Strictly speaking, MSG has gotten a bad rap.
No, not because it’s safe to eat. When ingested in quantity (and there’s plenty of it around to create that quantity), it causes brain damage, obesity, infertility, a-fib, fibromyalgia, migraine headaches, seizures, asthma and more.
MSG has a bad rap because it’s actually the manufactured free glutamate (MfG) in MSG that causes all those terrible reactions — and there are 40+ food ingredients besides MSG that contain MfG, which are just as toxic as MSG. But no one except the Truth in Labeling Campaign is talking about those excitotoxic ingredients being brain damaging, endocrine disrupting, reaction-causing food additives. It’s just MSG that’s being publicly exposed for being toxic.
Guilty as MSG is for causing disease and disability, there are numerous other ingredients that should be sharing MSG’s negative notoriety. Those are the MfG-containing ingredients you’ll find in most processed foods claiming “No MSG Added” or “No added MSG.”
If you have questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you. If you have hints for others on how to avoid exposure to MfG, send them along, too, and we’ll put them up on Facebook. Or you can reach us at questionsaboutmsg@gmail.com and follow us on Twitter @truthlabeling.