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

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

#351

Post by microtherion »

sonotmyname wrote: post #148
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.

> Given that in the west it was also dubbed "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" I would think some form of prejudice played a part. Given that 60 years ago the only place anyone in the US would run into manufactured MAG was in a Chinese restaurant, calling it that doesn’t seem the least bit related to race. And given that I’ve grown up in Canada and the US, eat Chinese food regularly, and have never heard this term before…

In Switzerland, some of the people most concerned about MSG in their Chinese food grew up in households where pretty much the only seasoning used was Aromat. You would also find it next to the pepper and salt shakers in simpler restaurants for decades. Aromat is mostly MSG, and yet, no cases of "Swiss Restaurant Syndrome" are known in the medical literature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromat

At least the Swiss own their MSG addiction and are listing Aromat as part of their "culinary heritage": https://www.patrimoineculinaire.ch/Produits#449

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

#352

Post by fomine3 »

bigbubba wrote: post #23
cube2222 wrote: post #2

This article is very long and having skimmed it I'm still not entirely sure: is monosodium glutamate unhealthy or not after all?

MSG is healthy because it causes no harm and makes food taste better. All else being equal, food tasting better will make you enjoy life more. Enjoying life is correlated with good health outcomes.

MSG works to reduce usage of salt.

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

#353

Post by alliao »

leetrout wrote: post #64
alliao wrote: post #27

the trick to MSG is to double what naturally occurring rate. Chicken that tastes like nothing can taste wonderful with a tinest dash and it'd taste like the best damn chicken. doesn't work well with food already full of umami like parmesan cheese.. and don't keep adding if you're already adding food additives like stock from a can/carton. Those are usually already heavily "fortified" with msg by itself.

Do you have a source for ratios or such? I have a 1 pound bag of msg and I add it to all kinds of stuff but it only has recommendations for soup on the bag. On other things I just sprinkle it (I dedicated an old salt shaker to dispensing MSG instead hehe)

You can look up amount of naturally occurring and do some maths! but over the time I've developed some rule of thumb.. Chicken - tiny amounts seafood - no soup - 1/3 of salt half formed food - half of what you'd add in soup

the result is naturally tasting food that got a little umami edge.

My grandma goes nuclear on it, usually in equal amounts of salt. That's usually too much in my opinion.

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

#354

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ineedasername wrote: post #346
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but holy hell Black men do get killed when arrested disproportionately in the U.S.. This is selection bias. The ratio of police shootings to arrests is not higher for black people. Police shootings of black persons are national news, police shootings of white persons are not.

The ratio of police shootings to arrests is not higher for black people Assuming that's true, all it says is that, once you're getting arrested, you're about even on the probability of being shot. What it doesn't address is the increased probability of Black me to be arrested to begin with.

> Assuming that's true, all it says is that, once you're getting arrested, you're about even on the probability of being shot.

Which is the thing the other poster had the false impression was not the case.

> What it doesn't address is the increased probability of Black me to be arrested to begin with.

But now you're talking about a totally different issue. And if black men commit more violent crimes as a result of historical and other factors, what do you propose that the police do about that?

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

#355

Post by 1MachineElf »

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…

My previous comment was downvoted when I was simply summarizing what researchers have already studied and analyzed for us. This paper has 76 references, including studies critical of MSG by both Chinese and Japanese scientists: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10942912.2020.1...

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

#356

Post by tdfx »

kelnos wrote: post #348
tdfx wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finally, he tries to muddy the waters by essentially claiming black people seem to "deserve it" more, because apparently black people are involved in more crime than white people? Which, again, doesn't seem to be very well supported by data. I don't think you're being fair to what he said. He said that black communities have higher crime rates, which should rightly deserve more police attention, hence their interac…

> He said that black communities have higher crime rates, which should rightly deserve more police attention, hence their interaction with police on a per capita basis would increase. "Interaction" is one thing; police killing people is another. (An aside: if we dig deeper to figure out why black communities often have higher crime rates... welp, there we go again, it usually boils down to some form of systemic racis…

> That is what the data shows, plain and simple. I'm not really interested in quibbling over vague claims that racism has little or nothing to do with it, as that's clearly false.

I understand why it feels that way, but all this data does is show correlation. As soon as you attempt to draw any meaningful conclusions about causation, the data is lacking.

I think the focus on racism is detrimental to the truth because it forces a feedback loop: we're tracking the race of victims of police shootings so that we can show more correlation that feeds back into the same narrative that racism is the problem. There's no data that shows poverty level, education level, etc. in these shooting statistics. If being poor increased your chances of being shot by the police, it would certainly explain the numbers, but since we're only interested in the race variable, we'll never know.

