive to that, but in this case I had no idea what racism the author was referring to.
Perhaps the stereotype of Chinese restaurants specifically being untrustworthy/unhealthy/unhygienic (i.e. Chinese chefs don't care about their customers / they're not up to our western standards) isn't universal, but it definitely exists in some parts of the world. MSG is an example of that, another one is the myth that you might just be eating cat or dog being advertised as something different (also often applied to Korean food in a similarly racist way).
Not saying it's high on the prioritised list of racist tropes we need to be fighting, but yeah, it's there.
I think the main difference between the two is the intent that's being implied. "Jewish Banker Syndrome" is implying something about me as a person. It's saying that, as a Jew, I'm more likely to be greedy and corrupt. "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" isn't really blaming the Chinese for anything, it's just noting the correlation that was observed.
Maybe a better comparison would be "Jewish Bank Syndrome", which to me sounds a lot less harsh than "Jewish Banker Syndrome".
> I've heard that the sickness associated with MSG is more likely due to ingesting old rice.
Yes, I remember there being a British, I think, study in 2011 or 2012 that bought samples of cooked rice from various oriental food sellers and found that some were contaminated (moist warm food left out for hours); the reasoning is that when people report sickness or allergy to the MSG that oriental food in the West is notoriously prepared with, they're actually having issues with the rice.
It's considered a dangerous practice. The general rule is food has four hours outside of its proper storage environment before it must be thrown away. Eg, leave the milk on the counter for an hour, put it back in the fridge, leave it out another three hours, and now you should throw it out. I don't have a link, but I'm citing ServSafe, a program that nationally certifies people for food safety (targeted to federal and state requirements for food service).
You might also consider the ambient temp of your kitchen. Pro kitchens run several hours a day, staying fairly warm the whole time (might have several ovens, tens of burners, and other hot equipment running throughout the day). Your kitchen, even with the rice cooker going, might stay fairly cool, and so bad bacteria has less time to grow.
Food safety is also talked about in terms of risk to different groups. Young children, pregnant mothers, and old adults are at higher risk than younger adults.
Two hours between 39F-140F is the official limit. This may be a bit conservative depending on one's consitution, gut flora, etc. (I've gone almost 20 years without losing my lunch, eating at hundreds of restaurants from spotless to quite dodgy over that period, so who knows...)
> You can get food poisoning from eating reheated rice. However, it's not the reheating that causes the problem but the way the rice has been stored before it was reheated.
> Uncooked rice can contain spores of Bacillus cereus, a bacterium that can cause food poisoning. When the rice is cooked, the spores can survive.
> If the rice is left standing at room temperature, the spores can grow into bacteria. These bacteria will multiply and may produce toxins (poisons) that cause vomiting or diarrhoea.
> The longer cooked rice is left at room temperature, the more likely it is that the bacteria or toxins could make the rice unsafe to eat.
Reheating the rice does kill the bacteria, but does nothing to the toxins.
It's funny you flag that, because that was the part I spent the most time pondering how to word. 'Japanese'? No, because it's more Chinese restaurants I think of as being the problem. 'Chinese'? Except, well, the food served there isn't a whole lot like actual Chinese food, I am given to understand, and this problem applies to anyone who uses a lot of rice, so Korean or Thai food seem like they might have problems. 'East Asian'? But is Thailand really 'East Asian'? And again, none of this stuff is particularly authentic... Ah, fuck it: 'oriental'. It even conveys correctly that this is all food as warped by Western consumers' preferences and demands and not necessarily reflective of the original countries.
Not sure how to help you find a better word without seeing the study itself to know precisely what they observed. For inauthentic Chinese etc. food, there are a number of descriptors - pan-Asian, Asian fusion, Americanized Chinese food, or just a short phrase ("Asian-influenced cuisine catering to Western palate" or whatever). You might've used it in an ironic sense but that's easily lost on readers.
It's because the word evolved during the 20th century into a mild pejorative. Similar to the word "gypsy." Occidental isn't disliked because nobody ever called anyone an Occidental in a sneering way.
I wonder if that's a piece of US-hypersensitivity? I'm British and it sounds a little old-fashioned but nothing close to 'offensive'. I even checked with a friend who works in an advice center and needs to be extremely aware of such issues and he didn't think it was problematic.
There was a long thread at metafilter about MSG fairly recently, and I found this comment from a biochemist to be a really good, straightforward primer on what exactly MSG is and how it is metabolized:
This article is both accurate and highly misleading. The author is correct that there is very little reliable evidence that links glutamic acid and/or glutamate to health problems. The backlash against MSG as a result of the "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" craze, was not rooted in scientific inquiry.
However, MSG is not just a source for glutamate like seaweed and tomatoes are. MSG is the sodium salt of glutamic acid and contains not just glutamate but also sodium ions. Having 2000mg of natural glutamate should be harmless. Having enough MSG to give you 2000mg of glutamate means you're getting a shit ton of sodium. That's not good for you, especially if you're one of the many people for whom excess sodium intake adversely affects your blood pressure. So while MSG is presumably no worse than NaCl (and is perhaps better in that the umami flavor means you don't have to use as much sodium to get an equally rich taste), to say that MSG is totally harmless without even mentioning sodium and hypertension is ridiculous. Even in terms of short term effects, I've had plenty of MSG-free hot and sour soups that made my head itch. Not from MSG but from thousands of mg of sodium found in their gratuitously added soy sauce and table salt.
As a person with HBP who actively monitors it, I can tell you this much. Sodium intake definitely affects my blood pressure. It goes like this, the higher my intake the shittier I feel. I'm not saying sodium is the main or only cause of HBP, it seems to affect some more then others, and there may be other underlining causes. But to call it a myth is downright ridiculous.
The link between sodium and edema, water retention, and kidney stress is not inconclusive. Large doses of sodium clearly have some impact. The question is, is that impact sufficient to explain the symptoms of Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, not whether the average person needs to moderate sodium consumption to avoid hypertension.
In short: your blood is mostly water. Your blood is surrounded by a selectively permeable membrane (your vascular tissue). Solutes increase osmotic pressure (see: biology 101). Sodium chloride (table salt) is highly soluble in water (see: chemistry). Therefore, sodium and chloride increase the osmolarity of your blood. Water passes through the semi-permeable membrane back into your blood to decrease osmotic pressure caused by the excess of sodium/chloride in your blood versus in the surrounding cells. Your blood pressure increases because the water increases the volume of your blood while the vascular tissue tries to contain and mediate this reaction (see: physics).
Blog posts are not a substitute for an education in biology, medicine, and science.
If anyone is going to nitpick about things in this post, please understand that I am striving to be understood. While I could put an asterisk after every sentence ("*except for...,") it would not be productive to do so. If anyone wishes for clarification, I would be glad to provide.
This explanation, while straightfoward and common-sensical, ignores the possibility that the body has some ability to eliminate excess solutes and/or excess fluids. Certainly the case is quite good that "more fluid in circulatory system yields higher blood pressure."
Indeed, and this possibility is called the kidney. Young people with 'healthy' kidneys are able to eat and drink almost anything they want and are much more likely to have well-regulated blood pressure. However, as we age, our kidneys perform more poorly (a simple explanation as to why older people are more likely to take blood pressure medications than younger people). As our physiology weakens, our diet (and exercise, among other things) become more important to our physiological health. This, in conjunction with the hardening of our arteries due to age and atherosclerosis, means that our diet (particularly our sodium intake) becomes exponentially more important in our older age than our younger age.
If this sounds unlikely, understand that the kidney is the direct or indirect target of many medications for blood pressure. Diuretics such as hydrochlorothiazide and loop diuretics such as furosemide act very directly on the kidney. Drugs such as ACE inhibitors (e.g. lisinopril), ARBs (e.g. losaratan), and renin inhibitors (aliskiren) act on the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, which directly involves the kidneys in a different manner. (I am a pharmacist).
I agree with your underlying sentiment, but this blood volume hypothesis is not supported by evidence.
Instead, current research indicates that high blood pressure after excess sodium intake may be caused by activation of the sympathetic nervous system, secondary to increased sodium loading on ion channels.
I remember it was in a relatively recent paper. This mechanism might help explain why sodium hasn't consistently been shown to have an adverse effect in humans while at the same time still being strongly associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Come to think of it, it's also a good explanation for why cultures in temperate climates tend to start their day with a hearty (salty) meal ;)
I would also like to point out, since above a comment was made about glutamate containing "a shitload" of sodium, that the actual sodium content of MSG is only around 13% by weight, compared to table salt where it's nearly 40%.
>Blog posts are not a substitute for an education in biology, medicine, and science.
Turns out that an education in biology, medicine and science in no substitute for actually doing research. Your explanation for why salt raises blood pressure and increases mortality was considered so obvious that it wasn't worth studying. When it was studied, it turned out not to be in any way true. (see: reality).
The OP didn't say 2000mg of MSG, they said 2000mg of glutamate. So you'd have to modify your calculation a bit to know how much MSG contains 2000mg of glutamate, and from there how much sodium that would contain.
"Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" is real though. Or rather I personally can't eat most things at chinese restaurants and this article was the first time I heard that this is actually a named thing, i.e. this is the first time I hear of CRS. Though I think it's more to do with the fat they use to fry rice in -- there is one place around here which serves chinese-style stir-fried noodles, but eating there reliably does not trigger any symptoms. They are also the priciest noodles around. Maybe CRS should just be named "bad cheap fried food syndrome". It's not a TLA, but you can just smush all the words together and call it bacheff syndrome.
