If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn't everyone in Asia have a headache?

A fairly convincing article.  As a kid I'd get headaches whenever I
ate certain sausages and I remember my mom speculating about MSG, but
I never had headaches from Chinese food.

Jeremy

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If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn't everyone in Asia have a headache?
Alex Renton
The Observer,	 Sunday 10 July 2005

In the port city of Yokohama, south of Tokyo, there is a museum
devoted entirely to noodle soup. It may be Japan's favourite foodie
day out: one and a half million ramen fans visit the museum every
year, and even on the wintry morning that I went the queue wound 50
yards down the street - young couples, mainly: cold, hungry and
excited.

Inside the Yokohama Ramen Museum and Amusement Park they meet
exhibitions on the evolution of soup bowls and instant noodle packets
- more fascinating than you'd think, but these are not the main event.
That's deep in the basement, where there's an entire street, done up
to look like a raucous 1950s Yokohama harbour-front. Every shop houses
a different noodle restaurant, each a clone of one of the best noodle
shops of Japan. It's a culinary Madame Tussauds.

The Japanese are sentimental about their noodle soup - it's the
working-class food that nourished the nation in the bleak days after
World War Two. Ramen chefs are TV celebs, in a country that devotes
more broadcast time to cookery than even we do. I asked the young
pilgrims just what they valued above all in ramen. They sniffed the
tangy air, Bisto-kid style: 'The basis of the experience is the
broth,' was the consensus. In the great Japanese cod-Western Tampopo -
the only movie to take noodle soup, sex and death with equal
seriousness - a ramen guru announces that the key to Japan's national
dish is that 'the soup must animate the noodles'.

What does chiefly animate Japanese soups and broths is an amino acid
called glutamate. In the best ramen shops it's made naturally from
boiling dried kombu seaweed; it can also come from dried shrimp or
bonito flakes, or from fermented soy. More cheaply and easily, you get
it from a tin, where it is stabilised with ordinary salt and is thus
monosodium glutamate.

This last fact is of little interest to the Japanese - like most
Asians, they have no fear of MSG. And there lies one of the world's
great food scare conundrums. If MSG is bad for you - as Jeffrey
Steingarten, the great American Vogue food writer once put it - why
doesn't everyone in China have a headache?

To begin to answer this we must go back to Japan a century ago.
Professor Kidunae Ikeda comes home from the physics faculty at the
Tokyo Imperial University and sits down to eat a broth of vegetables
and tofu prepared by his wife. It is - as usual - delicious. The
professor, a mild, bespectacled biochemistry specialist, turns to Mrs
Ikeda and asks - as spouses occasionally will - what is the secret of
her wonderful soup. Mrs Ikeda points to the strips of dried seaweed
she keeps in the store cupboard. This is kombu, a heavy kelp. Soak it
in hot water and you get the essence of dashi, the stock base of the
tangy broths and consommés the Japanese love.

This is the professor's 'Eureka!' moment. Mrs Ikeda's kombu is to lead
him to a discovery that will make his fortune and change the nature of
20th-century food. In time, it would bring about the world's
longest-lasting food scare, and as a result, kick-start the age of the
rebel consumer. It was an important piece of seaweed.

Professor Ikeda was one of many scientists at the turn of the century
working on the biochemical mechanics which inform our perception of
the world. By 1901 they had drawn a map of the tongue, showing,
crudely, the whereabouts of the different nerve endings that identify
the four accepted primary tastes, sweet, sour, bitter and salty.

But Ikeda thought this matrix missed something. 'There is,' he said,
'a taste which is common to asparagus, tomatoes, cheese and meat but
which is not one of the four well-known tastes.' He decided to call
the fifth taste 'umami' - a common Japanese word that is usually
translated as 'savoury' - or, with more magic, as 'deliciousness'. By
isolating umami, Ikeda - who had picked up some liberal notions while
studying in Germany - hoped he might be able to improve the standard
of living of Japan's rural poor. And so he and his researchers began
their quest to isolate deliciousness.

