Truth in Labeling Campaign Blog
The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about MSG and manufactured free glutamate
Big Pharma is currently targeting kids as young as six with risky weight-loss drugs.
It’s the same industry-for-profit game plan we’ve seen played out over and over again: feed excitotoxic – brain-damaging, obesity-producing amino acids to the unborn and the newborn, and then offer another drug to allegedly treat the damage that industry just produced.
Adding a scoop of a protein powder to a shake or smoothie sure sounds like a good idea. After all, proteins are essential nutrients for the human body. They are one of the building blocks of body tissue and can also serve as fuel sources.
But there’s a very important distinction to be made between the protein in meat, fish, poultry (and other whole-food sources) and the powder that comes out of that box, bag, or jar. Read this post carefully before you touch another protein-fortified drink, snack bar or supplement. Your brain will thank you!
Amino acids
Proteins are polymer chains made of amino acids linked together by peptide bonds. During human digestion, proteins are broken down in the stomach to smaller polypeptide chains via hydrochloric acid and protease enzyme actions.
When protein is ingested and then broken into individual amino acids, those individual amino acids proceed slowly through the human digestion processes. Unless one is allergic or sensitive to the food that contains the protein, its amino acids continue along to be digested without adverse effect.
But if protein is broken into individual amino acids before it is ingested, those free amino acids take on a toxic potential that they would never have ingested as part of a whole protein.
Take glutamic acid (glutamate). When released from protein during digestion, glutamate is vital to normal body function. Often referred to as “a building block of protein,” it is the major neurotransmitter in the human body, carrying nerve impulses from glutamate stimuli to glutamate receptors throughout the body.
Yet, when freed from its protein source (be it from milk, peas, soy, etc.) and then consumed in amounts that exceed what the healthy human body was designed to accommodate, glutamate takes on “excitotoxic” properties. What was a normally functioning neurotransmitter turns hostile, firing repeatedly and damaging receptor cells in the brain and elsewhere until they die.
Excitotoxins
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) makes a labeling distinction between whole protein foods and potentially excitotoxic processed protein products that are made up of individual amino acids.
FDA rules say that an unadulterated tomato is to be called a “tomato.” A “pea” is required to be called a “pea” and whey is called “whey.” Those are their common or usual names. No reference is made to the fact that these protein-containing foods contain protein.
In contrast, when amino acids are freed from proteins such as peas, the resulting ingredients will be called “pea protein,” or “isolated pea protein,” “pea protein concentrate,” or “hydrolyzed pea protein.” And you’ll find these ingredients in all kinds of food products, including a popular dairy-free drink called Ripple.
Other food ingredients that have the same excitotoxic properties have names that include the words “hydrolyzed,” “autolyzed,” “amino acid,” “L-glutamate,” “glutamic acid,” and “L-glutamic acid.”
So, why haven’t you come across this information before? Why are products containing these brain-damaging excitotoxins even allowed on the market?
The answers lie in the dark history of an unregulated industry – “policed” by an FDA that chooses to look the other way. That history can be read in The Toxicity/Safety of Processed Free Glutamic Acid (MSG): A study in Suppression of Information.
Accountability in Research. 1999(6):259-310; by A. Samuels.
To learn more about how the FDA cooperates with Ajinomoto, the world’s largest producer of monosodium glutamate, check out this page at our website.
It’s really tricky to talk about glutamate. It’s one of a bundle of amino acids – molecules used by all living things to make proteins. Humans have always created glutamate in their bodies in carefully controlled amounts. And up until the time industry discovered how to make unlimited supplies of glutamate, you could generally get all the essential amino acids your body needed by eating a healthy balanced diet on top of the amino acids that you made in your body.
Then in 1957, what had been true wasn’t true anymore. In 1957 one of industry’s finest began to produce free glutamate in unlimited quantities. Now, humans were no longer dealing with carefully controlled amounts of free glutamate in their food. Instead, they were dealing with adverse reactions such as skin rashes, asthma, migraine headache and fibromyalgia. And although it only became evident years later, many also suffered brain damage followed by obesity and infertility.
Think about it. Ingesting the quantities of free glutamate that became available in 1957 means there is more glutamate flooding the human body than the cells of the body can use. And the excesses accumulate in what’s called interstitial tissue (areas between cells), where they join with other excitotoxic neurotransmitters, firing repeatedly until their targeted glutamate receptors die – causing brain damage.
If you notice that sometimes things besides monosodium glutamate (MSG) cause “MSG” reactions, it will help you to know that 60+ other ingredients contain the same brain-damaging manufactured-free-glutamate that is found in MSG https://bit.ly/3BdGYMY
Don’t let your concern about such things as skin rash, migraine headaches, and heart irregularities caused by monosodium glutamate (MSG) distract you from the fact that MSG kills brain cells (that don’t repair themselves) and in turn disrupts the endocrine system.