If you read the original New England Journal of Medicine article on which this is based (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM196804042781419), you will find that is it in fact an anecdote where quite literally a physician ate Chinese food and wrote a letter about it. There is no research, no evidence, no null hypothesis.
Yes, but the result was "we couldn't induce headaches at all, except in subjects who had in fact consumed a placebo". Studies have decisively refuted a link between MSG and CRS.
I meant -- has anyone tried to see if people who complain about headaches after eating at Chinese restaurants are just dehydrated from eating too much salt?
Excitotoxicity is the "pathological process by which nerve cells are damaged and killed by excessive stimulation by neurotransmitters such as glutamate and similar substances" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excitotoxicity).
As the article says, when glutamate is consumed naturally, it is intertwined with fiber and other chemicals that regulate its uptake; however, glutamate additives are not and thus flood your body with glutamate, which can overload your blood-brain barrier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood%E2%80%93brain_barrier) and disrupt the delicate balance.
When making a risotto I might use 100g of parmesan cheese, which can amount to ~8g of MSG according to the internets, plus eat tomatoes on the side. That's the equivalent of 12g of Ajinomoto, I can't imagine adding that much to any dish.
Take the sauce in a chinese stir fry. Its ingredients: water, corn starch, and msg. Maybe some other things (flavorings). That's not too much different than putting msg in fruit juice. In the sense that the msg is in a sugar solution with no natural chemistry mitigants or fiber. Because its ~suspended in solution, its not clear its uptake would be regulated by adjacet fiber.
In research, the rats used as controls were fed nutritious
food. Given a choice of water and alcohol to drink, these rats chose water. Rats fed [msg laced] junk food chose alcohol to drink over water.
A simplified explanation: Salty food causes you to retain fluid due to osmotic pressure (see one of my other comments in this link). Alcohol is a diuretic, which causes you to expel fluid. There are more reasons, but this is the easiest to understand.
I'm highly skeptical of Truthinlabeling.org. The person/group behind it seem to highlight a kindle book alleging a link between Alzheimer's and MSG? The information is also rather muddled and unclear. I would not consider this to be a reliable source.
It's not complicated. It's been studied directly. It is an easy study to conduct. Give people MSG. Do they become symptomatic? The answer is no. This is the result you would expect, given the simple molecular structure of MSG and the fundamental role glutamic acid plays in the human body.
If we had learned about table salt in the 1910s and knew it primarily by its formula name NaCl, people would believe all manner of weird things about salt, too. In fact, people do believe weird things about salt; there is a widespread and unsupported belief that moderation of sodium intake is a key public health concern, which it is not.
It's the same with MSG. Dissolve MSG and you get sodium and an amino acid that is so important to our bodies that we produce it ourselves, without sourcing it from our food or the environment; an amino acid that is thus, unsurprisingly, hugely prevalent in foods we "naturally" eat.
I agree. My knowledge of the subject is little but the parent author of this thread came off as hyperbolic. I don't understand human biology well, so I left open the possibility that I may have an incorrect opinion, as it uneducated. My opinion is MSG is safe and delicious.
> In fact, people do believe weird things about salt; there is a widespread and unsupported belief that moderation of sodium intake is a key public health concern, which it is not.
It's not an unsupported belief. Studies have shown that high sodium intake is a significant contributor to hypertension. Here is one such study: http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/3/235. There is debate about whether consuming several thousand milligrams of sodium a day adversely affects blood pressure in everyone or only in some people, but that it's a major contributor to hypertension (9-17% of cases) is supported.
If you have specific criticisms of the methodology of those kinds of studies or if you have links to sources that dispute the above, I'd be interesting in reading them.
Or are you saying that what's unsupported is the notion that the above makes sodium intake a key public health concern?
Thanks for the link. I can only access the abstract, but conflicting results "over the extent to which elevated salt consumption has adverse implications for population health" is very different from saying that "there is a widespread and unsupported belief that moderation of sodium intake is a key public health concern, which it is not."
It sounds like the article concludes, contrary to your memory, that as a result of non-objective scientific practices, the public incorrectly believes that high sodium intake is definitely a huge problem for all, when in reality, it's either a huge problem for all, or it's a huge problem for some, or it's a huge problem for some and a small problem for others, or it's a small problem for some.
This claim sounds non-falsifiable; it amounts to saying that glutamates (in any form) as an additive must be doing something different than glutamates in tomatoes, where it's "bound in fibers", just because. Where, for instance, is the fiber in Parmigiano cheese?
Glutamate is very common in "natural" foodstuffs and plays key roles in our bodies. The notion that small quantities of glutamate (such as would be used to season food) render it toxic is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary evidence.
The quote from the Smithsonian Mag article -- "Glutamates that occur naturally in food come intertwined with different chemicals or fiber, which the body is naturally inclined to regulate" -- is by Amy Cheng Vollmer (http://www.swarthmore.edu/academics/biology/faculty-and-staf...), professor of biology at Swarthmore College.
Some of the first evidence that glutamate additives were dangerous was provided by Dr. John W. Olney in 1969:
Dr. Olney and Harvard scientist Dr. Jean Mayer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mayer) independently came to the same conclusion and led to the food industry removing MSG from baby food (and later all the MSG variants) because a baby's blood-brain barrier isn't fully developed so it can't protect against increased glutamate consumption:
However, one of the most interesting reports is the government's 1995 Life Sciences Research Office (LSRO) of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) report: "Analysis of Adverse Reactions to Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)".
Here are a few statements from the report (I'll write up a more detailed blog post of my notes on this later):
* Page 29: "The net result is that certain areas of the brain may be vulnerable to acute, large, magnitude fluctuations in plasma glutamate concentrations because flooding from adjacent circumentrical organs."
* Page 42: "Levels of ingested MSG might be sufficient to raise the concentration of blood glutumate and related compounds enough to change the levels of these amino acids in the brain, particularly in the circumvention areas not protected by the blood-brain barrier."
I went to this sketchy restaurant in Spain once, and started having pins and needles all around my skull. Reading what you just write, that might have been because of too much MSG. Pretty scary at that time.
You hit the nail on the head. For most of us, it's not the MSG that causes the problem. It's what comes with it. For starters it's the sodium. For me it's the 1000 calories in a monster Doritos bag, or the 3000 calories when I eat three times what I should at a Chinese takeout.
So here's the thing that happens to me... When I eat certain foods, I tend to wake up in the middle of the night feeling hot, and it feels like I've got elevated blood pressure and my mind is racing a bit and it keeps me up at night. This is a very particular effect and it seems to be food linked. I get it after eating Chinese food, I get it after eating Pizza, I get it after eating a pile of spaghetti with red sauce. I used to gorge on Triscuits and Cheese and I'd get the same effects. I thought it was the carbs at first since those seem to be bad for me with weight gain and thought it was all related. But, there's another link there which is that all of that has MSG or glutamate in it (and also lots of sodium of course). So if i stay away from those foods I don't get the horrible sweaty middle insomnia symptoms.
I can eat carbs if I stay away from glutamate/sodium, so my first guess that it was the white rice, pizza crust and spaghetti noodles was incorrect. But the MSG is always correlated with the symptoms. Is it the MSG or is it that the MSG comes with the salt? I dunno. I'm not really certain that it matters either.
(I've also had my BP taken by a cardiologist the day after eating Chinese food and it spiked enough to cross the line between normal and high blood pressure the next morning after the meal...)
Another point worth considering is the chirality of the molecule. There is a strong bias in biological systems in favour of l-oriented amino acids; a bias often unreflected or different in synthesised chemicals.
Biological systems often react differently to the different enantiomers of a chemical, sometimes being unresponsive to the enantiomer of a biologically active molecule, sometimes responding in a different but useful manner, and sometimes reacting adversely.
When I had first heard about this, it was the only anti-MSG argument that sounded even remotely plausible, but it seems that nowadays commercial MSG is made by bacterial fermentation, which means that they would also have the preference for L-oriented amino acids.
Here is an overall history of MSG production, including chemical synthesis (now obsolete). Even when they were doing this, they screened out the D-glutamate and re-synthesized it to maximize L-glutamate production (might not have been 100% effective, as apparently it involved doing optical screening of the crystals)
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/90/3/728S.full
Disclaimer - I am Japanese American, so grew up with Ajinomoto MSG, dashi, tomato sauce, parmesan, Doritos, etc. as part of my diet, so am biased toward skepticism on this topic.
Interesting - the metafilter referenced elsewhere on the thread had a pointer to a paper about D-glutamate vs L-glutamate. Apparently, bacterial fermentation generates a fair amount of D-glutamate, but this is true of "naturally occurring" fermentation (such as in cheese) too.
The abstract claims foods to which MSG is added directly contained lower amounts of D-glutamate than foods where the MSG comes from fermented foods. I wonder why? Maybe due to better optimization / control for L-glutamate production in the bacteria?
The MSG allergy is a myth, plain and simple. There have been plenty of scientific research studies done on the substance, and they found absolutely nothing. I don't know why this myth has persisted so long in popular culture. I compare it to people who rave about homeopathy. Any (perceived) effect is either anecdotal or placebo in nature.
What most people don't know, is that MSG occurs naturally in many foods. Beef, Chicken, Spinach, Tomatoes, etc... If you don't get an MSG allergy when you eat those foods, you don't have an MSG allergy. Source: http://zidbits.com/2010/12/is-the-msg-allergy-a-myth/
It's a lot like the stigma against aspartame. It found its way into popular culture and has become firmly entrenched despite all evidence from decades of intense scientific scrutiny to the contrary.