By 1909 the work on kombu was complete. Ikeda made his great
announcement in the august pages of the Journal of the Chemical
Society of Tokyo. He had isolated, he wrote, a chemical with the
molecular formula C5H9NO4. This and the substance's other properties
were exactly the same as those of glutamic acid, an amino acid
produced by the human body and present in many foodstuffs. When the
protein containing glutamic acid is broken down - by cooking,
fermentation or ripening - it becomes glutamate.

'This study,' concluded Professor Ikeda in triumph, 'has discovered
two facts: one is that the broth of seaweed contains glutamate and the
other that glutamate causes the taste sensation "umami".'

The next step was to stabilise the chemical. This was easy: mixing it
with ordinary salt and water made monosodium glutamate - a white
crystal soluble in water and easy to store. By the time he published
his paper, the professor had, wisely, already patented MSG. He began
to market it as a table condiment called Aji-no-moto ('essence of
taste') that same year.

It was an instant success, and when Kidunae Ikeda died in 1936 he was
a rich man: he remains, as every Japanese schoolchild knows, one of
Japan's 10 greatest inventors. The food chemicals giant Ajinomoto
Corp, now owned by General Foods, pumps out a third of the 1.5 million
tons of monosodium glutamate we eat every year - from India to
Indonesia 'Ajinomoto' means MSG.

Ikeda's original paper muses a little about MSG and why it should
excite the taste buds so, without arriving at any convincing
conclusion. Much more work has been done since. We now know that
glutamate is present in almost every food stuff, and that the protein
is so vital to our functioning that our own bodies produce 40 grams of
it a day. Probably the most significant discovery in explaining human
interest in umami is that human milk contains large amounts of
glutamate (at about 10 times the levels present in cow's milk). Babies
have very basic taste buds: it's believed that mother's milk offers
two taste enhancements - sugar (as lactose) and umami (as glutamate)
in the hope that one or other will get the little blighters drinking.
Which means mothers' milk and a packet of cheese'n'onion crisps have
rather more in common than you'd think.

When you next grate parmesan cheese onto some dull spaghetti, what you
will have done in essence is add a shed-load of glutamate to stimulate
your tongue's umami receptors, thus sending a message to the brain
which signals (as one neuro-researcher puts it) 'Joy and happiness!'
Supper is rescued - and your system has added some protein and fats to
a meal that was all carbohydrate.

Ripe cheese is full of glutamate, as are tomatoes. Parmesan, with
1200mg per 100 grams, is the substance with more free glutamate in it
than any other natural foodstuff on the planet. Almost all foods have
some naturally occurring glutamate in them but the ones with most are
obvious: ripe tomatoes, cured meats, dried mushrooms, soy sauce,
Bovril and of course Worcester sauce, nam pla (with 950mg per 100g)
and the other fermented fish sauces of Asia.

Your mate, Marmite, with 1750mg per 100g, has more glutamate in it
than any other manufactured product on the planet - except a jar of
Gourmet Powder straight from the Ajinomoto MSG factory. On the label,
Marmite calls it 'yeast extract'. Nowhere in all their literature does
the word 'glutamate' appear. I asked Unilever why they were so shy
about their spread's key ingredient, and their PR told me that it was
because it was 'naturally occurring ... the glutamate occurs naturally
in the yeast'.

As they put monosodium glutamate into production, Professor Ikeda and
his commercial partners found that making stable glutamate from the
traditional seaweed and salt was unnecessary. They developed a much
simpler and cheaper process using fermented molasses or wheat -
eventually manufacturers realised that almost any protein can be
broken down to produce it.

The product took off, immediately, and within a few years Ajinomoto
(which was now the company's name) was selling MSG across Asia. The
breakthrough to America came in the aftermath of World War Two. Like
pizza and vermouth, MSG was a taste American soldiers brought home
with them. They weren't aware that MSG was what they'd liked in Japan
- but the US Army catering staff noticed that their men enjoyed the
leftover ration packs of the demobilised Japanese Army much more than
they did their own, and began to ask why.

