If MSG is bad for you – as Jeffrey Steingarten, food critic for Vogue once asked, “why doesn’t everyone in China have a headache?”
Why? Because at the time Jeffrey Steingarten was conducting his often quoted “investigation” as to the headache status of people in Shanghai, the Chinese didn’t use a lot of processed food, meaning they didn’t have exposure to large quantities of manufactured free glutamate (MfG), the toxic ingredient in MSG. And the little that they used was sprinkled onto the dish they were making as they were finishing it. So, you wouldn’t expect everyone is China to have a headache.
I wonder what Mr. Steingarten, who claims to be “not” an “unbiased observer” of “phony food allergies and intolerances” would say if he knew that in 1969, it was discovered that glutamate is an excitotoxic – brain damaging — amino acid. It is a Jekyll and Hyde chemical that when ingested in quantity kills brain cells in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus as well as elsewhere.
Since 1957, virtually unlimited quantities of this manufactured free glutamate (MfG) have been added to processed and ultra-processed foods. That was when the Japanese company Ajinomoto began producing MfG using carefully selected (patented) genetically modified bacteria to feed on carbohydrates such as sugar, and excrete glutamate through their cell walls. And Big Food recognized that there was profit to be made by producing MfG to enhance the flavor of food, and started mass producing their own MfG-containing hydrolyzed proteins, yeast extracts, maltodextrin and more than 40 other MfG-containing ingredients to be used as flavor-enhancers.
Even today, not everyone in China gets MfG-induced headaches.