Is it news or is it propaganda?

If you have enough money and the right contacts, you too can make up your own ‘news’

Ajinomoto, the world’s largest manufacturer of monosodium glutamate (MSG), and its PR firm, Edelman Public Relations, have joined with CBS to recycle the Glutes favorite propaganda pieces disguised as news.

Aired on both CBS Mornings and the network’s highly regarded Sunday Morning show led by veteran journalist Jane Pauley, as well as a Bay area affiliate station, the productions are straight out of the Edelman/Ajinomoto playbook.

The often-repeated blueprint goes like this:

Use a headline that shows there’s controversy, but not to worry because you can trust that this article/video will give you the real facts:

Yes, MSG has a bad reputation but it’s now making a “comeback.”

“Science” has proven that there’s nothing to worry about!

Things need to be “set straight.”

2. Repeat the well-worn fiction that a 55-year-old letter is responsible for consumers considering that MSG might be toxic. Capitalize on its unique name “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.” Ignore the multitude of studies clearly demonstrating that MSG causes brain damage.

3. Trot out the “Expert,” who talks about “The Letter” and alludes to how it’s been refuted by “decades of research,” without the expert actually citing any.

4. Bring on the “Chefs,” who will be shown cooking up a storm of delicious food sprinkled with MSG and give some to the reporter to taste. “Yum!”

5. Introduce the xenophobic zinger. This is indeed the perfect example of the diabolical genius of the folks at Edelman PR, filling the airwaves with the concept that avoidance of MSG isn’t based on science, but is actually nothing more than anti-Asian hate speech in disguise.

“Ajinomoto established that deep-rooted xenophobia is at the center of MSG’s complicated history in the U.S.” Edelman stated in a 2019 press release. That seemingly crazy concept is still being repeated.

The Edelman team works long and hard at selling the product they’ve been paid to sell. And they have the media connections to make it happen. But despite the constant use of such expensive and wide-spread propaganda, recognition that MSG is harmful continues to be acknowledged by consumers. It looks like growing numbers of consumers are realizing that they are getting sick following meals that include MSG or some other ingredient that contains its processed free glutamate, and that the more consumers know the harder Ajinomoto and Edelman will work to sell us its disinformation.

Interesting thing about CBS, the network also makes itself available to spin news on behalf of Big Pharma. A January 60 Minutes program was identified as “an unlawful weight loss drug ad” for the med Wegovy by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. “The 60 Minutes program looked like a news story, but it was effectively a drug ad,” the group Committee said in a press release. PCRM also stated that Novo Nordisk, which makes Wegovy, paid over $100,000 to the doctors CBS interviewed for the segment.

With big PR firms having the media connections to place the stories they want told to appear as legitimate unbiased features, it should make you wonder when you read an article or watch a program: is it news, or is it propaganda?

September 26, 2023September 26, 2023

MSG on 60 Minutes got people riled up 30 years ago. Could it do the same thing today?

Thirty years ago this 60 Minutes program (video below) on MSG was the second most-watched show of the year. Despite that, the show’s creator Don Hewitt caved to glutamate-industry pressure and refused to air it a second time.

Since then the Glutes have kept a tight wrap on information about the toxic effects of MSG, filling the Internet, newspapers and TV with cleverly crafted propaganda that carries the falsehood MSG is a harmless ingredient. Advertising studies have been rigged to conclude that nothing was found to suggest that MSG is anything other than safe, diverting funding from research that might concluded that MSG is harmful, enlisting the support of celebrities and professionals who vouch for the safety of their excitotoxic – brain damaging – product and keeping any mention of possible MSG-toxicity out of FDA files.

But it’s a new day. And as much as we may disagree about our politics and even what truth is, no one will disagree with the notion that it’s wrong to poison people, most especially our children. And so, through a Citizen Petition addressed to FDA Commissioner Hahn, I have asked the people at the FDA (who have kept the myth of the safety of MSG alive no matter what) to weed out the lies that the FDA is telling at the behest of the glutamate industry and officially stop calling the excitotoxic manufactured glutamic acid and the MSG that contains it generally recognized as safe — GRAS.

To comment on and support that petition, simply go here and then click the blue “comment now” button at the top of the page.

And be sure to share this message with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn friends.

November 22, 2022November 22, 2022

MSG and the Media. Who signed the gag-order?

If it seems like you never hear mention of the toxic nature of MSG on any nationally-aired show – cable or network – it’s true! It’s almost as if a gag-order had been issued. In fact, any talk about MSG in the media has been virtually nonexistent since the 1991 CBS 60 Minutes broadcast (right below) about the dangers of the flavor enhancer.

Sometime after the 60 Minutes program aired, Nancy Millman, writing for the Chicago Tribune, did an article focusing on the activities of Jack Samuels (co-founder of the Truth in Labeling Campaign) and his fight to have MSG labeled. According to Millman, prior to beginning her work, she had cleared the story with her editor, but the article was never published.

