MSG - why the bad rap?

Uncle_moe

Everybody has an "allergy" these days and they blame their feeling of unwellness all too often on poor, innocent, and perfectly good foodstuffs. One that caught my eye recently was the hatred people have for MSG, actually people on these very boards were rating Chinese restaurants according to whether they used MSG (monosodium glutamate) or not. Reviewers seemed to be in favour of MSG free kitchens (how they knew there was no MSG in their food was not explained but i'll take their word for it that they were aware). Anyway my point is that MSG has been tested in numerous laboratory experiments and has yet to show any ill effects in people who have consumed it. MSG added to food rases the level of glutamate in our bloodstream no more than a high protein meal)
In its natural form MSG has been used since the 8th century and has not killed anyone to date. It occurrs naturally in many foods and is in most abundance in kombu, a seaweed which has been used in asian broths for centuries.
My point is that we have been fooled to think of MSG as something bad when in fact it is naturally occurring and actually enhances flavour as it provides umami in our food.
In case you are wondering I am referencing Jeffrey Steingarten who has taken his info from the Tarasoff and Kelly experiment in 1993 and Dr. Willaim H Yang's study in 1995.

El_Dangeroso

Some people are allergic to MSG and get headaches from it.

I know what you mean about it being naturally present in foods but then again so is sugar. Sugar in the context of fruit and vegetables and all the attendant nutrients is a completely different thing from refined sugar though. We can see this in healthy traditional populations that would have eaten a lot of fruit and been very healthy and then they are exposed to refined sugar and their health starts to decline rapidly.

MSG as an additive is a completely different animal than that of msg in natural foods. Many nutrients have both good and bad effects that are balanced by other nutrients in the food, for example vitamin E is good in food, but when we start dosing people with lots of vitamin E it damages health. Ditto anti-oxidants, they seem to have an oxidising effect when taken in pure supplement form.

MSG in supplement form can have good effects, but you have to balance this with the fact that it makes food into a 'superstimuli' as in hyper-palatable and thus encourages overeating. We may not yet have discovered what other compound is in food that drives us to seek out glutamate-rich foods.

In the same way that our natural penchant for sugar that leads us to seek out nutrient-rich plant food has been co-opted by the food industry to make us overeat sweetened foods and drinks, the natural attractive feature in nutritious, calorie-dense food (glutamate) has been co-opted to turn empty nutrition (chinese takeaway) into something our body will think is nutritious.

tHE vAGGABOND

A book I read summed it up well when it said MSG is not bad for you, in normal levels..

But the problem is that its a huge cause of obesity, and therefore all manner of other illnesses as it basically makes people eat more then they should [which is why its in basically all processed and fast food ]

Uncle_moe

thanks for the replies, glad to see people are actually interested in this. While some people may be allergic to MSG it is apparently only 1 per cent of the population which makes me wonder why people complain of headaches caused by it, am I meeting all the one percenters?
I also traveled through asia and was lucky enough to be granted access to some professional kitchens where all the chefs had a dish of MSG powder as part of their mise en place, and the customers don't all seem to be complaining.
My basic point was that we should be less inclined to blame foods for our ailments and stop looking for things that aren't there. If you're lactose intolerant its not an excuse to not eat cheese. So some young cheeses have small amounts of lactose its not enough to make you sick unless you are once again in the one percent of people with a sever allergy to lactose.

El_Dangeroso

I wouldn't take a chef using something as any sign of healthfulness. Chefs cook for taste, that's why they've been ignoring the advice that saturated fat is bad for you, not because they know it's not true but because butter tastes really good.

Even high-end kitchens cook with industrial seed oils, just because most natural fats impart a taste and it's easier to use seed oils for deep frying over and over even though the fats are damaged.

Though I get your point, avoiding MSG in otherwise crappy food is sort of pointless if you're going to eat crappy food anyway. I think good unprocessed food tastes good enough on its own though and doesn't need any additives.

rantyface

You shouldn't eat too much of it because glutamate is a neurotransmitter but it's fine in the doses people eat it at. If you were actually allergic to glutamate you'd be dead because you need it. There are other sensitivity reactions that are not strictly speaking allergies that can happen with MSG, but "allergic" is the wrong word.

It's naturally present in plenty of foods like cheese and tomato, and the people I know who pretend to be allergic to anything with a chemical name don't seem to have any reaction to it if it's not on the label.

Sugar is a different story because there are different types of sugar with different effects. MSG extracted from yeast is chemically identical to MSG found naturally in other foods.

The argument that it is mostly in crap food is also wrong. It is naturally present in high concentrations in Italian food, for example, and if you use a stock cube in healthy soups and stews you might eat more veg!

The reason we like MSG rich food is that glutamate acts directly as a stimulant on taste buds and lowers the amount of salt or sugar you would normally need for the nerve impulse. At higher concentration you can taste its pleasant savoury taste an that is probably because it is an amino acid and we need protein, which is made of amino acids including glutamate, to survive.

However, it comes as a sodium salt and I don't really like salt so I don't like it.

rantyface

I found this article saying exactly what I thought, but better because I'm crap at writing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/12/msg-allergy-chinese-restaurant-syndrome-myth

El_Dangeroso

rantyface wrote: »

I found this article saying exactly what I thought, but better because I'm crap at writing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/12/msg-allergy-chinese-restaurant-syndrome-myth

That article doesn't really say anything though. It mostly says that they use MSG a lot in China (big woop, they also smoke a LOT of cigarettes, does that mean they're harmless too?) and that soy sauce and Parmesan contain a lot of glutamate. It still doesn't address that MSG in its refined format stimulates overeating. Something that most people in the west could really do without.

Rockn

Interesting thread. I've only ever read that MSG is bad but never heard the reasons why. So it seems it's no worse than salt really as long as you don't overeat.

Trampas

i was in china and they give you a jar of msg to put on your food

tHE vAGGABOND

So it seems it's no worse than salt really as long as you don't overeat.

Its just like the "saturated fat is not bad for you, your body needs it" posts which appear here sometimes...

Yes its not bad for you in really small amounts..

But its in most processed and fast foods in quite large amounts [in the grand scheme of things], and as a result most people get waaaaaaaaaay too much of it, and too much is a bad thing

El_Dangeroso

tHE vAGGABOND wrote: »

Yes its not bad for you in really small amounts..

It's not bad for you in large amounts either and it is necessary but your body can make sat fat out of carbs or other fats if needs be, in fact a lot of starch ends up being converted to saturated fat (palmatic acid) in the body.

On the salt front, I'm in two minds. On the one hand people who consume foods naturally high in salt like seaweed are getting definite net benefit, but there is definitely a link between processed meats and cancer and heart-disease, the only factor that I can see would cause this would be the highly salted aspect as the nitrates are protective in leafy green vegetables. I read somewhere that they used to cure meats with potassium nitrate and then added in sodium nitrate to the mix.

But when you take high salt consumers and get them to eat a low-sodium diet (and change nothing else) they don't really get any benefit out of it health-wise. Maybe a high-sodium diet tends to be a low-potassium diet and taking away one without adding in the other doesn't do much.

In any case I use granulated kelp to season my food as it packs a nice dose of trace minerals along with the sodium.