My gut feeling is that we're going to be in a similar place in 10-20 years with HFCS. The body of research there is still relatively young, however.
Uh. I actually have an MSG sensitivity which took me forever to figure out what it was. For decades I'd occasionally be eating in a restaurant and my lips, tongue and/or back of my throat would go numb. It wasn't until I bought MSG and started putting it on pretty much everything in larger doses that I realized it was the culprit.
I can reproduce it pretty easily by simply putting nothing but MSG on my tongue. It takes a good bit to do it however and seems to cause me no other problems so I tend not to worry about it, but it is clearly some kind of sensitivity or allergy which is easily reproducible and not the slightest bit vague (lips going numb is a pretty easily identifiable sensation). Claiming it is all completely made up seems a bit premature.
It is said that the human body itself produces up to 50g of glutamate every day; an allergy to it should result in much more terrible effects than superficial numbness. Someone already posted a longer explanation: http://www.metafilter.com/131105/Dorito-Powder#5147903
Really? Please observe the differences between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:L-Glutamate_Structural_Fo... and https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Glutamin... . The only difference is the relocation of hydrogen ions, which is a normal and expected occurrence of all molecules in the presence of other molecules. The equilibrium of these different forms of the same molecule is mediated by pH, among other things. They are in fact the same molecule. The word "acid" only means that it likes to give up a hydrogen ion when given the opportunity.
I read some glutamate metabolism papers last night and I don't think this is likely to be true at all. I think it's a manifestation of the naturalist fallacy: you believe the "free glutamic acid" released by the dissolution of MSG to be artificial and are trying to rationalize a distinction for the glutamates that the body produces that doesn't exist.
In reality, glutamic acid isn't simply an amino acid that happens to be present in the human body. It is fundamental to the way our bodies work; it's required for nitrogen metabolism! Glutamate toxicity seems very unlikely.
I don't know what you read, but in the body glutamic acid doesn't just float around randomly, it's carefully stored near the nerves that need it. Excess glutamic acid where it doesn't belong causes nerve problems.
It's like the difference between sucrose and starch. Chemically they are the same, but the effects are very different because one needs more digestion than the other.
Your body can't metabolize nitrogen without glutamic acid. It's part of how you, and I think maybe all the rest of your siblings in phylum chordata, build proteins. I don't see a lot of reason to believe that it causes "nerve problems" in the human body, but would welcome a citation to the literature that shows that.
It gets worse for your argument. Here's a paper that demonstrates that very large oral doses of MSG in both mice and humans don't even significantly raise the plasma concentration of glutamates.
This should probably be unsurprising. Your body is designed to deal with consumption of glutamates; in fact, even though it's so vital to your system that you produce it yourself, humans get most of their glutamic acid from dietary sources. Hypersensitivity to dietary glutamate would be maladaptive.
The idea that your body has carefully delineated locations where it's safe to have glutamic acid (probably not coincidentally in the nervous system, the most complex part of the body), and that ingesting "artificial" sources of glutamic acid throws that out of whack, is again I think a manifestation of the naturalistic fallacy.
I think people are talking about sensitivity, are you saying that everybody should be able to ingest dishes made with MSG and not feel bad because of the MSG?
MSG is not in beef chicken spinach or tomatoes. There is a difference between the glutamic acid that is in these foods and the salt that is msg. Furthermore, MSG is manufactured using chemical processes which means that there are plenty of trace elements from the manufacturing processes in the end product. It is very much possible to be allergic to MSG.
Even the present article, despite being very much pro-MSG, allows that some people may be sensitive to it.
1. I occasionally get symptoms often associated with MSG. Terrible headache, confusion, nasal drip, nausea, and so on. It can put me out of action for about 12 hours.
2. I invariably get these symptoms about 24 hours after I've eaten processed foods with an unusually rich flavour and which have, somewhere in their ingredients, either MSG or something that might conceal MSG (e.g. "flavourings").
I can't guarantee that it's MSG, because I'm too chicken to test it directly (that headache really sucks), but it certainly fits the profile.
Now some people point out, "It occurs naturally in all kinds of foods. The original MSG was derived from miso soup, which you eat every day."
And my answer is, "I don't know. Maybe it's a subtle variant of MSG that only occurs in the synthetic variety? Maybe the naturally occurring MSG is bound up with other things that render it safe for me to eat? But something's making me ill, and it's only in synthetic ingredients."
The "synthetic" MSG you're referring to isn't synthesized, it's cultured by bacteria in sugar. There is a chemical process to create MSG, but it is significantly more expensive; the shift to fermentation happened in the '70s, so you may never have had chemically synthesized MSG.
Thanks for pointing that out. So "synthetic" is the wrong word. Maybe "industrially produced"?
Anyway, if it's made by bacteria, that suggests that it's enantiopure, so there goes one of my hypotheses about the cause of the problem. The ones I'm left with are:
- it's something else entirely that's making me ill
- the naturally-occurring MSG is bound up with other substances in some way that makes it safe for me to consume
I guess there's nothing for it other than for me to pick a weekend when I'm not busy, swallow a teaspoon of the stuff, and see what happens.
Hard cheese is fine. If MSG is the culprit (and I still think it probably is), it's the industrially produced kind. I don't know why, but I can assure you I'm not making up those headaches.
My qualm with MSG doesn't involve its health effects, but the fact that MSG makes telling the difference between good food and crap far more difficult.
If you'd like to see a demonstration of what I mean, boil a pound of dried beans, and add some MSG. I find you'll eat the otherwise unflavored, bland beans with the same mechanical compulsion as a bag of potato chips. In that way MSG spoils the sport of preparing delicious food.
That should also raise the issue of portion control and satiety in your mind. If you're reading this, I assume you're more concerned with maintaining a steady weight than tricking your body into desiring greater quantities of food. MSG'll thwart you there, and unfortunately it's usually used on foods that are already pure starch and fat rather than nutritious fare.
My thoughts exactly. Additives like MSG are inevitably used to cover up bad food. I avoid MSG because I would rather know if what I'm served is bad after the first bite, than an hour later with indigestion.
I really do not like these articles that say "science says not to worry, you must be a very stupid and uneducated person to be worried about this." Any honest scientist will tell you that science does not know exactly how the human body processes food and there is no model which will exactly predict the effects of the human body ingesting a certain food.
Saying that the experimental results are mixed does not make me feel better. Experimenting with humans is very difficult, and certain types of experiments are downright impossible. Thus, effects of foods that do are not immediate and drastic are very hard to determine in human experiments.
Think about a food that we now know is very dangerous: trans fats. Humans had been eating trans fats for about 80 years when they were definitely found to cause heart attacks. Only then there was enough data to make a definite connection. And while there were some scientific articles that suggested a connection in the 60's someone could always say "there is no definite proof." Many people died of heart attacks before the statistics became such that a connection was obvious.
Then there is the tendency of people to wrongly assume that compounds that are kind of similar will have the identical effect on the body. Thus, for a long time carbohydrates were all bunched together because they were very similar molecules. People would often say that carbohydrates cannot be bad for you because humans have been eating rice and wheat for centuries without negative effects. But it turned out that fructose is a little different than other carbohydrates and it can be bad for you.
And then there is the fact that the same thing can be benign or very dangerous depending on what form it is in. Thus, fructose is absolutely benign when eaten as part of a fruit or vegetable, but quite harmful when eaten in a refined sugar or high fructose corn syrup form.
So I am very very suspicious of any food additives. The only rational decision for a human being is to eat the type of foods humans have eaten for tens of thousands of years before and for which our bodies have evolved. Maybe MSG is benign. Or maybe it is actually bad for you. I would prefer not to become one of those statistics that allows scientists to prove many years from now that MSG is indeed bad for you.
MSG is especially worrying because there are some studies that show negative effects of MSG and the fact that other studies show no effects does not quite negate these. Furthermore, I myself feel negative effects when eating certain foods that I suspect of containing MSG.
This is, I think, the same reason why we should be sceptical of genetically modified foods - not because the process is unnatural, or is inherently damaging - but for a more banal reason, because it is similar to eating foods with a lot of additives. In both cases you fundamentally lose control over the building blocks of your diet. If you can only choose between different highly processed foods, that means you need advanced domain knowledge to be able to make a reasonable judgment about the trans-fats, the MSG, or the highly processed sugar. But, at present, these additives are not mixed into the ingredients, you do at least have the option of opting out.
The only way your body would know or care if it was consuming a genetically modified food was if that modification produced something toxic (poisonous). Barring than that, to your body, it's all proteins, carbohydrates, fats, etc... If you are concerned about genetically modified foods, you should probably also be concerned with domesticated foods, since those have been selected by their farmers for many generations to produce specific things - bigger fruits, better tasting meats. We've been doing genetic modification since we started farming. It's only been the past generation or so that we started hacking the DNA directly.
> you should probably also be concerned with domesticated foods, since those have been selected by their farmers for many generations to produce specific things - bigger fruits, better tasting meats
This is sort of true, but also not at all. Natural selection deals with incremental changes over the course of decades, or generations. The likelihood that, for instance, Omega 3 production will spontaneously arise in a tomato, is so small as to be negligible. GM represents a step-change in capability, closer to the possibilities of the use of industrial food additives, than it is to traditional breeding. Except, as I say, the additives are now an integral part of the ingredients.
