Enough to get her fired?

In January Food Navigator-USA ran the story “Ajinomoto defends MSG as nonprofit petitions FDA to rescind its GRAS status.” And Ajinomoto’s Tia Rains fired back with a classic piece of glutamate-industry propaganda.

It’s not what she said in the piece that’s so interesting, because it’s classic industry talk. What is interesting is the fact that Ajinomoto responded at all.

For 50+ years, the Glutes have pretty much ignored criticism from those who have maintained that MSG is toxic. It would appear that they’ve used this strategy to keep questions of glutamate sensitivity out of the media – just letting any question of harm done by MSG die a slow, quiet death. And this strategy, along with rigging the research they’ve presented to the FDA as evidence of MSG’s safety, has been incredibly effective, for this excitotoxic, brain damaging food additive is still being advertised as generally recognized as safe (GRAS) by the FDA.

So why the change in strategy? Or did Tia Rains make a terrible mistake. Terrible enough to get her fired.


Reminder: Please take a moment to comment on this petition at the link below.

Go to www.Regulations.gov, and put this docket number FDA-2021-P-0035 in the search box, click “search.” There you’ll see a link to the petition and a button that says “comment.”

NOTE: If you’re commenting on Tuesday or Thursday an extra step is needed as the FDA site is being updated twice a week. On those days:

Go to www.regulations.gov and put this docket number FDA-2021-P-0035 in the search box, click “search.”

On the left side, it will say “Document Type,” check the “other” box and then click on the second document titled “Citizen petition from Adrienne Samuels” and you’ll see a “Comment” button at the top.


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.

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