An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami

Because nobody has a reaction to MSG. It's ill effects are entirely fictional.

So really what you're talking about is glutamate which is a very widely occuring amino acid. It's "non-essential" which means that your body produces it. Almost all fermented foods contain it (including liquid aminos). Cheeses, meats, vegetables, etc contain it. It's very likely that you eat several times as much naturally occurring glutamate in your diet as you would if you used MSG in your cooking.

Basically if someone says they are allergic to MSG, but not allergic to all of the other foods that contain glutamate, is like someone saying they're allergic to table salt, but not allergic to all of the other foods that contain sodium, which is not medically plausible.

The flip side is that very high blood concentration of sodium can cause medical issues, and people worried about glutamate argue that a similar effect is going on when you eat MSG, but research so far indicates that at normal dietary levels, you're fine to sprinkle a little of either molecule on your food.

There are a lot of "sensitivity" syndromes, and some are associated with genetic issues, some with toxicity, and others with mental health. And then there are questionable diseases [2]. Yes, the sufferers are sometimes vocal and unscientific. Those claiming to follow science shouldn't be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture-bound_syndrome [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_questionable_diseases

Even the (rebutted, non-reproducing) studies that showed adverse reactions to MSG (in the 80s and early 90s) showed headache as one of the symptoms not associated with MSG (tingling and numbness were more closely associated).

I don't doubt you're able to give yourself a migraine, but I do doubt that you're controlling for MSG.

This might be one of the best-studied food safety questions in the literature.

Double refers to the fact that not only do the test subject not know what treatment they are getting (e.g. real or placebo), but also the staff who administer that treatment do not know: both are blind, hence double. This is important because if the administrators know, then something in their behavior such as body language could leak the information to the test subjects.

If administrator and test subject are the same person, it cannot be double. However, you can take steps to prevent yourself from knowing what you're taking, like preparing identical containers which are randomized and whatnot. If there is no second human there serving to you who could leak clues then it may be as good as double blind.

I'm a sort of accidental vegetarian, in that I never really decided to become one; the rest of my family is vegetarian and I stopped eating meat because it was inconvenient, and then gradually I lost interest in it.

I realized at some point MSG is really useful for adding umami flavor to things without adding other flavors, like seaweed or tomato or mushroom. It is wonderful for certain things, and makes some vegetarian dishes basically indistinguishable from those with meat. I think it's a little odd that people will go out of their way to add unusual strong-flavored ingredients for the umami, when you could just add MSG.

At the same time, MSG on its own to me has a really cheap umami quality. It reminds me of really cheap frozen dinners and bad food from elementary school. For awhile I couldn't get over that, and then eventually realized that when it's used in complement with the right things in the right amounts, it works great--you just need to figure out the right settings.

So sometimes those natural sources of umami just seem contorted and more trouble than they're worth. Other times, they seem to supply umami in a way that doesn't seem cheap or one-dimensional.

I suspect that there's some other component of many "umami" flavors we haven't discovered yet, or other tastes that technically aren't umami but would be identified as such currently. It's difficult for me to believe that MSG is really capturing most of what I like about savory dishes; I feel like something else is missing. I'm waiting for other amino acid salt receptors to be identified; I wouldn't be surprised if they're somehow linked in their activity to glutamate receptors or something of that sort.

Which is not to say the result isn’t the same as if they just added the MSG. It’s just a different approach to adding it.

> neither persistent nor serious effects from MSG ingestion

Effects don't have to be serious or persistent for them to be a nuisance enough to avoid!

I don't need six hours of a mild headache/nausea, thanks.

(Density of MSG is 1.62 g/cm³, 1 teaspoon = 5cm³)

Here's how I discovered my MSG intolerance:

I made a bunch of onion soup (from onion soup mix), and ate a ton of it. I then spent the next 24 hours feeling terrible, downing pepto, etc.

A few weeks later I made a recipe that included onion soup mix as an ingredient. Again I felt terrible.

I though, Aha, I must have an onion allergy, this onion soup mix keeps making me sick.

So I started checking if onions themselves made me sick. But onions were no problem.

Then I looked at the other ingredients on the onion soup mix. Monosodium glutamate stood out. I remembered hearing that could cause problems. So I started learning more about it, and as I did much of my digestive life came into focus. I remembered moments of intestinal agony ever since I was a teenager that I couldn't explain. I paid attention to what bothered my stomach, and always there was some form of MSG---autolyzed yeast, etc.

Since making an effort to avoid MSG I almost never encounter those symptoms. And when I do it's usually attributable to food prepared by others whose ingredients I can't strictly account for.

People claim MSG intolerance isn't a real thing, but my experience has shown me otherwise.

Can you point to studies which confirm salt as the cause of these symptoms that MSG is unfairly blamed for?

I can eat consume copious amounts of salt without any ill effects, like finishing huge bowls of soup to the last drop.

I exercise a lot so I use salt liberally, and add it to water. If I don't supplement the salt intake, I start getting muscle cramps and a kind of lethargic feeling, particularly in hot weather.

I did an experiment, though, about 8 months ago: I started drinking bouillon. I prepared about a mug of hot water with a teaspoon of the soup stock. On one mug per day, I was okay. When I went up to three, the headaches and nausea showed up. I felt like crap, so I cut it short.

There is salt in that stuff, but that can't be it.

Overconsumption of FOS causes bloating, nausea, "brain fog," lower GI upset, and a whole raft of other symptoms that sound an awful lot like what many self-diagnosed NCGS folks report. For folks with Fructose Malabsorption, the threshold consumption of FOS that causes symptoms is less than 10% the level that causes symptoms in the general population.

The confounding thing is that wheat is rich is FOS. So folks who believe they have NCGS stop eating wheat and sometimes feel better. They probably have Fructose Malabsorption, or are suffering from insulin spiking effects from refined carbs, or some other effect. But they heard gluten was bad for you, and when they ate the package of bread that said "gluten free," and stopped eating the normal wheat bread, they started feeling better.

"Middlebrow dismissals" of their condition don't really help them either. True, gluten is almost certainly not their problem. But gluten free food, as a side effect of lacking wheat, often helps them feel better! What are the chances that something similar is happening with MSG? Perhaps added MSG is often found along side other ingredients/contaminants that cause headaches and other reported "MSG symptoms"?