You might say that just about everyone has heard of MSG-migraines. Every headache clinic that we know of lists MSG as a headache trigger. And the Glutes either ignore the relationship entirely or simply say it isn’t so.
If pushed to the wall, industry always falls back on its old standby called Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, which erroneously implies that MSG-reactions are limited to those reported by Dr. Ho Man Kwok in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1968.
You’ll never hear the Glutes talking about MSG-induced brain damage, MSG-induced obesity, or MSG-induced infertility. If you read the medical literature, you’ll find studies of MSG-induced brain damage, MSG-induced retinal degeneration, MSG-induced obesity, and MSG-induced infertility going back over 60 years to research from Lucas and Newhouse in 1957. And you won’t hear about that from the major media outlets (and even the not-so-major ones). Ever since 60 Minutes aired a segment on MSG in 1991, no media outlet has even suggested that MSG might be toxic.
Data suppression could be considered an art form – one the Glutes have been mastering for decades. Want to know how that works? You’ll find the details in the published, peer-reviewed article The Toxicity/Safety of Processed Free Glutamic Acid (MSG): A Study in Suppression of Information.
Could it be that the addition of excitotoxic – brain damaging – amino acids to the daily diet of Americans has something to do with increases in autism, Alzheimer’s disease, macular degeneration and other glutamate-induced abnormalities that have mushroomed since 1957 when vast quantities of excitotoxic amino acids were first produced for use in processed food?
The concept of excitotoxic free glutamate is difficult to understand, but essential to our well-being.
Glutamate is a Jekyll and Hyde amino acid — on one hand a building block of protein and neurotransmitter essential to life itself. But when consumed in excess, in quantities greater than needed for normal body function, it becomes a brain-damaging excitotoxin firing repeatedly until its targeted glutamate receptors die.
Understanding excitotoxic — brain damaging — free glutamate is not easy. But until we recognize the role that glutamate plays not only in obesity and infertility, but in autism, macular degeneration, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis (all abnormalities of the central nervous system), there will be no way to avoid the damage that it does, and there will be no antidote. Adding to the challenge is the role that industry plays in suppressing information on the dangers of manufactured free glutamate while disseminating disinformation about its safety/toxicity.
Neurotransmitters
Concepts that today are commonplace, were unimagined 150-200 years ago. The first amino acid (named asparagine) was discovered in 1806 in France. Sixty years later, glutamate was identified by Karl Ritthausen. Then for years, despite its presence in every part of the body and the prominent role glutamate plays as a building block of protein, it went largely unnoticed by researchers.
In the mid 1950s, the high concentration of free glutamate in the brain had caused scientists to speculate about its role in brain function. There had been claims in the 1940s that it could improve cognitive acuity and raise the IQs of patients with mental impairment. And in the 1950s Hayashi had found that glutamate could cause convulsions and proposed that glutamate might be a central synaptic transmitter.
In 1959, Curtis, Phillis and Watkins demonstrated that glutamate depolarized and excited neurons in the central nervous system, however, various aspects of the action of glutamate seemed to argue strongly against a transmitter function. Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers that carry chemical signals (“messages”) from one neuron (nerve cell) to another brain cell identified as a receptor.
The following major neurotransmitters are frequently discussed in scientific journals: Dopamine, Serotonin, Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), Glutamate (glutamic acid), Norepinephrine, and Acetylcholine. Of these, glutamate is the only excitotoxic neurotransmitter.
Glutamate: an excitotoxic — brain-damaging — neurotransmitter
Over the course of the next ten years, glutamate was confirmed as a brain damaging neurotransmitter.
In 1969, Dr. John Olney actually coined the term “excitotoxin” to describe the brain-damaging actions of glutamic acid. Olney had been using Accent brand monosodium glutamate (MSG) in research as his source of free glutamate because Accent brand MSG (which is 100 percent MSG) was as effective for inflicting brain damage as more expensive pharmaceutical grade L-glutamate.
Olney’s identification of glutamate as an excitotoxic neurotransmitter triggered two initiatives.
The first came from researchers who wanted to understand the science of excitotoxicity. That included study of obesity, behavior disorders, reproductive dysfunction (including infertility), macular degeneration, autism, neurodegenerative diseases and more. And they explored remedies that might be used to ameliorate those conditions.
The second was introduced by a company that produced monosodium glutamate in the United States — a Japanese firm that set out to discredit the work of those who had exposed the fact that monosodium glutamate causes brain damage. In 1968 they launched an initiative to do whatever was necessary to keep the truth about monosodium glutamate’s toxicity from having a negative effect on their profits.
