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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure you've "proven" it's MSG though. Warm up some chocolate cubes, sprinkle msg and sandwich the cubes so it's in the middle. Then ask an SO to randomize and give you chocolate with or without msg every few days without telling you and note when you get headaches. My initial guess is that doing this 6-9 times you should get sufficient signal (if it's indeed true that MSG absolutely gives you headaches Everytime ) to fairly conclusively prove it.

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You’d need to administer it in such a way that you can’t detect it by taste, and as pmoriarty says, to be double blind is a further challenge. You can however modify your protocol. Instead of chocolate buy some unfilled pill capsules (very cheap) and have a friend fill half with a pinch of salt, and half with a pinch of MSG. This friend makes a note of which caps are MSG, and without informing you or your SO which is which. The friend can simply assign each cap a day, and keep the key to which day is MSG in a notebook and be revealed later. From there, follow your protocol. It’s now double-blind, and you won’t taste what it is you’re taking and have some subconscious reaction.

I intended to write that s/he should just swallow the chocolate to not taste what's inside but I forgot. I mean if we are gonna give this dude headaches at the least let's make it chocolate?

Bad science. Chocolate has a lot of confounding components such as Tyramine which is said to trigger migraines in the sensitive.

Which would show join the test put forward.

Agree with your point but the way you got there doesn't add up.

Just to be clear: to be double-blind, both of you would need to not know which cubes are which until after the experiment.

If the experimenter knows which are which and the subject doesn't, it's only single-blind. The disadvantage of this is that the experimenter might inadvertently reveal some clue to the subject as to which is which. That would make the experiment's conclusions more suspect than double-blind.

I get where you're coming from but my diet is simple enough at this point that the stuff is isolated. I had sinus headaches for 23 years. I slowly cut out foods over a period of 5 years to find triggers. I eat the same thing everyday now that I know what not to eat.

I do check the ingredients first now, but previously it was all reverse engineering from getting a headache to going back and seeing what I ate. I'd happily do a study in a lab, if it meant published research was going to be put out. The sinus headaches are miserable enough that I'll never be doing it just for interest.

Chocolate is a no go because I've cut out sugar and caffeine as well. I mostly eat meat, non-gluten carbs, and broccoli.

For MSG, I don't know about it ahead of time. If I do, I don't eat the food. For example, went to kbbq, ate some plain meat, rice, and egg, got a headache after leaving. Next time I was there I asked about MSG because it was the most likely trigger to be used. Turns out it was in the steamed egg and the salt and pepper mix. Avoided those and felt fine for multiple visits after.

I think this is a blind way of discovery because I didn't have assumptions about the triggers when I started trying to figure what they were.

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