MSG arrived in America at a key moment. Mass production of processed
food was booming. But canning, freezing and pre-cooking have a grave
technical problem in common - loss of flavour. And MSG was a cheap and
simple additive that made everything taste better. It went into tinned
soups, salad dressings, processed meats, carbohydrate-based snacks,
ice cream, bread, canned tuna, chewing gum, baby food and soft drinks.
As the industry progressed, it was used in frozen, chilled and
dehydrated ready meals. MSG is crucial in no-fat or low-fat food,
where natural flavour is lost with the extraction of oils. It's now
found in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and dietary supplements.

Ajinomoto Corp started manufacturing in the States in 1956 and in 1962
allied itself with Kellogg's. MSG sells in the States in supermarkets,
under the brand Ac'cent. In Britain you will have to visit a Chinese
supermarket for a supply of pure Gourmet Powder, but MSG plays a role
- often in secret - in products on almost every shelf of the
supermarket.

But MSG's conquest of the planet hit a major bump in April 1968, when,
in the New England Journal of Medicine, a Dr Ho Man Kwok wrote a
chatty article, not specifically about MSG, whose knock-on effects
were to panic the food industry. 'I have experienced a strange
syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant, especially
one that served northern Chinese food. The syndrome, which usually
begins 15 to 20 minutes after I have eaten the first dish, lasts for
about two hours, without hangover effect. The most prominent symptoms
are numbness at the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms
and the back, general weakness and palpitations...'

And so was born Chinese restaurant syndrome (CRS) and a
medico-academic industry dedicated to the researching and publicising
of the dangers of MSG - the foreign migrant contaminating American
kitchens. Shortly after Dr Ho came Dr John Olney at Washington
University, who in 1969 injected and force-fed newborn mice with huge
doses of up to four grams/kg bodyweight of MSG. He reported that they
suffered brain lesions and claimed that the MSG found in just one bowl
of tinned soup would do the same to the brain of a two-year-old.

Other scientists were testing MSG and finding no evidence of harm - in
one 1970 study 11 humans ate up to 147 grams of the stuff every day
for six weeks without any adverse reactions. At the University of
Western Sydney the researchers concluded, tersely: 'Chinese restaurant
syndrome is an anecdote applied to a variety of postprandial
illnesses; rigorous and realistic scientific evidence linking the
syndrome to MSG could not be found.'

Science has still not found a convincing explanation for CRS: indeed,
some researchers suggest it may well be to do with the other things
diners have imbibed there - peanuts, shellfish, large amounts of
lager. Others say that fear of MSG is a form of mass psychosis - you
suffer the symptoms you've been told to worry about.

The fact is that, since the eighties, mainstream science has got bored
of MSG. Some research continues; in 2002, for example, New Scientist
got very excited over a report that MSG might damage your eyesight,
after Japanese scientists announced that they had produced retinal
thinning in baby rats fed with MSG. It turned out they were putting 20
grams of MSG in every 100g of rat food - an amazing amount, given
that, in the UK, we adults consume about four grams of it each a week.
(One project took people who were convinced their asthma was caused by
MSG and fed them up to six grams of it a day, without ill-effects).
However, at no time has any official body, governmental or academic,
ever found it necessary to warn humans against consuming MSG.

But popular opinion has travelled - spectacularly - in the opposite
direction to science. By the early eighties, fuelled by books like
Russell Blaylock's Excitotoxins - The Taste That Kills, MSG's name was
utter mud. Google MSG today, and you'll find it blamed for causing
asthma attacks, migraines, hypertension and heart disease,
dehydration, chest pains, depression, attention deficit disorder,
anaphylactic shock, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and a host of
diverse allergies.