In a way it's glaringly true. Most Americans will die from eating too much domesticated meat which is known to cause heart disease. If you're already overweight or have high cholesterol/etc then any undetected possible effect from additives/GM is irrelevant.
Cubans consume a ton of MSG (sazón) and live notoriously long lives despite very poor living conditions.
Your last sentence is very troubling: You feel the negative effects when eating certain foods that you 'suspect' contain MSG. To me, that really sounds like you may psyche yourself out. ie. that you worry about MSG so much that it starts to cause you stress about it, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy/placebo effect/whatever. Anyway, I can't tell you with 100% certainty that MSG is healthy or not, but I can tell you that there are cultures that consume it in large quantities that seem largely unaffected.
The Goya brands definitely do as a flavor additive, but there are other brands of Sazon that don't include any glutamate. Then again, Goya has always been the cheap/crap brand of Spanish food.
Badia adds it as well. I'm not just referring to here in the US though. I have a copy of Nitza Villapol's La Cocina Criolla, and almost every recipe calls for MSG.
"MSG is especially worrying because there are some studies that show negative effects of MSG"
Have you read the actual studies? There are no "mixed" studies, they're all conclusive. One of the biggest studies done was a decade long and found absolutely nothing.
Did you read the article this discussion is attached to? It said in part:
"Initially, researchers had success proving both the short-term and long-term dangers of MSG: mice injected with the additive showed signs of brain lesions, and humans fed 3 grams of MSG per 200 ml of soup presented symptoms congruent with “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.” "
If you believe the original article is wrong, then you should perhaps make a comment in the main thread explaining why it is wrong instead of contradicting me. I merely assumed what the article said about the studies was more or less correct.
It's like your eyes refused to show your brain the words that you didn't want to read.
"Subsequent studies, however, provided mixed results: some confirmed findings of brain lesions in animals or symptoms in humans, but other studies were unable to replicate the results. Double-blind studies often showed little correlation between MSG and adverse symptoms. Parties on both sides of the debate slung accusations at the other, with the anti-MSG researchers claiming that studies were being funded by MSG producers, and pro-MSG researchers accusing the other side of fear-mongering.
From the FDA to the United Nations to various governments (Australia, Britain and Japan) the public bodies that have investigated MSG have deemed it a safe food additive. The FDA states on their website:
FDA considers the addition of MSG to foods to be “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS). Although many people identify themselves as sensitive to MSG, in studies with such individuals given MSG or a placebo, scientists have not been able to consistently trigger reactions.
Scientific interest in its deleterious effects seems to be waning: one of the last studies to gain public attention was published in 2011. The authors of that study claimed to have found a link between MSG and obesity, though those results have been questioned. While the general scientific consensus seems to be that only in large doses and on an empty stomach can MSG temporarily affect a small subset of the population, MSG’s reputation is still maligned in the public eye."
I very clearly mentioned in my original comment that there are other studies that show no effects. My point was and still is that if there are some studies that show negative effects and some studies that show no negative effects, the latter do not (for me at least) cancel out the former. It is entirely possible that there are negative effects that are not picked up by some studies. The fact that the FDA believes that MSG is "generally recognized as safe" does not guarantee it is safe. To use my previous example, the FDA also used to believe that trans fats were safe.
So all my comments have been logically consistent with each other and my actual honest opinion. Thus they are quite undeserving of your half thought out response.
So essentially there's no way for you to ever feel that MSG is safe because the normal outcome is "no negative effects" which, for you, will never counterbalance the few studies that have shown negative effects. I suppose someone would have to publish a study that shows positive effects for you to consider it?
If you think there is a logical flaw in my argument say what it is. If you do not feel like saying what it is, then do not post. You must be very proud of yourself for composing a sentence with several big words in it, but it means absolutely nothing.
The logical flaw is that you assume that all studies are worthy of consideration, and the hidden inference that equal weight should be given to a study regardless of its methodology or rigor.
Good information generally cancels out bad information. I have no particular opinion about the veracity of any MSG claim, but there have been so many bad dietary studies published. I would urge a skeptical default position on any result, and only moderate skepticism based on evidence of sample size, methodology and rigor.
> I really do not like these articles that say "science says not to worry, you must be a very stupid and uneducated person to be worried about this." Any honest scientist will tell you that science does not know exactly how the human body processes food and there is no model which will exactly predict the effects of the human body ingesting a certain food.
It's true that we have a very limited understanding of the human body.
But this is the whole point. Unless there's some science to back something (or you have some personal experiences) then it's irrational to change your behaviour. [Note that I'm certainly not discounting personal experience here. Because the body is complicated, I think that's worth more than science. But you've got to be careful about your biases.]
The example of trans fats is an interesting one. AFAIK, the science (early 90s?) predated anyone seriously changing behaviour or policy. Although people suggested a connection earlier, it would not have been reasonable to start altering the entire food industry around some unsubstantiated claims. There are random connections suggested all the time. Unfortunately, they are only insightful in retrospect and no one remembers the ones that didn't turn out to be true.
> So I am very very suspicious of any food additives. The only rational decision for a human being is to eat the type of foods humans have eaten for tens of thousands of years before and for which our bodies have evolved.
While it's sane to be suspicious of food additives, I don't think it's rational to go back ten of thousands of years. Modern humans live much longer and are healthier than humans ten thousand years ago. There are plenty of modern additives about which there is little to no debate:
* Iodine added to salt.
* Vitamins A and D added to milk in Northern countries (incl. USA and Canada).
* Fluoride added to tap water.
I'm sure there are many other additives that are generally accepted as good, but I'm not aware of. And aside from additives, I certainly wouldn't want my food to stop being pasteurized...
> MSG is especially worrying because there are some studies that show negative effects of MSG and the fact that other studies show no effects does not quite negate these.
IIRC, the studies that showed negative effects were done by injecting MSG directly into rats. I believe the consensus is that the ingestion of glutamate is much different than direct injection. You consume glutamate every day in your food (I'm sure there are plenty of things you eat which would do very bad things if injected directly into your blood). I don't think anyone has the view that studies are negated because they are contradicted by others, but they are frequently negated due to poor protocols or new information.
I actually don't find MSG very worrying because it seems to be a cultural phenomenon, more than a scientific one. (There are many: third-hand smoking, resveratrol, anti-oxidants, etc. Not to say there's no science there, just that the cultural view is only tangentially related to the science. It's like our fan death.)
I went through my own little discovery: A few years ago, I was shocked to discover that a girl I was dating frequently cooked with an MSG sauce (she was from Mexico). Stunned, I researched the whole MSG thing. Turns out it's quite popular all over the world, except in english-speaking countries. The popular demonization stemmed from a few poorly-done studies that very quickly become part of the zeitgeist (it's suggested that this was partly due to racism/xenophobia since it was seen as an asian thing). And despite its widespread use for decades, there's no real evidence that suggests what people fear about it. And because of the fear, it's actually one of the most-tested of all food ingredients and yet it remains legal to sell and use as an additive everywhere.
> Furthermore, I myself feel negative effects whe...
> I'm certainly not discounting personal experience here. Because the body is complicated, I think that's worth more than science. But you've got to be careful about your biases.
An interesting personal anecdote about this: I used to eat that instant Ramen stuff all the time when I was in my 20s. At some point I started getting migraines and I was able to correlate the triggering of them with eating the Ramen (lots of other things triggered them, too). That led me to investigate MSG and become a little paranoid about eating things with it—I figured I might actually have some sensitivity to it.
Later I got diagnosed with hypertension and started taking pills to control that. And once I was on the medication I noticed that I wasn't getting migraines any more. At this point I'm reasonably sure that all my migraines were caused by high blood pressure. In fact, the one or two times I've gotten migraine-ish headaches (nothing ever as bad as I used to get) I've taken my blood pressure and it was high.
So now I'm thinking that the MSG wasn't causing the headaches directly, but it was raising my blood pressure. Or maybe it wasn't actually the MSG doing that, since that Ramen stuff also has a ton of salt in it.
Anyway, our bodies are complicated machines and they're all tuned a little different.
Different rates of uptake. That's the difference. That's why eating a box of cherry tomatoes and a bowl of ramen have drastically different effects on your sense of well-being.
At the very least, people should be made aware whether it's in certain foods. Then they can choose what's best for them.
Personally, MSG bedrocks me. I have to take a sick day off work in some cases after eating an MSG-laden meal. I've developed the skill to taste it now, after a brief tour through Asia. So I guess I can manage.
The surest bet is just to eat natural. What have humans been eating for the past 2,3, 10 million years? Please, give me a plentiful variation of all that.
But this practice of deeming artificial foods "safe" for consumption after a few year's testing reeks of greedy arrogance.
That notion has been studied and refuted. Give a mouse, or a person, a high oral dose of MSG, and their plasma levels of glutamate are not significantly changed.
I use MSG in cooking and it's a great way to lower salt while dramatically increasing flavor. It doesn't make bad food magically good, but it makes good food great. Especially good in soups and stews. I bought a bulk container in the ethnic food aisle of a grocery and it has lasted a couple of years and is now just about gone. It's amazing how much a little pinch goes.
> I use MSG in cooking and it's a great way to lower salt
It might lower salt a bit, but it's hardly a great way, the S stands for sodium, which is exactly what you want to avoid. Perhaps the trade off is worth it if you can use less, but you need to calculate it carefully.
