The Strange Case of Dr. Ho Man Kwok (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Strange Case of Dr. Ho Man Kwok (2019)

#291

Post by 1MachineElf » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:56 AM UTC

reitzensteinm wrote: post #193

wwweston wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone who swears that MSG is bad for health do so because they personally hold anti-chinese racist views? Probably not. Is it possible that: * the MSG mythology in some Western nation was proposed by those with some degree of bias against foreign things or chinese cuisine or people specifically * it caught on and was repeated by people who were enthusiastic about it because of some degree of that bias * MSG was…

It totally is systemic racism. But I wish there was another word for it, or that racism were not used interchangeably with systemic racism. There's a hell of a difference between "you're racist" and "you're spreading misinformation that only exists because your grandparents were racist". The latter will get a reaction from the vast majority of people like "oh shit, I had no idea, that's awful". The former will cause…

It's not systemic racism, it's the headache I get from excess glutamate. My family is Chinese. Don't @ me.

Re: The Strange Case of Dr. Ho Man Kwok (2019)

#292

Post by Auracle » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:59 AM UTC

fingerlocks wrote: post #118

fraudsyndrome wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they for different reasons? What is the reason Koreans think it's bad for health? As I haven't read about that. Given that in the west it was also dubbed "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" I would think some form of prejudice played a part.

That term is over 50 years old and not commonly used, if at all, ever. The only time I've seen "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" brought up is either in a article about how that term is racist, or a historic piece referencing the origins from the 1968 New England Journal of Medicine. However, my local Hippy Organic Community Grocery Store has all sorts of products proudly claiming the absence of MSG.

I’m pretty sure you hit the nail on the head with your last point. We all saw it when avoiding gluten became a fad. Very few people had the need to avoid gluten, but enough for it to be added to some packaging. That steamrolled in to people thinking that gluten was somehow bad for them, regardless of the fact that if they had celiac disease they would have known about it.

My friend and I had a competition to point out the most ridiculous gluten free indicated packaging. I won with sand.

There were certainly other factors in play (and in this case, nobody needs to avoid msg) but once you sees the thought in people’s mind that something should be avoided, they’ll come up with all sorts of reasons on their own.

Re: The Strange Case of Dr. Ho Man Kwok (2019)

#293

Post by 1MachineElf » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 6:03 AM UTC

noyeastguy wrote: post #100

I suspect that there is some truth the the "Chinese-restaurant syndrome" beyond the racism of the times. Chinese food contains much soy sauce and other fermented ingredients. These foods contain yeasts which are naturally inflammatory via multiple innate immune system pathways. MSG is even produced via fermentation but is probably more devoid of yeast and bacterial cell wall polysaccharides than other ingredients. In…

The cause of the headaches is the G in MSG, the glutamate. It's an excitotoxin. Common discourse deflects the true cause and points to the S, Sodium. This is because if the public really became conscious of glutamate, it would put at risk the bottom line of everyone who has disguised glutamate as Natural Flavors, Yeast Extract, etc.

Re: The Strange Case of Dr. Ho Man Kwok (2019)

#294

Post by turtlebits » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 6:07 AM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #58

louisvgchi wrote: post #10

Dave Chang has a small scene in one of his Ugly Delicious (great show, by the way) episodes where he gets a group of non-Asian Americans, who claim to be MSG-allergic, to come and share their stories of MSG-related symptoms after eating at Chinese restaurants. He then hands out Doritos and American products that the participants claim they love and can eat all day. Hard to see where this is going... he says, all thes…

There are also many non-celiacs who would swear that they cannot eat glutten. That does not discredit the actual existence of celiacs. When I was younger, I would sometimes discover that certain foods contain MSG by identifying what I had eaten before the onset of symptoms. Now I've learned to check everything beforehand. And the one time that the mother-in-law used her neighbour's soup mix instead of the soup mix th…

MSG occurs naturally in a lot of foods and won't necessarily show up in ingredient lists. It's in tomatoes, soy sauce, seaweed, etc.

Re: The Strange Case of Dr. Ho Man Kwok (2019)

#295

Post by 1MachineElf » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 6:08 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #252

shakna wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just as every experiment ever done on MSG would suggest; > In 1995, the Food and Drug Administration asked an independent scientific group, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, to study MSG’s safety. It found that only a small number of people experienced any side effects, and that was only after consuming six times the normal serving of MSG on an empty stomach. There is a _very_ small num…

> It isn't no one. Do you have a different citation? Because what you actually quoted says it is no one, unless you think people are going to Chinese restaurants and being served a plate of pure MSG. Show me one person who has ever eaten instant noodles while maintaining an empty stomach.

My family is Chinese. I love the traditional cooking AND American-style "Chinese" food. I have never had problems with the MSG in these, but I have had headaches after downing too much brewer's yeast and a broth made with a philipinno soup packet one time. Do you know what both of these have in common? It's Glutamate, which is an excitotoxin in excess amounts. Too much of that stuff absolutely will hurt your head.