Thus since 1968 the processed food industry has had its own nasty
headache as a result of MSG. Hundreds of processed products would have
to be withdrawn if amino-acid based flavour-enhancers could not be
used. They would become, simply, tasteless. By the 1980s a third of
all Americans believed it was actively harmful. Crisp-buying teenagers
thought MSG made them stupid and spotty. Mothers read that MSG could
put holes in their children's brains.

So the food industry employed its usual tactic in the face of consumer
criticism: MSG was buried by giving it new names. The industry came up
with a fabulous range of euphemisms for monosodium glutamate - the
most cheeky of all is 'natural flavourings' (however, the industry did
remove MSG from high-end baby foods).

Nowadays the industry's PR beats a big drum. 'Natural, Tasty, Safe' is
the slogan. 'Many people believe that monosodium glutamate is made
from chemicals. Monosodium glutamate is a chemical in the same way
that the water we drink and the oxygen we breathe are chemicals,'
explains an MSG website.

MSG manufacturers are now pushing it as actively useful for health - a
way to eat less salt - and they have pursued the celebrity route too.
Heston Blumenthal, of the Fat Duck in Bray, is among the eminent chefs
the industry has enlisted for promotion of the umami principle at
conferences across the world - although he uses traditional sources
like kombu.

It's not surprising that the MSG-makers are so busy on their product's
image, because MSG-phobia still shows no signs of subsiding. This
despite the fact that every concerned public body that ever
investigated it has given it a clean bill of health, including the EU,
the United Nations food agencies (which in 1988 put MSG on the list of
'safest food additives'), and the British, Japanese and Australian
governments.

In fact, every government across the world that has a food licensing
and testing system gives MSG - 'at normal levels in the diet' - the
thumbs-up. The US Food and Drug Administration has three times, in
1958, 1991 and 1998, reviewed the evidence, tested the chemical and
pronounced it 'genuinely recognised as safe.

However, there remains a body of respected nutritionists who are sure
MSG causes problems - especially in children. And parents listen. Most
doctors who offer guides to parents qualify their warnings about MSG -
it may cause problems, it has been anecdotally linked with disorders.
But public figures like the best-selling nutrition guru Patrick
Holford are powerful advocates against MSG. He's sure the science
shows that MSG causes migraines and he is convinced of the dangers of
the substance to children, particularly in the child-grabber snacks
like Monster Munch and Cheesy Wotsits .

'I'm a practitioner and there's no doubt that kids with behavioural
problems react to MSG,' he says. 'I've given them the foods, and seen
the different reactions. Glutamate is a brain stimulant in the way
that it is given, because it enhances sensory perception in the sense
that things taste much better - and some kids become very
hyperactive.'

Holford admits that he has not measured this hyperactivity, or tested
MSG by itself on children - his statements are based on anecdotal
comparison of the effects of plain crisps versus flavoured ones. But
there is some justice in his complaint that in all the acres of
research on MSG, 'most is directed at the possible physiological
effects, not the behavioural ones'.

Eric Taylor, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at King's
College in London, is among the leading British experts on food
additives and children's behaviour. He was a pioneer of 'elimination
tests' that examined food additives and their effect on children -
establishing, for one, that the colouring tartrazine did contribute to
hyperactivity.

Yet he does not think MSG is a culprit and he has never tested it.
Why? 'There are so many substances, and there's not much funding. And,
with MSG, there's no reasonable physiological theorem to justify the
research.' The only investigation he has seen on children's brains and
MSG, conducted in the seventies, suggested that the substance might
improve reading ability.

Patrick Holford, like many of MSG's foes, also talks of its possible
addictive properties and he cannot explain why 'natural' glutamate,
say in cheese or parma ham, should be any less addictive, or harmful,
than glutamate that's been industrially produced and stabilised with
salt.

The anti-additive movement (check out the excellent and informative
www.truthinlabeling.org) admits that 'natural' and 'industrially
produced' glutamate are chemically the same, and treated by the body
similarly. So why doesn't anyone ever complain of a headache or
hyperactivity after a four cheese and tomato pizza (where there's
easily as much glutamate as in an MSG-enhanced chicken chow mein)?