This reminds me about people who are fanatical about avoiding nitrates in Bacon, not realizing that the "natural" celery salt added to Bacon means that actually the expensive bacon sold in Whole Foods actually has more nitrates than conventional bacon. It's just "natural" nitrate, so it must be ok.....
I still think "umami" looks out of place next to the other basic taste words. All the others come in adjective/noun pairs: sweet/sweetness, salty/saltiness, etc. Where's the adjective for "umami"? "Umami" again? "Umami-tasting"? It doesn't work well (and importing the Japanese adjective "umai" would make things worse, not better).
Instead, I highly prefer the adjective sapid with its corresponding noun sapidity. Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, sapid. Sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, sapidity. Much better.
It seems strange that there wouldn't be an English word to describe what MSG tastes like.
In general, I think MSG simply tastes salty, even though I understand and agree that it doesn't precisely taste like a salt.
MSG doesn't have a flavor unfamiliar to western cuisine. Chicken soup has flavors that fall within the realm of MSG (even without the MSG found in canned soups). Gravies too.
It isn't the MSG that will kill you. MSG, sugar and salt are all naturally occurring in health food and the key is moderation and balance.
The problem is we have turned something which is harmless in moderation into a massive food business build on a model of addiction.
The thing that will make you unhealthy is highly processed food devoid of nutrition that is made entirely of starch, vegetable oil, sugar, salt and MSG that has replaced a healthy diet.
If you eat fresh fruit, vegetables and a moderate amount of meat, cooked healthfully and sprinkle a bit of seasoning on it for flavour you will likely be no worse off than consuming the healthy stuff without seasoning. Though if you use good ingredients you probably don't need the extra refined product. There are plenty of natural ingredients rich in glutamate.
You know what? This generalization of what is good and bad for you - is just a generalization to find a common food product which is easily mass producible and consumable by the entire planetary populace. However, just as shirts are tailored, I believe we may be entering an age of tailored foods for 7 billion + individuals. MSG can depend on who you are, how old, what else do you eat, are you on a plane. We will get there. Quick! Somebody make an app and Hadoop it.
If you think MSG is fine, try eating a tablespoon of it with nothing else.
Then another time try eating a bunch of mushrooms or similar by themselves with a similar quantity.
Likely not the same feeling. Digestion and absorption of food changes with how you consume it. Eating a sweet potato or a bunch of sugar doesn't hit the bloodstream the same way.
In my teens and twenties I found I got migraine headaches after eating certain foods; with a little experimentation I found foods (all kinds, not just Chinese) containing added MSG gave me a headache within 2-4 hours. Eliminating those foods eliminated the headaches. Later in life I found I was less effected though with sufficient quantities I could still get one. It was pretty clear the only food that affected me this way had MSG in it. Most people seem not to be affected.
Personally I don't mind if people add it to foods as long as it's labeled honestly so I can choose to avoid it. No different than with peanut allergies or sodium content or trans-fats. Adding yeast extract or hydrolyzed vegetable protein (proteins broken down into amino salts including the glutamate) to foods to avoid mentioning you did it for the MSG is the only thing that bugs me. It's like saying a food is low-salt because you added Natural Ocean Water instead of salt.
Adequately controlling for experimental bias includes a double-blind placebo-controlled experimental design (DBPC) and the application in capsules because of the strong and unique after-taste of glutamates.[21] In a study performed by Tarasoff and Kelly (1993) 71 fasting participants were given 5 g of MSG and then administered a standard breakfast. There was only one reaction, and it was to the placebo in a self-identified MSG-sensitive individual.[18] In a different study done by Geha et al. (2000), they tested the reaction of 130 subjects who reported sensitivity to MSG. Multiple DBPC trials were performed and only subjects with at least two symptoms proceeded. Only two people out of the whole study responded in all four challenges. Because of this low prevalence, the researchers concluded that the response to MSG was not reproducible.
Where are you eating that they put a tablespoon of MSG in something? Even Chinese restaurants I'm familiar with that use MSG only use (and only need) a very small amount.
I'm not familiar with chemistry but I am pretty sure that MSG (glutamic acid bonded with sodium) can have different properties (or be handled differently by the body) than glutamate...the amino acid.
In New Zealand we were always taught that MSG was bad, until they did an actual study on it and decided that 0.01% of the population has an allergic reaction to MSG that causes Migraines, Vomiting, etc.
Ever since, no one in NZ gives a shit about MSG now. Seems Australia is still really anal about it.
"Australia and New Zealand[edit]
Food Standards Australia New Zealand[29] (FSANZ) cites "overwhelming evidence from a large number of scientific studies" to explicitly deny any link between MSG and "serious adverse reactions" or "long-lasting effects", declaring MSG "safe for the general population". It does, however, describe that in less than 1% of the population, sensitive individuals may experience "transient" side effects such as "headache, numbness/tingling, flushing, muscle tightness, and generalised weakness" to a large amount of MSG taken in a single meal. People who consider themselves sensitive to MSG are encouraged to confirm this through an appropriate clinical assessment.
Standard 1.2.4 of the Australia and New Zealand Food Standards Code requires the presence of MSG as a food additive to be labeled in packaged foods. The label must bear the food additive class name (e.g., flavour enhancer), followed by either the name of the food additive, MSG or its International Numbering System (INS) number, 621.[30]"
In NZ - no one cares
In Aus - everyones like "ZOMG MSG, BAD FOR YOU" and try to avoid it.
Food in NZ is way better than Australia. (Australians don't know how to cook steak)
Be careful about making your generalisations too broad. I live in New Zealand, and would have said that everyone in New Zealand thinks that MSG is ZOMG BAD FOR YOU. I suspect that each of us can only speak for our own social group.
That said, that you for your information about MSG. I wasn't aware that FSANZ had declared it to be effectively harmless.
I'm only basing it on experience, in my late teens no one seemed to care for MSG anymore, I remember people joking about it saying stuff like "who cares if it does turn out to be bad, it makes food taste SOOO much better"
I moved to Australia to live for 5 years and I remember being at work in Sydney and people saying "Oh I'm not eating that, its probably full of MSG" and I would say its not bad for you and they are like "well every study disagrees with you..." and if you mention FSANZ declaring it harmless they are like "oh whats that?".
I live in Singapore now, no doubt everything has MSG, but ZOMG I LOVE FOOD HERE! :D
I concur. I went to both countries, and I'm a damn foodie. I remember my cousin coming back from NZ 10 years ago saying it was awesome but the food sucked. I went there, and I was like, WHAT THE HELL WAS HE EVEN TALKING ABOUT?!?!
New Zealand has some of the BEST food I've ever had. It was way better than Australia. And, yeah, this is anecdotal and definitely subjective, but once you've tried something like Ferg Burger in Queenstown, you may have to rethink NZ on the culinary map.
> Would you use these crystals in your kitchen if they were called “super delicious umami crystals?”
I use those crystals in my kitchen and they are labelled "monosodium glutamate" (Ajinomoto). A pound of that easily lasts me 2 years. You only need a dash here and there (and only if it isn't umami on its own).
I also eat/use Parmesan, Dashi, tomatoes, and so forth.
163 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 82.7 ms ] threadA citation or source would be much appreciated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Safety
The oral lethal dose to 50% of subjects (LD50) is between 15 to 18 g/kg body weight in rats and mice respectively, five times greater than the LD50 of salt (3 g/kg in rats).
Which references:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10736380
>> Therefore, the intake of MSG as a food additive and the natural level of glutamic acid in foods do not represent a toxicological concern in humans.
This is the same story with aspartame vs sugar. Aspartame has an LD50 of around 5 g/kg, sugar 29.7 g/kg. You can say "wow, aspartame is 6 times as toxic as sugar!", but you have to take into account that it is 200 times sweeter than sugar.
Of course in reality you can't really compare salt with glutamate since they stimulate different receptors. In the end we can probably conclude that neither salt not glutamate pose any real danger to a healthy person in doses that are not completely ridiculous, so add both to your food!
So if I ate 2.6 kg of sugar in one sitting, I have a 50 percent chance of dying as a result? Mmmm, could be worth it.
1. Only small percentage of people was afflicted with physical symptoms.
2. These symptoms were vague and so variable that they had to refer to as "syndrome", rather than "symptom".
3. Ultimately, MSG allergy proved to be largely false.
4. MSG is found everywhere.
"Jewish Deli Syndrome" could be considered racist depending on the surrounding circumstance.
However, if there is set of ingredients that are unique to Jewish deli meat scientifically proven to cause problems for non-trivial percentage of population, then I would agree with you that it wouldn't (and shouldn't) be racist to call "Jewsih Deli Syndrome".
Evil bankers exist of lots of ethnicities and faiths but lots of people do (often but not always subconsciously) link greedy bankers and jewish people.
Just like using unhealthy or even dangerous additives is often linked to Chinese cuisine even though they're used just as much in tons of other cuisines as well.
Equating an existent stereotype with one which doesn't actually exist and saying "it's not that bad, I wouldn't be offended by that" is the false analogy. Because then it doesn't have the personal impact a prejudice or misconception you've actually been exposed to has.
A white person might say that if someone joked "all white people are lazy", they wouldn't be offended so a black or latino person shouldn't either. A black person is much more likely to be offended by "all black people are lazy" because that's something that's actually rooted in societal prejudices. Change it to "all white people are racist" and suddenly by their defensive tone, you'll note that you've hit a nerve and they're actually uncomfortable and/or offended.
"Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" has nothing to do with Chinese food being bad or unhealthy or dangerous. It's just that is is (was?) fairly common for there to be more MSG in Chinese Food. So it was a natural shorthand. It hadn't even occurred to me that someone would think it was racist before today.
I'm torn between finding this funny and finding this irritating. There's enough genuine problems that people face based on race, nationality, gender or sexual orientation that debates like this just make it harder to get people to take us seriously on things that matter.
It's pointless to try to tell people what is and isn't offensive. Normally, I err on the side of thinking that if somebody is offended, they must have reason to be and I should be sensitive to that, but in this case I had no idea what racism the author was referring to.
Not saying it's high on the prioritised list of racist tropes we need to be fighting, but yeah, it's there.
Maybe a better comparison would be "Jewish Bank Syndrome", which to me sounds a lot less harsh than "Jewish Banker Syndrome".
If you want to get glutamates in your food, when cooking with meat proteins, add mushrooms, seaweed, or even a single prawn or anchovy.
Yes, I remember there being a British, I think, study in 2011 or 2012 that bought samples of cooked rice from various oriental food sellers and found that some were contaminated (moist warm food left out for hours); the reasoning is that when people report sickness or allergy to the MSG that oriental food in the West is notoriously prepared with, they're actually having issues with the rice.
You might also consider the ambient temp of your kitchen. Pro kitchens run several hours a day, staying fairly warm the whole time (might have several ovens, tens of burners, and other hot equipment running throughout the day). Your kitchen, even with the rice cooker going, might stay fairly cool, and so bad bacteria has less time to grow.
Food safety is also talked about in terms of risk to different groups. Young children, pregnant mothers, and old adults are at higher risk than younger adults.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_zone_(food_safety)
http://www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/Can-reheating-rice-cause-food-po...
> You can get food poisoning from eating reheated rice. However, it's not the reheating that causes the problem but the way the rice has been stored before it was reheated.
> Uncooked rice can contain spores of Bacillus cereus, a bacterium that can cause food poisoning. When the rice is cooked, the spores can survive.
> If the rice is left standing at room temperature, the spores can grow into bacteria. These bacteria will multiply and may produce toxins (poisons) that cause vomiting or diarrhoea.
> The longer cooked rice is left at room temperature, the more likely it is that the bacteria or toxins could make the rice unsafe to eat.
Reheating the rice does kill the bacteria, but does nothing to the toxins.
In Japan it is common to refer to Thai, Vietnamese etc. as "Asian".
Anyone else in the UK agree or disagree?
http://www.metafilter.com/131105/Dorito-Powder#5147903
However, MSG is not just a source for glutamate like seaweed and tomatoes are. MSG is the sodium salt of glutamic acid and contains not just glutamate but also sodium ions. Having 2000mg of natural glutamate should be harmless. Having enough MSG to give you 2000mg of glutamate means you're getting a shit ton of sodium. That's not good for you, especially if you're one of the many people for whom excess sodium intake adversely affects your blood pressure. So while MSG is presumably no worse than NaCl (and is perhaps better in that the umami flavor means you don't have to use as much sodium to get an equally rich taste), to say that MSG is totally harmless without even mentioning sodium and hypertension is ridiculous. Even in terms of short term effects, I've had plenty of MSG-free hot and sour soups that made my head itch. Not from MSG but from thousands of mg of sodium found in their gratuitously added soy sauce and table salt.
Blog posts are not a substitute for an education in biology, medicine, and science.
If anyone is going to nitpick about things in this post, please understand that I am striving to be understood. While I could put an asterisk after every sentence ("*except for...,") it would not be productive to do so. If anyone wishes for clarification, I would be glad to provide.
If this sounds unlikely, understand that the kidney is the direct or indirect target of many medications for blood pressure. Diuretics such as hydrochlorothiazide and loop diuretics such as furosemide act very directly on the kidney. Drugs such as ACE inhibitors (e.g. lisinopril), ARBs (e.g. losaratan), and renin inhibitors (aliskiren) act on the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, which directly involves the kidneys in a different manner. (I am a pharmacist).
Instead, current research indicates that high blood pressure after excess sodium intake may be caused by activation of the sympathetic nervous system, secondary to increased sodium loading on ion channels.
I remember it was in a relatively recent paper. This mechanism might help explain why sodium hasn't consistently been shown to have an adverse effect in humans while at the same time still being strongly associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Come to think of it, it's also a good explanation for why cultures in temperate climates tend to start their day with a hearty (salty) meal ;)
I would also like to point out, since above a comment was made about glutamate containing "a shitload" of sodium, that the actual sodium content of MSG is only around 13% by weight, compared to table salt where it's nearly 40%.
Turns out that an education in biology, medicine and science in no substitute for actually doing research. Your explanation for why salt raises blood pressure and increases mortality was considered so obvious that it wasn't worth studying. When it was studied, it turned out not to be in any way true. (see: reality).
In other words, the sodium intake from eating MSG is about 1/3 that of table salt on a per weight basis.
http://www.chow.com/food-news/69604/you-re-not-allergic-to-m...
Glutamate is an excitotoxin, and it's an additive in almost all processed foods, in various forms with many different names (http://www.truthinlabeling.org/hiddensources.html).
Excitotoxicity is the "pathological process by which nerve cells are damaged and killed by excessive stimulation by neurotransmitters such as glutamate and similar substances" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excitotoxicity).
As the article says, when glutamate is consumed naturally, it is intertwined with fiber and other chemicals that regulate its uptake; however, glutamate additives are not and thus flood your body with glutamate, which can overload your blood-brain barrier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood%E2%80%93brain_barrier) and disrupt the delicate balance.
This is akin to Dr. Lustig's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lustig) findings on sugar (fructose): Eating whole fruits is fine because you're consuming fiber with the fructose (nature provides the antidote), but fruit juice is all fructose and no fiber so your body is flooded with fructose, which is toxic (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.htm...).
When making a risotto I might use 100g of parmesan cheese, which can amount to ~8g of MSG according to the internets, plus eat tomatoes on the side. That's the equivalent of 12g of Ajinomoto, I can't imagine adding that much to any dish.
In research, the rats used as controls were fed nutritious food. Given a choice of water and alcohol to drink, these rats chose water. Rats fed [msg laced] junk food chose alcohol to drink over water.
Unrelated, but interesting.
Beer goes great with salty food. We know this already, but why?
I'd also encourage anyone reading the above links to take a peek at this: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Excitotoxicity
There are some notable discrepancies with the article and it seems clear that this is not a black and white issue, but rather complicated.
If we had learned about table salt in the 1910s and knew it primarily by its formula name NaCl, people would believe all manner of weird things about salt, too. In fact, people do believe weird things about salt; there is a widespread and unsupported belief that moderation of sodium intake is a key public health concern, which it is not.
It's the same with MSG. Dissolve MSG and you get sodium and an amino acid that is so important to our bodies that we produce it ourselves, without sourcing it from our food or the environment; an amino acid that is thus, unsurprisingly, hugely prevalent in foods we "naturally" eat.
It's not an unsupported belief. Studies have shown that high sodium intake is a significant contributor to hypertension. Here is one such study: http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/3/235. There is debate about whether consuming several thousand milligrams of sodium a day adversely affects blood pressure in everyone or only in some people, but that it's a major contributor to hypertension (9-17% of cases) is supported.
If you have specific criticisms of the methodology of those kinds of studies or if you have links to sources that dispute the above, I'd be interesting in reading them.
Or are you saying that what's unsupported is the notion that the above makes sodium intake a key public health concern?
It sounds like the article concludes, contrary to your memory, that as a result of non-objective scientific practices, the public incorrectly believes that high sodium intake is definitely a huge problem for all, when in reality, it's either a huge problem for all, or it's a huge problem for some, or it's a huge problem for some and a small problem for others, or it's a small problem for some.
I have seen no proof that glutamate, when ingested orally, has any excitotoxicity activity.
Glutamate is very common in "natural" foodstuffs and plays key roles in our bodies. The notion that small quantities of glutamate (such as would be used to season food) render it toxic is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary evidence.
Some of the first evidence that glutamate additives were dangerous was provided by Dr. John W. Olney in 1969:
"Brain Lesions, Obesity, and Other Disturbances in Mice Treated with Monosodium Glutamate" (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/164/3880/719).
Dr. Olney and Harvard scientist Dr. Jean Mayer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mayer) independently came to the same conclusion and led to the food industry removing MSG from baby food (and later all the MSG variants) because a baby's blood-brain barrier isn't fully developed so it can't protect against increased glutamate consumption:
The Harvard Crimson: Baby Food Manufacturers Will Suspend Use of MSG (http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1969/10/27/baby-food-manuf...)
There is plenty of recent research that shows glutamate's effects on the brain...
* Serum proteins bypass the blood-brain fluid barriers for extracellular entry to the central nervous system (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8491281)
* Excitatory Amino Acids in Neurologic Disorders (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199407283310414)
* Dana Foundation: Protecting the Brain from a Glutamate Storm (http://www.dana.org/news/cerebrum/detail.aspx?id=7376)
However, one of the most interesting reports is the government's 1995 Life Sciences Research Office (LSRO) of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) report: "Analysis of Adverse Reactions to Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)".
The full FASEB 293 page report is not available online in digital form (http://books.google.com/books/about/Analysis_of_adverse_reac...). You can order a copy from the LSRO FASEB (http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/granule/FR-1995-10-03/95-24594/cont...), and there are a few used copies on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Analysis-Adverse-Reactions-Monosodium-...).
