The Glutes

For years, the Truth in Labeling Campaign has been calling them the “Glutes,” a name that many now recognize as being those who make money selling their poisons hidden in food. We gave them a name because we want you to know them and start talking about them, and it’s hard to talk about someone or something if it doesn’t have a name.

The founder and chief operating officer of this loosely knit operation is Ajinomoto, the world’s largest producer of monosodium glutamate. Ajinomoto designs and bankrolls its research, bragging of the millions it’s spending on public relations to “clear MSG’s bad name.” Their goal is to counter the fact that every day more and more people are suffering reactions to MSG and other flavor enhancers that contain MSG’s toxic manufactured free glutamate (MfG) by plastering the world with propaganda that MSG has gotten a bad rap.

Without the researchers who execute their double-blind studies using excitotoxic, brain damaging placebos, without the food technologists who incorporate MfG into thousands of processed foods, without the manufacturers that use MSG in their products so they can skimp on quality — aided by the grocery outlets that sell their products — and without the “public servants” at the FDA who for 50 years have turned their backs on research that clearly demonstrates MSG has toxic potential while endorsing the out and out lie that MSG is safe for use in food, MSG would have long ago been banned. And it can be done. As recently as 2018 the FDA acted to no longer allow the use of seven flavoring substances and flavor enhancers deemed dangerous.

Those are the Glutes: the people who work to keep MSG flowing without mentioning that they work for the producer of MSG when signing off on their work.

Scientific fraud is one of the things the U.S. manufacturer of MSG specializes in, although according to the working definition of “scientific fraud,” what they do doesn’t fit the accepted definition of scientific fraud.

That’s because the Glutes don’t plagiarize, fabricate (make up) data, or falsify data by manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record. Instead, the Glutes design and implement studies guaranteed to fail to find evidence of MSG toxicity. This is discussed in part in the book, The Perfect Poison.

“By the time I’d completed my research, having reviewed all the IGTC-sponsored studies, I understood just how the IGTC produced study after study that found no association between ingestion of monosodium glutamate and adverse reactions. I’d observed that while a variety of researchers worked on the various studies, and the work was produced at different universities and medical schools, the designs of each study were essentially the same, only the details varied. While the flaws of each study could be dismissed as shoddy science, sloppy scholarship, or inadvertent error, taking the group of studies as a whole, it appeared that there was clear intent to deceive the public about the safety of monosodium glutamate.

Intent to deceive? Could it be otherwise? Given the methodological flaws inherent in their work, and their unwillingness to change their protocols after those flaws were pointed out to them, we were drawn to the notion that it was with intent that IGTC researchers moved from a predetermined conclusion (that their product is ‘safe’) to design and implementation of research guaranteed to bring readers back to that predetermined conclusion. And remember, they brought their study protocols to the FDA, where they were approved. If they haven’t been ‘accidentally’ destroyed, the records are housed at the FDA’s Dockets Management and obtainable through a Freedom of Information request.”

The subject is also addressed in the website, Seven Lines of Evidence (human studies rigged to produce negative results)

Tag: The Glutes

Who are the ‘Glutes’?

Scientific fraud carried out by the pros