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An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami

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Re: An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami

#91

Post by tptacek »

wollstonecraft wrote: post #88
tptacek wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientists have been doing challenge studies with MSG for 4 decades, and no study that presented subjects with MSGs and detected any adverse reactions significantly different than placebo has ever reproduced. Even the (rebutted, non-reproducing) studies that showed adverse reactions to MSG (in the 80s and early 90s) showed headache as one of the symptoms not associated with MSG (tingling and numbness were more closel…

Ajinomoto vs Morton's salt as the control, milled to the same consistency in gelcaps. How did they find the subjects? Was it a general call for college students, or did they attempt to drill down to find rare sensitive individuals?

Which study? There are dozens of them.

Re: An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami

#92

Post by tptacek »

drewmol wrote: post #76
tptacek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it "may" cause digestive irritation, how come it never does when scientists do blinded studies of it?

The articles mentioned studies, but I can't give informed speculation, have not looked at any of the studies. Will assume the participants who reported irritation are a small enough a population to fall within the range of participants reporting irritation from placebo. So I'll opine that most of the people who report negative reaction probably have not sufficiently isolated MSG as the culprit, even if they are certa…

By all means, reach out any time you have questions. :)

Re: An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami

#93

Post by indemnity »

205guy wrote: post #79
bvinc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just checked the ingredients on my liquid aminos and it doesn't say msg. Their website says they don't add it, but there may be "very small amounts" that naturally occur from the soybeans. Please explain. P.S. I have no reaction to MSG I just don't understand why you would think someone is being irrational.

I agree with bvinc in this debate: those claiming to be scientific and saying MSG can't cause any reaction are rudely dismissing the real experiences of strangers. There are many reasons for the perceived MSG reactions: other additives in the MSG (like melamine milk in China), other foods at Chinese restaurants (and possible additives in those), all the way to psychosomatic and culture-bound syndromes [1]. There are…

Agree all you want, your opinion is still wrong.

If many double blind experiments are not enough to convince you, I suspect nothing will.

How do you feel about vaccines?

Re: An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami

#94

Post by kazinator »

Melissa O'Brien at UBC has directly observed the effects of MSG on the blood flow in the dura in rat brains:

https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/... [2016]

She basically takes it for granted that MSG causes headaches and is looking at the mechanisms.

A recent study found that a single oral dose of 150mg/kg taken consecutively for five days resulted in headache and muscle tenderness when given to healthy young men (Shimada et al. 2013). Older work concluded that MSG consumption did not induce symptoms of pain or sensitivity but many of these studies have been scrutinized for their poor methodology (Tarasoff and Kelly 1993). Without definitive proof that MSG is harmful, it has been cleared in the United States and Canada as safe for human consumption and can be added to foods without regulation from Health Canada.

Lots more in this paper; very good work.

Re: An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami

#95

Post by kazinator »

wollstonecraft wrote: post #69
thedz wrote: post #5

I've talked to many otherwise perfectly rational folks who get worked up about avoiding MSG when it comes to Asian food — but still go out and buy liquid aminos or eat foods that are caked in it.

I've done a double blind experiment with myself, and msg reliably triggers migraines.

You can't do a double-blind expepriment on yourself, but you can simulate one.

Double refers to the fact that not only do the test subject not know what treatment they are getting (e.g. real or placebo), but also the staff who administer that treatment do not know: both are blind, hence double. This is important because if the administrators know, then something in their behavior such as body language could leak the information to the test subjects.

If administrator and test subject are the same person, it cannot be double. However, you can take steps to prevent yourself from knowing what you're taking, like preparing identical containers which are randomized and whatnot. If there is no second human there serving to you who could leak clues then it may be as good as double blind.

Re: An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami

#96

Post by kazinator »

itbeho wrote: post #83
tptacek wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientists have been doing challenge studies with MSG for 4 decades, and no study that presented subjects with MSGs and detected any adverse reactions significantly different than placebo has ever reproduced. Even the (rebutted, non-reproducing) studies that showed adverse reactions to MSG (in the 80s and early 90s) showed headache as one of the symptoms not associated with MSG (tingling and numbness were more closel…

I think it’s very likely that something with MSG on the label often includes things like anti-caking agents or nitrates that may actually be the culprit. I kept a food diary for a year and the common headache trigger seemed to be “MSG”. Changing my diet to avoid it eliminated the headaches. So it really doesn’t matter to me if someone on the internet says it can’t be MSG. The practical result in my case was close eno…

Anti-caking agents are used in powders other than MSG.