Here are a few statements from the report (I'll write up a more detailed blog post of my notes on this later):
* Page 29: "The net result is that certain areas of the brain may be vulnerable to acute, large, magnitude fluctuations in plasma glutamate concentrations because flooding from adjacent circumentrical organs."
* Page 42: "Levels of ingested MSG might be sufficient to raise the concentration of blood glutumate and related compounds enough to change the levels of these amino acids in the brain, particularly in the circumvention areas not protected by the blood-brain barrier."
* Page 42-43 (regarding the Pineal gland): "...
I can eat carbs if I stay away from glutamate/sodium, so my first guess that it was the white rice, pizza crust and spaghetti noodles was incorrect. But the MSG is always correlated with the symptoms. Is it the MSG or is it that the MSG comes with the salt? I dunno. I'm not really certain that it matters either.
(I've also had my BP taken by a cardiologist the day after eating Chinese food and it spiked enough to cross the line between normal and high blood pressure the next morning after the meal...)
Wikipedia confirms this
The referenced papers on the process (from 1957!) indicates that they were reporting L-glutamate producing bacteria specifically: Here is an overall history of MSG production, including chemical synthesis (now obsolete). Even when they were doing this, they screened out the D-glutamate and re-synthesized it to maximize L-glutamate production (might not have been 100% effective, as apparently it involved doing optical screening of the crystals) Disclaimer - I am Japanese American, so grew up with Ajinomoto MSG, dashi, tomato sauce, parmesan, Doritos, etc. as part of my diet, so am biased toward skepticism on this topic.The abstract claims foods to which MSG is added directly contained lower amounts of D-glutamate than foods where the MSG comes from fermented foods. I wonder why? Maybe due to better optimization / control for L-glutamate production in the bacteria?
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/chir.530060410/ab...
What most people don't know, is that MSG occurs naturally in many foods. Beef, Chicken, Spinach, Tomatoes, etc... If you don't get an MSG allergy when you eat those foods, you don't have an MSG allergy. Source: http://zidbits.com/2010/12/is-the-msg-allergy-a-myth/
My gut feeling is that we're going to be in a similar place in 10-20 years with HFCS. The body of research there is still relatively young, however.
I can reproduce it pretty easily by simply putting nothing but MSG on my tongue. It takes a good bit to do it however and seems to cause me no other problems so I tend not to worry about it, but it is clearly some kind of sensitivity or allergy which is easily reproducible and not the slightest bit vague (lips going numb is a pretty easily identifiable sensation). Claiming it is all completely made up seems a bit premature.
But not as free glutamic acid, and that makes a HUGE difference.
In the body the glutamate (acid or not) is bound up with other things, i.e. not free.
I said acid because my understanding was the MSG disassociates from the sodium once ingested.
In reality, glutamic acid isn't simply an amino acid that happens to be present in the human body. It is fundamental to the way our bodies work; it's required for nitrogen metabolism! Glutamate toxicity seems very unlikely.
I believe no such thing.
I don't know what you read, but in the body glutamic acid doesn't just float around randomly, it's carefully stored near the nerves that need it. Excess glutamic acid where it doesn't belong causes nerve problems.
It's like the difference between sucrose and starch. Chemically they are the same, but the effects are very different because one needs more digestion than the other.
It gets worse for your argument. Here's a paper that demonstrates that very large oral doses of MSG in both mice and humans don't even significantly raise the plasma concentration of glutamates.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136011/
This should probably be unsurprising. Your body is designed to deal with consumption of glutamates; in fact, even though it's so vital to your system that you produce it yourself, humans get most of their glutamic acid from dietary sources. Hypersensitivity to dietary glutamate would be maladaptive.
The idea that your body has carefully delineated locations where it's safe to have glutamic acid (probably not coincidentally in the nervous system, the most complex part of the body), and that ingesting "artificial" sources of glutamic acid throws that out of whack, is again I think a manifestation of the naturalistic fallacy.
Even the present article, despite being very much pro-MSG, allows that some people may be sensitive to it.
1. I occasionally get symptoms often associated with MSG. Terrible headache, confusion, nasal drip, nausea, and so on. It can put me out of action for about 12 hours.
2. I invariably get these symptoms about 24 hours after I've eaten processed foods with an unusually rich flavour and which have, somewhere in their ingredients, either MSG or something that might conceal MSG (e.g. "flavourings").
I can't guarantee that it's MSG, because I'm too chicken to test it directly (that headache really sucks), but it certainly fits the profile.
Now some people point out, "It occurs naturally in all kinds of foods. The original MSG was derived from miso soup, which you eat every day."
And my answer is, "I don't know. Maybe it's a subtle variant of MSG that only occurs in the synthetic variety? Maybe the naturally occurring MSG is bound up with other things that render it safe for me to eat? But something's making me ill, and it's only in synthetic ingredients."
Anyway, if it's made by bacteria, that suggests that it's enantiopure, so there goes one of my hypotheses about the cause of the problem. The ones I'm left with are:
- it's something else entirely that's making me ill
- the naturally-occurring MSG is bound up with other substances in some way that makes it safe for me to consume
I guess there's nothing for it other than for me to pick a weekend when I'm not busy, swallow a teaspoon of the stuff, and see what happens.
If you'd like to see a demonstration of what I mean, boil a pound of dried beans, and add some MSG. I find you'll eat the otherwise unflavored, bland beans with the same mechanical compulsion as a bag of potato chips. In that way MSG spoils the sport of preparing delicious food.
That should also raise the issue of portion control and satiety in your mind. If you're reading this, I assume you're more concerned with maintaining a steady weight than tricking your body into desiring greater quantities of food. MSG'll thwart you there, and unfortunately it's usually used on foods that are already pure starch and fat rather than nutritious fare.
Saying that the experimental results are mixed does not make me feel better. Experimenting with humans is very difficult, and certain types of experiments are downright impossible. Thus, effects of foods that do are not immediate and drastic are very hard to determine in human experiments.
Think about a food that we now know is very dangerous: trans fats. Humans had been eating trans fats for about 80 years when they were definitely found to cause heart attacks. Only then there was enough data to make a definite connection. And while there were some scientific articles that suggested a connection in the 60's someone could always say "there is no definite proof." Many people died of heart attacks before the statistics became such that a connection was obvious.
Then there is the tendency of people to wrongly assume that compounds that are kind of similar will have the identical effect on the body. Thus, for a long time carbohydrates were all bunched together because they were very similar molecules. People would often say that carbohydrates cannot be bad for you because humans have been eating rice and wheat for centuries without negative effects. But it turned out that fructose is a little different than other carbohydrates and it can be bad for you.
And then there is the fact that the same thing can be benign or very dangerous depending on what form it is in. Thus, fructose is absolutely benign when eaten as part of a fruit or vegetable, but quite harmful when eaten in a refined sugar or high fructose corn syrup form.
So I am very very suspicious of any food additives. The only rational decision for a human being is to eat the type of foods humans have eaten for tens of thousands of years before and for which our bodies have evolved. Maybe MSG is benign. Or maybe it is actually bad for you. I would prefer not to become one of those statistics that allows scientists to prove many years from now that MSG is indeed bad for you.
MSG is especially worrying because there are some studies that show negative effects of MSG and the fact that other studies show no effects does not quite negate these. Furthermore, I myself feel negative effects when eating certain foods that I suspect of containing MSG.
This is sort of true, but also not at all. Natural selection deals with incremental changes over the course of decades, or generations. The likelihood that, for instance, Omega 3 production will spontaneously arise in a tomato, is so small as to be negligible. GM represents a step-change in capability, closer to the possibilities of the use of industrial food additives, than it is to traditional breeding. Except, as I say, the additives are now an integral part of the ingredients.
Your last sentence is very troubling: You feel the negative effects when eating certain foods that you 'suspect' contain MSG. To me, that really sounds like you may psyche yourself out. ie. that you worry about MSG so much that it starts to cause you stress about it, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy/placebo effect/whatever. Anyway, I can't tell you with 100% certainty that MSG is healthy or not, but I can tell you that there are cultures that consume it in large quantities that seem largely unaffected.
Have you read the actual studies? There are no "mixed" studies, they're all conclusive. One of the biggest studies done was a decade long and found absolutely nothing.
Sources:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2222.2009....
http://www.livestrong.com/article/408512-neurological-effect...
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-52156839.html
"Initially, researchers had success proving both the short-term and long-term dangers of MSG: mice injected with the additive showed signs of brain lesions, and humans fed 3 grams of MSG per 200 ml of soup presented symptoms congruent with “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.” "
If you believe the original article is wrong, then you should perhaps make a comment in the main thread explaining why it is wrong instead of contradicting me. I merely assumed what the article said about the studies was more or less correct.
"Subsequent studies, however, provided mixed results: some confirmed findings of brain lesions in animals or symptoms in humans, but other studies were unable to replicate the results. Double-blind studies often showed little correlation between MSG and adverse symptoms. Parties on both sides of the debate slung accusations at the other, with the anti-MSG researchers claiming that studies were being funded by MSG producers, and pro-MSG researchers accusing the other side of fear-mongering.
From the FDA to the United Nations to various governments (Australia, Britain and Japan) the public bodies that have investigated MSG have deemed it a safe food additive. The FDA states on their website:
FDA considers the addition of MSG to foods to be “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS). Although many people identify themselves as sensitive to MSG, in studies with such individuals given MSG or a placebo, scientists have not been able to consistently trigger reactions.
