Listen up Jeffrey Steingarten. Twenty-four years ago you were one of a handful of food writers coming to the defense of the safety of MSG. It was the “in” thing to do. And your “If MSG was so bad for you, why doesn’t everyone in Asia have a headache?” was so well written and so provocative, it’s still referred to today.
It’s been 24 years since you wrote those words for Vogue Magazine. It’s long been obvious to those of us who can differentiate fact (produced by honest scientists) from glutamate industry rigged research and paid-for-propaganda, that the defining component of MSG is its brain damaging excitotoxic free glutamate. To be brain-damaging, there has to be more glutamate floating free in the body than is used for normal body functions. And it wasn’t until 1957 that Ajinomoto began mass-producing free glutamate in amounts needed to produce brain damage. Before 1957, there wasn’t enough free glutamate to cause brain damage.
To be brain damaging, large quantities of free glutamate have to be floating free in the body. Before 1957, there wasn’t enough free glutamate available in processed foods and drinks to cause brain damage.
It’s a mouthful to say, and not easy to understand, but prior to 1957, the amino acid known as glutamic acid (or glutamate) would only have been found in the healthy human body under well-defined and tightly controlled circumstance — when all glutamate was used to support normal healthy functions.
That’s how it was. That’s how it had always been. But in 1957, the major U.S. producer of MSG began mass-producing MSG in the U.S. using genetically modified bacteria that would secrete free glutamate through their cell walls. That was followed by aggressive marketing.
In The Perfect Poison there’s a section that describes the thought process that went into becoming certain that the placebos used in the Glutes double-blind studies of the safety of MSG were not really placebos, but were concoctions that would cause reactions identical to reactions caused by MSG test material.
That’s the kind of thinking that I found myself doing when I happened upon a market report published in the Taiwan News written by Report Ocean, a renowned market research firm that had recently released an insightful report focusing on the MSG market in China. What caught my eye was this simple statement, “Monosodium glutamate (MSG) is a manufactured (emphasis added) flavor enhancer that has a place with the class of mixtures on the whole known as glutamates.” And I found myself intrigued more by words left unsaid than by anything else, because in the United States with that simple statement, there would have been an extensive barrage of “MSG is safe” propaganda, with the repeated assertion that MSG is natural or naturally occurring.
In “The curious history of MSG in China, and a tour of an MSG Factory,” Christopher St. Cavish tells the reader that in China, there is no such thing as Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, which reinforced my growing suspicion that the MSG produced in the U.S. and MSG produced in China are actually different things — an idea reinforced by St. Cavish’s statement, “long fascinated by the contrast between their cultural baggage and supposed medical ill-effects in the U.S. and their unconditional acceptance in Asia. In China, which consumes 55% of the world’s MSG, there is no such thing as Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.” Moreover, St. Cavish makes no mention of adverse reactions following ingestion of MSG; he repeatedly asserts that all MSG is exactly the same thing; and he describes how Chinese MSG is made, with no mention of bacteria that excrete glutamate through their cell walls.
I have studied the few English language papers I could find relevant to the procedures used outside of the United States for producing monosodium glutamate prior to 1957 and have come to the conclusion that the monosodium glutamate manufactured in the United States after 1957 contained excitotoxic free glutamate complete with its impurities while monosodium glutamate manufactured elsewhere did not.
So, there it is Mr. Steingarten. It was the MSG produced in the United States (not in Asia) after mass production of MSG was introduced in 1957 that caused headaches, other adverse reactions, brain damage and all the various abnormalities of the nervous system like obesity, infertility, behavior disorders and neurodegenerative disease. And it still does.