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This American Life did a great story on the history of why and how MSG was vilified. I won’t post any spoilers because it is a fantastic listen.
Just because it’s a neurotransmitter in your brain, doesn’t mean it can’t have adverse affects elsewhere in the body (conversely, there are many drugs that have an effect on the body, but no effect on the brain due to the blood brain barrier), i.e. the body is complex.
That said, it’s generally recognized as safe and may potentially cause side effects in some people but there isn’t much evidence for it, and MSG is one of the most studied food additives in the world.
True. I guess nicotine is a good example of this. When delivered directly into the bloodstream (via inhalation or a nicotine patch) it is an addictive stimulant. When ingested orally it is poisonous.
Allergy doesn’t mean instant death. I have a pollen allergy but the symptoms are sneezing and itchy eyes. I have a nut allergy but the only symptom is an itchy mouth and throat. I still live even though I’m often enough in contact with the chemicals that make my body go “no”.
So if MSG allergy was a thing (which it doesn’t seem to be, based on my quick Google search) then it would not cause people to die necessarily.
Glad I am not allergic. I keep a small jar in the kitchen and it is easily the most interesting seasoning to experiment with.
Meanwhile, my sister claims to be severely allergic. It’s crazy given the number of items in her regular diet containing MSG if you read the label. Sadly, she is full of excuses like this she uses to rationalize an insanely high fat diet and is obese.
I have also used MSG to reduce both fat and salt in the meals I cook. A big reason I asked this question is that I wanted to know if there is a legitimate reason I should tell people that the food I cooked for them contains glutamate. Because the reaction is often similar to your sisters. And guess what, if I don’t tell them, nobody is experiencing any form of side effects.
Theoretically speaking you could be oversensitive to the substance, so in small amounts it should be fine for your body, and in larger amounts you’d get all those alleged symptoms.
However in practice that means that a lot more things than just crystalline MSG would trigger those symptoms - like mushrooms, tomato paste, soy sauce, Parmesan cheese, meat broth, etc.
As someone who is sensitive to MSG, tomatoes, parmesan etc. ALSO affect me in similar ways, albeit usually less severely.
Babies are also ingesting large amounts of glutamate when being breastfed. Which is why I believe 99.99…% of glutamate “intolerance” / “allergies” are caused by the nocebo-effect.
It probably comes down to eating a lot of very salty foods and not recognizing that you’ve had too much salt. Common symptoms include temporary high blood pressure and headaches, the same issue that people claim they have with MSG.
I get that genetically msg is not a problem for a huge amount of the population, but what about someone like me that genuinely has msg reactions that require me to do a time out at restaurants because of body shock loading?
It’s no different from Asians that don’t process alcohol so well. Some want a time out because genetically they’re in a group that might not like alcohol.
How is this hard to understand?
Do you have such reactions to glutamine rich foods? (Tomatoes, fish, eggs) Msg is also in most processed foods.
If you only have such reaction at restaurants, it’s probably something else.
The initial craze about msg was pure racism and very bad science.
https://www.jandonline.org/article/S2212-2672(21)00068-X/fulltext
There’s a lot of Asian pride in telling me it’s not msg, and doing studies to prove it’s not msg. (Asian pride as described by Asian pride experts of that ethnicity).
However, the horrible fact remains that for some people MSG is proving to be the cause of reactions. The usual source is restaurants using MSG, but just to clarify the matter we find out the hard way when friends get too happy with MSG.
As much as I want to believe in rigorous science I still have to tell you that you’re not considering the actual sufferers. It’s a reaction akin to getting punched, and I definitely know about it.
It wounds the pride of the occasional restaurant that doesn’t really want people to walk out because of a medical problem. I’m sorry about that. I’ll look into possible solutions. It’s my fault for really enjoying Asia and Asian food.
Again, all of that is really testable. You can even blind test yourself at home.
Any salted meats will naturally form MSG when the glutamic acid binds to sodium. Pretty much all processed foods contain msg even if it was not an additive because it naturally forms on the foods themselves when free glutamate binds to salts. If you had any form of Japanese food cooked with kombu or seaweed, it also had high msg content.
None of this is even unique to Asian foods. Most cheeses are extremely high in msg, especially aged cheeses like Parmesan. Pretty much all savory foods contain some glutamate and glutamic acids.