Scientific interest in its deleterious effects seems to be waning: one of the last studies to gain public attention was published in 2011. The authors of that study claimed to have found a link between MSG and obesity, though those results have been questioned. While the general scientific consensus seems to be that only in large doses and on an empty stomach can MSG temporarily affect a small subset of the population, MSG’s reputation is still maligned in the public eye."
That last sentence is important.
So all my comments have been logically consistent with each other and my actual honest opinion. Thus they are quite undeserving of your half thought out response.
Good information generally cancels out bad information. I have no particular opinion about the veracity of any MSG claim, but there have been so many bad dietary studies published. I would urge a skeptical default position on any result, and only moderate skepticism based on evidence of sample size, methodology and rigor.
It's true that we have a very limited understanding of the human body.
But this is the whole point. Unless there's some science to back something (or you have some personal experiences) then it's irrational to change your behaviour. [Note that I'm certainly not discounting personal experience here. Because the body is complicated, I think that's worth more than science. But you've got to be careful about your biases.]
The example of trans fats is an interesting one. AFAIK, the science (early 90s?) predated anyone seriously changing behaviour or policy. Although people suggested a connection earlier, it would not have been reasonable to start altering the entire food industry around some unsubstantiated claims. There are random connections suggested all the time. Unfortunately, they are only insightful in retrospect and no one remembers the ones that didn't turn out to be true.
> So I am very very suspicious of any food additives. The only rational decision for a human being is to eat the type of foods humans have eaten for tens of thousands of years before and for which our bodies have evolved.
While it's sane to be suspicious of food additives, I don't think it's rational to go back ten of thousands of years. Modern humans live much longer and are healthier than humans ten thousand years ago. There are plenty of modern additives about which there is little to no debate: * Iodine added to salt. * Vitamins A and D added to milk in Northern countries (incl. USA and Canada). * Fluoride added to tap water. I'm sure there are many other additives that are generally accepted as good, but I'm not aware of. And aside from additives, I certainly wouldn't want my food to stop being pasteurized...
> MSG is especially worrying because there are some studies that show negative effects of MSG and the fact that other studies show no effects does not quite negate these.
IIRC, the studies that showed negative effects were done by injecting MSG directly into rats. I believe the consensus is that the ingestion of glutamate is much different than direct injection. You consume glutamate every day in your food (I'm sure there are plenty of things you eat which would do very bad things if injected directly into your blood). I don't think anyone has the view that studies are negated because they are contradicted by others, but they are frequently negated due to poor protocols or new information.
I actually don't find MSG very worrying because it seems to be a cultural phenomenon, more than a scientific one. (There are many: third-hand smoking, resveratrol, anti-oxidants, etc. Not to say there's no science there, just that the cultural view is only tangentially related to the science. It's like our fan death.)
I went through my own little discovery: A few years ago, I was shocked to discover that a girl I was dating frequently cooked with an MSG sauce (she was from Mexico). Stunned, I researched the whole MSG thing. Turns out it's quite popular all over the world, except in english-speaking countries. The popular demonization stemmed from a few poorly-done studies that very quickly become part of the zeitgeist (it's suggested that this was partly due to racism/xenophobia since it was seen as an asian thing). And despite its widespread use for decades, there's no real evidence that suggests what people fear about it. And because of the fear, it's actually one of the most-tested of all food ingredients and yet it remains legal to sell and use as an additive everywhere.
> Furthermore, I myself feel negative effects whe...
An interesting personal anecdote about this: I used to eat that instant Ramen stuff all the time when I was in my 20s. At some point I started getting migraines and I was able to correlate the triggering of them with eating the Ramen (lots of other things triggered them, too). That led me to investigate MSG and become a little paranoid about eating things with it—I figured I might actually have some sensitivity to it.
Later I got diagnosed with hypertension and started taking pills to control that. And once I was on the medication I noticed that I wasn't getting migraines any more. At this point I'm reasonably sure that all my migraines were caused by high blood pressure. In fact, the one or two times I've gotten migraine-ish headaches (nothing ever as bad as I used to get) I've taken my blood pressure and it was high.
So now I'm thinking that the MSG wasn't causing the headaches directly, but it was raising my blood pressure. Or maybe it wasn't actually the MSG doing that, since that Ramen stuff also has a ton of salt in it.
Anyway, our bodies are complicated machines and they're all tuned a little different.
Yeast extract contains MSG, but it also leaves an unpleasant aftertaste in the mouth for hours.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t73urU2Degw
MSG'd!!! Ow, my stomach lining!!
At the very least, people should be made aware whether it's in certain foods. Then they can choose what's best for them.
Personally, MSG bedrocks me. I have to take a sick day off work in some cases after eating an MSG-laden meal. I've developed the skill to taste it now, after a brief tour through Asia. So I guess I can manage.
The surest bet is just to eat natural. What have humans been eating for the past 2,3, 10 million years? Please, give me a plentiful variation of all that.
But this practice of deeming artificial foods "safe" for consumption after a few year's testing reeks of greedy arrogance.
Amazon has a 1LB bag available for $6.50 and is Prime eligible: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001OCP02Q/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
It might lower salt a bit, but it's hardly a great way, the S stands for sodium, which is exactly what you want to avoid. Perhaps the trade off is worth it if you can use less, but you need to calculate it carefully.
hmm.
Instead, I highly prefer the adjective sapid with its corresponding noun sapidity. Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, sapid. Sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, sapidity. Much better.
In general, I think MSG simply tastes salty, even though I understand and agree that it doesn't precisely taste like a salt.
MSG doesn't have a flavor unfamiliar to western cuisine. Chicken soup has flavors that fall within the realm of MSG (even without the MSG found in canned soups). Gravies too.
The problem is we have turned something which is harmless in moderation into a massive food business build on a model of addiction.
The thing that will make you unhealthy is highly processed food devoid of nutrition that is made entirely of starch, vegetable oil, sugar, salt and MSG that has replaced a healthy diet.
If you eat fresh fruit, vegetables and a moderate amount of meat, cooked healthfully and sprinkle a bit of seasoning on it for flavour you will likely be no worse off than consuming the healthy stuff without seasoning. Though if you use good ingredients you probably don't need the extra refined product. There are plenty of natural ingredients rich in glutamate.
Then another time try eating a bunch of mushrooms or similar by themselves with a similar quantity.
Likely not the same feeling. Digestion and absorption of food changes with how you consume it. Eating a sweet potato or a bunch of sugar doesn't hit the bloodstream the same way.
In my teens and twenties I found I got migraine headaches after eating certain foods; with a little experimentation I found foods (all kinds, not just Chinese) containing added MSG gave me a headache within 2-4 hours. Eliminating those foods eliminated the headaches. Later in life I found I was less effected though with sufficient quantities I could still get one. It was pretty clear the only food that affected me this way had MSG in it. Most people seem not to be affected.
Personally I don't mind if people add it to foods as long as it's labeled honestly so I can choose to avoid it. No different than with peanut allergies or sodium content or trans-fats. Adding yeast extract or hydrolyzed vegetable protein (proteins broken down into amino salts including the glutamate) to foods to avoid mentioning you did it for the MSG is the only thing that bugs me. It's like saying a food is low-salt because you added Natural Ocean Water instead of salt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Safety
If you think salt is fine, try eating 10 tablespoons of it with nothing else.
Ever since, no one in NZ gives a shit about MSG now. Seems Australia is still really anal about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate
"Australia and New Zealand[edit] Food Standards Australia New Zealand[29] (FSANZ) cites "overwhelming evidence from a large number of scientific studies" to explicitly deny any link between MSG and "serious adverse reactions" or "long-lasting effects", declaring MSG "safe for the general population". It does, however, describe that in less than 1% of the population, sensitive individuals may experience "transient" side effects such as "headache, numbness/tingling, flushing, muscle tightness, and generalised weakness" to a large amount of MSG taken in a single meal. People who consider themselves sensitive to MSG are encouraged to confirm this through an appropriate clinical assessment. Standard 1.2.4 of the Australia and New Zealand Food Standards Code requires the presence of MSG as a food additive to be labeled in packaged foods. The label must bear the food additive class name (e.g., flavour enhancer), followed by either the name of the food additive, MSG or its International Numbering System (INS) number, 621.[30]"
In NZ - no one cares
In Aus - everyones like "ZOMG MSG, BAD FOR YOU" and try to avoid it.
Food in NZ is way better than Australia. (Australians don't know how to cook steak)
That said, that you for your information about MSG. I wasn't aware that FSANZ had declared it to be effectively harmless.
I moved to Australia to live for 5 years and I remember being at work in Sydney and people saying "Oh I'm not eating that, its probably full of MSG" and I would say its not bad for you and they are like "well every study disagrees with you..." and if you mention FSANZ declaring it harmless they are like "oh whats that?".
I live in Singapore now, no doubt everything has MSG, but ZOMG I LOVE FOOD HERE! :D
New Zealand has some of the BEST food I've ever had. It was way better than Australia. And, yeah, this is anecdotal and definitely subjective, but once you've tried something like Ferg Burger in Queenstown, you may have to rethink NZ on the culinary map.
I use those crystals in my kitchen and they are labelled "monosodium glutamate" (Ajinomoto). A pound of that easily lasts me 2 years. You only need a dash here and there (and only if it isn't umami on its own).
I also eat/use Parmesan, Dashi, tomatoes, and so forth.