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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.
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.
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.
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.It’s poisonous, anyway, and we don’t really know how the inhalation of chemical additives (at least idk) May compound the nicotine poisoning.
Back to being poisonous anyway, that’s why a lot of first time users feel nauseated and vomit.
You are right. All it took was 10 seconds for me to google. I am an idiot. What is true however is that it is much more dangerous when ingested orally. All my nicotine shots (for ecigs) carry the typical “skull” warning symbol, with the advice to call a doctor if you accidentally swallow some.
You’re not an idiot; misinformation abounds and it just gets tedious looking up everything, all the time.
Interesting side note: it wasn’t unusual on family farms, for a long time, to give horses a couple of plugs of chewing tobacco, as a deworming agent.
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.