Re: The Strange Case of Dr. Ho Man Kwok (2019)

#296

Post by rayiner » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 6:11 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #272

rayiner wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it’s worse than that: https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-school-be-antiracist-a-new-... Under a policy proposal by the Evanston, IL superintendent, white and Asian students would be held behind doing remote learning while other students were prioritized for return to in-class education. When people opposed the policy, they were called racists. The condemnation was worse for Asians who objected to their kids being gi…

Sure, it's an uncomfortable thing to say, but I hope we're not dismissing hypotheses because of how they make us feel. More to the point - I agree with the comment above about how the term "racist" (and "white supremacist") makes people have fairly strong emotional reactions, and we'd probably have better discussions if we somehow avoided those words. But I hope we can move past them and analyze what this theory is s…

> but it would be pretty hard to argue that such rational-acting parents who love their children are not, at least a little bit, comfortable with using the reality of race in America to improve their own standing by placing themselves in proximity to whiteness!

The phrase “using the reality of race in America to improve their own standing” really gets to the heart of the issue. Consistent with critical theory, it implies that Asians benefit from the existence of white oppression of other non-whites. Critical theory posits that Asians “improve their own standing” by helping perpetuate white supremacy.

But consider the counter-factual. Say the US was just white and Asian people. Would Asians be as successful in that case? Under the traditional liberal view, the answer is yes. The existence or non-existence of oppressed groups doesn’t help or hurt Asians. Under the critical theory view, the answer is no. In a system of white supremacy, if Asians aren’t helping oppress other non-whites, there is no reason to “allow” them to succeed.

Empirically, we know the critical theory view is wrong. Countries like Canada and Australia don’t have the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and aren’t segregated. But Asians enjoy high economic mobility in those countries as well.

The basic error in your reasoning is assuming that the existence of segregation changes the incentives or the outcomes for Asians. To the contrary, it’s “rational” for Asian immigrants to assimilate into the dominant white culture whether or not segregation exists. Indeed, it’s rational for pretty much any immigrant in any country to assimilate into the dominant culture, regardless of whether there is also another, oppressed culture in the country.

Re: The Strange Case of Dr. Ho Man Kwok (2019)

#297

Post by JKCalhoun » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 6:12 AM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #265

rubicon33 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called being biased, misinformed, or at worst stereotyping, and it used to be accepted that everyone does it and it's not the end of the world that your aunt from Wisconson thinks MSG gives her hives. Nowadays that aunt is racist, her whole family is racist, and it's the reason why everyone else can't get ahead in life.

I might agree that the pendulum has swung too far, but we also now have a better understanding of how bias and stereotyping can nonetheless be damaging. though yes, racism is much too loaded of a term to be thrown around the way it currently is. If you admit to no gradations, well that's when you get cancel culture, when a joke in poor taste that might reveal some bias can result in the same consequences as blatant h…

Maybe. But I have observed that so many cameras in people's pockets the past decade have shown us no evidence of UFOs nor of Bigfoot — but holy hell Black men do get killed when arrested disproportionately in the U.S..

Re: The Strange Case of Dr. Ho Man Kwok (2019)

#298

Post by rayiner » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 6:13 AM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #260

rayiner wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the idea is to get everyone on board with the idea that the deck is still stacked against minorities even in the absence of conscious contemporary racism (which I believe to be true) Chinese Americans have higher incomes than white people on average. In terms of income mobility: Vietnamese Americans who came here in the 1970s as refugees went from being among the poorest groups in the country, to parity with whi…

It could impair prosperity for Asians. Comparing raw average income alone isn't sufficient to settle the question. Consider the counterfactual possibility that Asians might be even more prosperous with even higher income if not for structural racism. I fact, it seems that Asians do make as much as 8% less than others in comparable jobs [0] though that difference may disappear somewhat for Asians born in the US, indic…

> Asians still make 8% less than whites in comparable jobs except for Asians who have been in the United States for one and a half generations, whom have reached full parity in income.

This sounds like the difference is due to things like immigration status and citizenship, not race. Most Asians are immigrants, and many aren’t citizens. That limits opportunities quite a bit even within the realm of “comparable” jobs.

Re: The Strange Case of Dr. Ho Man Kwok (2019)

#299

Post by chanakya » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 6:14 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #192

wpietri wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think the same way. But now that I see how pervasive a force racism has been in America's history, I have a different view. Now I think it's worth asking both questions: Is racism really at play? And given America's lasting, endemic racism, is there reason to think something makes it absent in a given case? A couple of the books that turned me around here: Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning", a history of…

I’m really not sure there is a sound conclusion to be drawn from comparing the Tulsa Massacre to people being skeptical of food from a different culture. The former is something that’s a unique and very ugly aspect of American history. The latter is pretty much universal.[1] You can squint and lump both things under the umbrella of “racism” but they’re so different as to be two completely different kind of things. An…

I'd go even further and say that just because America has a history of racism and racist ideas does not mean that racism continues to be a major factor today. I've read Kendi, and he offers scant evidence that it is.

Re: The Strange Case of Dr. Ho Man Kwok (2019)

#300

Post by lifeformed » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 6:35 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #199

reitzensteinm wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It totally is systemic racism. But I wish there was another word for it, or that racism were not used interchangeably with systemic racism. There's a hell of a difference between "you're racist" and "you're spreading misinformation that only exists because your grandparents were racist". The latter will get a reaction from the vast majority of people like "oh shit, I had no idea, that's awful". The former will cause…

> If the idea is to get everyone on board with the idea that the deck is still stacked against minorities even in the absence of conscious contemporary racism (which I believe to be true) Chinese Americans have higher incomes than white people on average. In terms of income mobility: Vietnamese Americans who came here in the 1970s as refugees went from being among the poorest groups in the country, to parity with whi…

Economic prosperity isn't the only metric that matters. Racism isn't just about money - the deck can also be stacked in social, cultural, and political ways.