Similarly, the Baltimore Sun accepted and then refused to print an article on MSG by journalist Linda Bonvie, and an editor at the New York Times told Bonvie that she wouldn’t take a story that even mentioned MSG. According to Bonvie, the editor had said she was unwilling to face the pressure and intimidation that would result if she did. And in 1991, Don Hewett of 60 Minutes said, on air, that he had never had so much pressure applied to him by industry as he had prior to the airing of the MSG segment. Although rated by TV guide as one of the two most watched programs of the 1991 year, 60 Minutes has refused to run the piece again. Prior to the 60 Minutes show airing, Ajinomoto pulled out all the stops to kill it. In early 1990, we had become aware that the show was in the works, and over the course of its development had provided information to producers Grace Dickhaus and Roz Karson. In March of 1991, a producer for the CBS show called Ajinomoto with the announcement that they were thinking of doing a segment on their product.

According to the Wall Street Journal a group of trade associations launched one of the largest pre-emptive campaigns in public relations history. The WSJ said that “A crisis-management team specializing in 60 Minutes damage control has been hired to help the industry execute an elaborate game plan to forestall a repeat of the 1989 Alar-on-apples scare.”

We had received a copy of the “International Food Information Council MSG Committee/MSG Coalition COMMUNICATIONS PLAN” from an anonymous source, which detailed IFIC’s plans for scuttling the 60 Minutes segment on MSG, or, failing that, to provide for crisis management. We forwarded IFIC’s plan to the WSJ.

The IFIC, which represents itself as an “independent” organization, sends attractive brochures to dietitians, nutritionists, hospitals, schools, the media, and politicians, proclaiming the safety of monosodium glutamate. IFIC’s paid relationship to the glutamate industry is documented in the 31st edition of the Encyclopedia of Associations.

February 8, 2022February 8, 2022

Had they listened, the obesity epidemic would have been stopped before it took hold, and infertility would never have reached crisis proportions

Sections below taken in part from the obituary of John W. Olney posted at Washington University in St. Louis, THE RECORD.

“John W. Olney, MD, the John P. Feighner Professor of Psychiatry and a professor of pathology and immunology, died April 14, 2015. He was 83.

“A longtime leader in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Olney remained active in research until the last few days of his life.

“He studied neurotransmitters in the brain and how they can become toxic under certain circumstances. He was the first scientist to propose that when high concentrations of the neurotransmitter glutamate were released from brain cells, the glutamate could overexcite cellular receptors and destroy cells through a process he named ‘excitotoxicity.’”

Dr. John Olney in 1991 appearing on a 60 Minutes segment on MSG.

More than a talented researcher, John Olney was a kind and caring human being. Seeing the dangers posed by use of free glutamate in food, he published articles on the subject and spoke out on the dangers of MSG, putting his reputation and research funding at risk. In 1972 he testified before the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, warning that ingestion of MSG places humans at risk, with the greatest risk being for the very young. He gave evidence to a National Academy of Science panel organized to determine whether MSG ought to be banned from baby food, only to find that it had been an “industry arranged whitewash” carried out by a group of scientists with almost no experience in neuropathology. In 1991 he was interviewed for the only 60 Minutes segment ever aired questioning the safety of MSG.

In 1993 he gave testimony to the FDA’s review of the safety of monosodium glutamate – and convinced other neuroscientists to join him. Never hesitating to do what he could to stem the tide of the growing use of MSG, he then was a plaintiff in a lawsuit designed to force the FDA to require appropriate labeling of monosodium glutamate when present in food.

“John was truly a unique individual who had an enormous impact in psychiatry and across many scientific and clinical disciplines,” said Charles F. Zorumski, MD, the Samuel B. Guze Professor, professor of neurobiology and head of the Department of Psychiatry. “He was an innovator and a pioneer. Literally, the field of studying glutamate as an excitotoxin, and even the word ‘excitotoxicity’ itself, can be traced to John’s seminal studies in the late 1960s and 1970s. And his most recent work on the effects of drugs on the developing brain has changed how pediatric anesthesia is done.

“Olney came to Washington University in 1964 as a resident in psychiatry and joined the faculty in 1968. He started his medical training at age 28, leaving a job in the U.S. Army to pursue a medical degree when his sister was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Born in Marathon, Iowa, Olney earned his bachelor’s and medical degrees from the University of Iowa.

“In addition to working with glutamate, Olney studied the effects of anesthetic drugs, such as ketamine, on the developing brain. He did important and much-cited research into fetal alcohol syndrome, concluding that if a pregnant woman consumed as few as two drinks, the alcohol could cause nerve cells in the fetal brain to die. And Olney found that as the brain continued to develop in the years after a baby was born, anesthetic drugs also had the capacity to do damage. Consequently, he recommended that elective surgery be avoided in very young children whenever possible.

“Olney was a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He was a recipient of the Wakeman Award for Research in the Neurosciences, the Dana Foundation Award for Achievement in Health and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Biological Psychiatry.”

Maybe now that it has been demonstrated that excitotoxic glutamate ingested by a pregnant woman will cause brain damage in her fetus and newborn, leading to intractable obesity (the obesity epidemic) and reproductive disorders (the infertility crisis), someone will listen. Adrienne Samuels