Their answer is that the industrial fermentation process introduces
contaminants. This is possible, of course, but it ignores the fact
that whole swaths of the planet - including East Asia, where I live -
do not have any problem with MSG. Here in Thailand, the phong chu rot
sits on the table with the fish sauce and the chilli powder where you
would have the salt and pepper.

MSG has had one unarguable effect on us - and it is a benign one. It
has made consumers look at the small print. In turn this kick-started
the organic food movement and other, more militant consumer power
groups. 1968 was a good year for rebels, and the dawn of MSG-phobia
coincides with the beginning of a great shift in middle-class
consumers' thinking - a withdrawal of our faith in the vast
corporations that fed and medicated us. After 1968 we began to
question them and their motives. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace
came next.

It is now 37 years since Dr Ho Man Kwok named Chinese restaurant
syndrome, and it's plain that the case against MSG remains unproven.
So either you conclude, as some will, that government, science and the
mega-corporates of the food industry really are all in league with
each other to poison us for profit. Or, like me, you make a different
decision.

Now, I have little faith in the food industry and I'm as suspicious of
food additives as the next person - I spend many hours fighting the
grim battle to keep them from my children's mouths. But until new
evidence emerges I am going to give MSG a conditional discharge. But
would I have it in the kitchen? Well, I did. I bought a little bag of
Ajinomoto from the corner shop on our Bangkok street and tried it, a
gram (the tip of a teaspoon) at a time.

By itself it tasted of almost nothing. So I beat up and fried two
eggs, and tried one with MSG, one without. The MSG one had more egg
flavour, and didn't need any salting. I tried the crystals on my son's
leftover pieces of chicken breast (definitely more chickeny). I tried
it in a peanut butter sandwich (nothing). On Weetabix with milk
(interesting, sort of malty) and on Weetabix with milk and sugar
(thought I was going to be sick).

My friend Nic came round. He told me about a Japanese restaurant he'd
been to that gave him headaches and a 'weird tingling in the cheeks' -
until he told them to stop with the MSG. Then he was fine, he said. I
nodded and I served him two tomato and chive salads; both were made
using the very same ingredients but I told him one plate of tomatoes
was 'organic', the other 'factory-farmed'. The organic tomatoes were
far better, we agreed. These, of course, were the tomatoes doused with
mono sodium glutamate.

Then we ate mascarpone, parma ham and tomato pizza. Nic felt fine. So
did I. I had ingested, I reckoned, a good six grams of MSG over the
day, and probably the same again in free glutamate from the food - the
equivalent of eating two 250g jars of Marmite.

I've thrown the Ajinomoto out now. It works, but it was embarrassing -
a bit like having a packet of Bisto in the cupboard. There is no need
to have MSG in the kitchen. If I want extra glutamate in my food I'll
use parmesan, or tomato purée, or soy sauce. Or like Mrs Ikeda, boil
up some kelp.

So you think you don't eat MSG? Think again...

Some of the names MSG goes under

monopotassium glutamate
glutavene
glutacyl
glutamic acid
autolyzed yeast extract
calcium caseinate
sodium caseinate
E621 (E620-625 are all glutamates)
Ajinomoto, Ac'cent
Gourmet Powder

The following may also contain MSG natural flavours or seasonings
natural beef or chicken flavouring
hydrolyzed milk or plant protein
textured protein
seasonings
soy sauce
bouillon
broth
spices

Free glutamate content of foods (mg per 100g) roquefort cheese 1280
parmesan cheese 1200
soy sauce 1090
walnuts 658
fresh tomato juice 260
grape juice 258
peas 200
mushrooms 180
broccoli 176
tomatoes 140
mushrooms 140
oysters 137
corn 130
potatoes 102
chicken 44
mackerel 36
beef 33
eggs 23
human milk 22

For more on the MSG debate visit: www.truthinlabeling.org,
www.msgmyth.com, www.msgtruth.org or www.food.gov.uk.

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