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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.
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.
Since the “S” in MSG is salt, yeah, they would all die. I might be wrong, but, I’m pretty I read a paper years ago that said an allergy to salt was impossible. It’s one of those base elements that don’t seem that important until it is. It would be the same as allergic to hydrogen.
No, the “S” is sodium. MSG (monosodium glutamate) is a sodium compound like salt, but the anion is different - for salt it’s chloride, for MSG it’s glutamate.
It could be theoretically possible that only the anion caused you some hard. For example, sodium cyanide is extremely poisonous, but also a sodium salt. In practice however glutamate is just some aminoacid.
The S is sodium, which is a component of salt.
Sodium, not salt is a part of MSG. This is also like saying that the Hydrogen in Hydrogen Cyanide kills ya.
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?
The difference is that glutamate is produced by our bodies naturally. Alcohol (Ethanol) is not. It is literally poison to every human, which is why the liver takes a lot of damage when removing it from your body.
Cool and fun except for people that for whatever reason have a problem with msg, and you’re busy telling them it’s a made up problem. Being a sufferer I almost believed it until - who should appear - my kid outside the restaurant because of same said problem. We both sat there with our made up food processing problem. Tell yourself whatever - like I care.
Take a skin-prick allergy test and you"ll have proof.
skin prick tests don’t work for dietary sensitivities
“Food allergy symptoms are caused by the interaction between a food allergen and an antibody known as IgE (immunoglobulin E). To diagnose a food allergy, your allergist may use a skin prick test (SPT) to measure the presence of IgE antibodies for the suspect food. SPTs are inexpensive, produce immediate results, and can be performed in the doctor’s office.”
Source: foodallergy.org
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