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

#357

Post by dotancohen »

ubercow13 wrote: post #323
dotancohen wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there is evidence, that is why we are having this discussion. In addition to the evidence that there exists a very small minority of people who are sensitive to MSG, there exists a large industry that is dependent upon the availability of an inexpensive, effective flavour enhancer. That industry has an interest in discrediting the ill effects of MSG, just as the petrochemical industry had an interest in dis…

I must be mistaken because based on the article, I thought we were having this discussion because there is no evidence.

The article mentions right in the beginning that studies have shown evidence for a connection between MSG intake and onset of symptoms.

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

#358

Post by ceejayoz »

labawi wrote: post #321
thaumasiotes wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Six times is in the same order of magnitude I don't think this sentence has any meaning. What is "the same order of magnitude"? By the normal definition (still not great, but at least it's well-defined), 6 times x is only in the same order of magnitude as x when x is in the range [0,1.7), and it's in the next order of magnitude up when x is in [1.7,10). Even if we adjust that to a log scale, 6x is in the same order…

An order of magnitude is 10x, this is 6x so within an order of magnitude. Specific numbers are meaningless. Calling it same order of magnitude seems an unfortunate (and technically incorrect) phrasing. Still, the point stands - a 6x difference between normally-served dose and a harmful one is way too small to call it non-harmful. How do you even define a normally-served dose? This needs further clarification with bet…

> Still, the point stands - a 6x difference between normally-served dose and a harmful one is way too small to call it non-harmful.

We happily accept a 1.5-2x margin for Tylenol.

If you accidentally put 6x the normal amount of MSG in some fried rice, you’re gonna know about it.

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

#359

Post by mlyle »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #309
mlyle wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > You don’t have to knowingly possess a racist motive to be racist. > I think you do, otherwise this opens the door to anyone and everyone being a "racist" by some secondary, tertiary, or nth order effect. Surely there's something in-between. Say, perhaps, black people make you uncomfortable, such that you're inclined against hiring them and you preferentially hire whites instead. Then, you wouldn't knowingly posse…

> Surely there's something in-between. Say, perhaps, black people make you uncomfortable, such that you're inclined against hiring them and you preferentially hire whites instead. Then, you wouldn't knowingly possess a racist motive but would be definitely acting racist and perpetuating racism. That seems pretty clearly to be a racist motive. "Black people make you uncomfortable" is literally traditional racism, and…

> "Black people make you uncomfortable" is literally traditional racism, and action taken based on that motive is racist.

Good, you caught what I was saying.

> Doing something like that without thinking through your intentions too hard doesn't make the act unintentional, because the intent is there whether you consciously evaluate it or not, and it doesn't change the motive.

This seems to require a tortured interpretation of "intentional". Especially as it can be subtle and difficult to tease out the reasons we do things and make snap judgments. When your mind tells you "he just didn't seem like 'an engineer'" or "I don't think he was a culture-fit" or "I got a bad vibe about how he'd treat the rental property" --- we don't necessarily see the chain to [because he's black and not able in this instant to look 3x more professional than would be required of an equivalent white candidate for a positive impression]. There's no intention there, even if the outcome is racist. And in this scenario, it's not impossible for the black person to get hired, but the bar is unconsciously higher. That's one reason why this is all so insidious and so hard.

> Someone who buys a chicken sandwich only because they want a chicken sandwich has no such motive or intent.

Someone might have a hell of a lot more idea why they want a chicken sandwich than why they are making subtly biased decisions against disadvantaged people.

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

#360

Post by mlyle »

lliamander wrote: post #312
mlyle wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > You don’t have to knowingly possess a racist motive to be racist. > I think you do, otherwise this opens the door to anyone and everyone being a "racist" by some secondary, tertiary, or nth order effect. Surely there's something in-between. Say, perhaps, black people make you uncomfortable, such that you're inclined against hiring them and you preferentially hire whites instead. Then, you wouldn't knowingly posse…

> Everyone has, from their own point of view, good motives and intentions. And you will almost always make more progress by addressing those sincere motives than you will by labeling them racist.

If the outcome is racist, it's a problem that needs to be confronted and that the people involved need to be educated about in that context.

Without the systematically bad outcome for a group of disadvantaged people, there is no big problem, after all.

So call it what it is. If the intentions look good, go about it in a gentle way.

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