Cooking For Engineers

[northsmoke]

I'd love to hear the answer to this one.
Come on someone must know this one.

[Dilbert]

>> someone must know this one

short answer: no, no one does really know.

the FDA thinks it is safe.
there are people who react - more or less severely - to lower or higher levels

and there are people selling every variety of "cure" or "prevention" imaginable - so why not decided msg will turn your hair green?

[JohnMich]

Well a very good question! Try googling "effects MSG" and the war of words start. There are fanatics on both sides of the fence - as usual.

However I can tell you that here in Australia manufacturers are so sure of the conventional wisdom that many are now labelling their products with remarks such as 'No added MSG' and 'Contains no MSG'.

Similarly many restaurants advertise that they do not use MSG.

My wife and I do not buy products that contain MSG because, irrespective of what the pro-MSGers say, we know that it gives us headaches.

[Guest_001-A]

MSG = mono sodium glutamate, it is the salt form of glutamic acid, an amino acid which your body produces on its own (and one which is consumed from a variety of foods).

Sodium is typically paired with chlorine (NaCl) to make what we know as table salt. It is also an essential electrolyte and is required to absorb glucose into your body in the small intestine.

Since it is a simple amino acid salt, it should be absorbed into the blood quite quickly as it does not require any enzymes to break down any protein structure because it is simply one peptide unit. Just as pure glucose is quickly absorbed into the blood (instead of starch requiring enzymes to break it into individual glucose units).

Glutamate is a neurotransmitter, but I do not know and have not heard of toxicological effects from consuming MSG in excess. I'm not an expert in this area, but I know that glutamate will not passively traverse the blood-brain barrier (ie, an increased concentration of glutamate in your blood will have no effect on how much is received by your brain) but requires a cellular transport system (many compounds or ions are delivered to/from cells this way) that is more dependent on the concentration of glutamate INSIDE the brain vs outside in the blood.

This is quickly turning into a lesson on biochemistry so I'll stop here, but I will mention another thing about labeling: At least in the US, when a product says "Contains No MSG" what is really meant is that it contains no PURIFIED MSG. There are no label restrictions on what can be said about sources of MSG. So often you may see "hydrolyzed yeast"and/or "hydrolyzed yeast protein" and/or "yeast extract" or something to that effect-it's MSG. Where do you think MSG comes from? If you took vegemite or marmite and processed it a bit, you could recover pure MSG.

Bottom line: there's nothing wrong with sodium you need to live and an peptide you make in your own body.

[Cheff Wannabee]

All I can say is if MSG is so bad for you, why aren't 4 Billion Asians sick all the time? On labels, it's also disguised as Sodium Caseinate. As a note, MSG has 60% less sodium than table salt.