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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

It's not complicated. It's been studied directly. It is an easy study to conduct. Give people MSG. Do they become symptomatic? The answer is no. This is the result you would expect, given the simple molecular structure of MSG and the fundamental role glutamic acid plays in the human body.

If we had learned about table salt in the 1910s and knew it primarily by its formula name NaCl, people would believe all manner of weird things about salt, too. In fact, people do believe weird things about salt; there is a widespread and unsupported belief that moderation of sodium intake is a key public health concern, which it is not.

It's the same with MSG. Dissolve MSG and you get sodium and an amino acid that is so important to our bodies that we produce it ourselves, without sourcing it from our food or the environment; an amino acid that is thus, unsurprisingly, hugely prevalent in foods we "naturally" eat.

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> In fact, people do believe weird things about salt; there is a widespread and unsupported belief that moderation of sodium intake is a key public health concern, which it is not.

It's not an unsupported belief. Studies have shown that high sodium intake is a significant contributor to hypertension. Here is one such study: http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/3/235. There is debate about whether consuming several thousand milligrams of sodium a day adversely affects blood pressure in everyone or only in some people, but that it's a major contributor to hypertension (9-17% of cases) is supported.

If you have specific criticisms of the methodology of those kinds of studies or if you have links to sources that dispute the above, I'd be interesting in reading them.

Or are you saying that what's unsupported is the notion that the above makes sodium intake a key public health concern?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23213158

Thanks for the link. I can only access the abstract, but conflicting results "over the extent to which elevated salt consumption has adverse implications for population health" is very different from saying that "there is a widespread and unsupported belief that moderation of sodium intake is a key public health concern, which it is not."

It sounds like the article concludes, contrary to your memory, that as a result of non-objective scientific practices, the public incorrectly believes that high sodium intake is definitely a huge problem for all, when in reality, it's either a huge problem for all, or it's a huge problem for some, or it's a huge problem for some and a small problem for others, or it's a small problem for some.

I agree. My knowledge of the subject is little but the parent author of this thread came off as hyperbolic. I don't understand human biology well, so I left open the possibility that I may have an incorrect opinion, as it uneducated. My opinion is MSG is safe and delicious.

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