Re: An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami

#97

Post by kazinator »

cjlars wrote: post #33
bvinc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just checked the ingredients on my liquid aminos and it doesn't say msg. Their website says they don't add it, but there may be "very small amounts" that naturally occur from the soybeans. Please explain. P.S. I have no reaction to MSG I just don't understand why you would think someone is being irrational.

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) is an amino acid bound to a sodium molecule to make it into a shelf stable powder. Much like table salt (NaCl) is a sodium molecule bound to a chloride molecule to achieve the same. When they contact the water in food they both dissolve into the component molecules. So really what you're talking about is glutamate which is a very widely occuring amino acid. It's "non-essential" which means…

> if someone says they are allergic to MSG

If someone says they are allergic to MSG, they are simply abusing the word allergic. The reaction isn't allergic. It is not an immune response.

Nobody in the thread above you used the word "allergic"; you made that up.

Immune reactions are very different; they can be triggered by traces of the material. Nobody in their right mind claims they react to traces of MSG.

The following paper studies the actual mechanisms how of MSG alters blood flows in brains. Well, rat brains:

https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/...

Re: An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami

#98

Post by galdosdi »

cjlars wrote: post #33
bvinc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just checked the ingredients on my liquid aminos and it doesn't say msg. Their website says they don't add it, but there may be "very small amounts" that naturally occur from the soybeans. Please explain. P.S. I have no reaction to MSG I just don't understand why you would think someone is being irrational.

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) is an amino acid bound to a sodium molecule to make it into a shelf stable powder. Much like table salt (NaCl) is a sodium molecule bound to a chloride molecule to achieve the same. When they contact the water in food they both dissolve into the component molecules. So really what you're talking about is glutamate which is a very widely occuring amino acid. It's "non-essential" which means…

Your chemistry is scarily bad, are you trolling? When elements combine into molecules the result often behaves very differently from the components.

> Basically if someone says they are allergic to MSG, but not allergic to all of the other foods that contain glutamate, is like someone saying they're allergic to table salt, but not allergic to all of the other foods that contain sodium, which is not medically plausible.

OK, so how come I can eat table salt but chlorine alone will kill me?

Go back and complete that chem 100 course

Re: An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami

#99

Post by sparky_z »

kazinator wrote: post #95
wollstonecraft wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done a double blind experiment with myself, and msg reliably triggers migraines.

You can't do a double-blind expepriment on yourself, but you can simulate one. Double refers to the fact that not only do the test subject not know what treatment they are getting (e.g. real or placebo), but also the staff who administer that treatment do not know: both are blind, hence double. This is important because if the administrators know, then something in their behavior such as body language could leak the…

Prepare your two samples. Put them in identical containers. Attach sealed envelopes that record which one is which. Mix them up in such a way that you can't tell them apart anymore. Randomly mark one A and one B. Perform your experiment on A and B. Once you have the results, open the envelopes to find out which one was which.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Re: An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami

#100

Post by kazinator »

galdosdi wrote: post #98
cjlars wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) is an amino acid bound to a sodium molecule to make it into a shelf stable powder. Much like table salt (NaCl) is a sodium molecule bound to a chloride molecule to achieve the same. When they contact the water in food they both dissolve into the component molecules. So really what you're talking about is glutamate which is a very widely occuring amino acid. It's "non-essential" which means…

Your chemistry is scarily bad, are you trolling? When elements combine into molecules the result often behaves very differently from the components. > Basically if someone says they are allergic to MSG, but not allergic to all of the other foods that contain glutamate, is like someone saying they're allergic to table salt, but not allergic to all of the other foods that contain sodium, which is not medically plausibl…

Indeed consuming protein molecules which contain glutamate is different from consuming free glutamate in the form of MSG.

We can draw a ready analogy to saccharides. It is like denying the effects of sugar because indigestible complex carbohydrates are made of sugar and do not produce those effects. "A blood sugar spike doesn't exist because cellulose is made of sugars, and I've eaten a large bowl of moistened sawdust without experiencing such a spike. It's probably an imagined effect or maybe caused by something else, such as a response to anti-caking agents in the sugar."

Why is MSG used in the first place on foods which already contain glutamate? For instance, why is it used in Vietnamese lemon grass chicken recipes, given that chicken protein has tons of glutamate? It's because the glutamate that is locked up in protein doesn't produce the taste effect of MSG.

So why don't these naysayers deny the existence of the taste effect of MSG also?

As in: "Gee, I don't believe that MSG can possibly be a flavor enhancer, because boiled chicken breast contains copious glutamate and yet tastes bland. People who say that flavor is enhanced by MSG are just imagining it due to confirmation bias fueled by mass hysteria."

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