As a courtesy prior to publication, Olney had shared the results of research confirming that MSG causes brain lesions with its producer. In response, glutamate industry researchers produced studies that they claimed were replications of Olney’s work. But their procedures were different enough to guarantee that toxic doses had not been administered, or that all evidence that nerve cells had died would be obscured. Industry-sponsored researchers said they were replicating studies, but did not do so. Instead, discussion was phrased to suggest that studies were “replications,” and the conclusions were based on what was said, not on what was actually done.
By 1980, the evidence for MSG-induced brain damage and subsequent obesity was irrefutable, and glutamate industry interests moved from attempts to refute the work of Olney and others to simply asserting that Olney’s work was invalid because animal studies do not represent the human condition. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the agency charged with protecting consumers against impure, unsafe, and fraudulently labeled products, did not comment.
From that point forward, the defense against MSG-induced brain damage turned into a series of propaganda campaigns making the case that MSG did not cause adverse reactions such as numbness of the neck, arms, and back with headache, dizziness, and palpitations — or anything else MSG was accused of causing.
At the heart of this endeavor were a series of seriously flawed studies that each violated the assumptions their statistical analyses were built on. Publication of those studies ceased after Jack and Adrienne Samuels discovered and pointed out to the FDA that placebos used in glutamate-industry studies, each approved by the FDA, all contained excitotoxic aspartic acid known to cause reactions identical to reactions caused by MSG test material. The FDA did not comment.
Science vs. special interests
The science is clear:
Suppression of information about glutamate-induced toxicity is less obvious:
Prior to 1957, the first year that virtually unlimited (and therefore potentially brain damaging) amounts of free glutamate were produced for use in food, if there was new information about any amino acid, it was devoured by medical journals and sent in a press release to the media. But since the 1957 explosion in production of free glutamate, information about glutamic acid has been hidden from public view.
The Citizen Petitions filed in January and March of 2021 asking the Commissioner of Food and Drugs to:
have not been answered.
Freedom of Information Act requests asking for copies of studies or other evidence used by the FDA in coming to the conclusion that MSG is “safe” have been ignored.
And legislators who are charged with the oversight of the FDA? They’re not in the majority party or they’re on the wrong committees – or they’re just too busy to see to eliminating brain-damaging amino acids from food.
Despite clear evidence that manufactured free glutamate causes brain damage, and that the people who manufactured it are suppressing that information, unlimited amounts of excitotoxic free glutamate are being used in processed and ultra-processed food, promoting obesity, infertility and behavior dysfunction, autism, macular degeneration, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and a host of other abnormalities of the central nervous system.
Postscript
In 1957, the major U.S. producer of MSG and the free glutamate contained in it had started producing free glutamate in virtually unlimited amounts — amounts sufficient to cause that free glutamate to become excitotoxic — brain damaging.
Prior to 1957, excitotoxicity had been unknown.
Adrienne Samuels, Ph.D.
April, 2023
Monosodium glutamate is produced in the United States by the Ajinomoto, Co., Inc., which happens to be the world’s largest manufacturer of monosodium glutamate.
You may not appreciate the product that they sell, but you really should appreciate the ingenuity of their marketing — their sure-fire recipe for deception. This rich and powerful corporation twists the truth, misrepresents what is true and tells half-truths so very cleverly that its deceptions go largely unnoticed. Monsanto, the corn refiners (the high fructose corn syrup people), and the companies that made the artificial sweetener aspartame before Ajinomoto took it over, haven’t been nearly as clever as Ajinomoto in keeping their products from being the subjects of negative publicity.
As an example, here are nine “game plans,” tactics that have proven to be pure genius in the way they’ve managed to hoodwink consumers into believing MSG is a safe and natural product:
# 1: MSG is a poison that those in the flavor-enhancer industry maintain is perfectly safe. And here’s one way they skirt an out-and-out lie to do it — they never say that research shows that their product is safe, but rather claim that “Another study has failed to find that monosodium glutamate is harmful.” What they don’t tell you is that they’ve rigged all their studies to produce favorable results (failing to find…), going so far as to lace their placebos with aspartic acid, an excitotoxin found in aspartame. And if those studies don’t come out as planned, they are simply not published.
# 2: Research presented as evidence that monosodium glutamate is a harmless food additive has often been characterized as the “gold standard” — that is, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. But if you review those studies, you’ll find that the subjects were not drawn randomly from a defined population (a necessary condition given the statistical tests used), and that, in fact, the only random factor in those studies might have been the order in which subjects who were administered both test and placebo materials were given those materials.
It is a known fact that since 1978, if not before, placebos used in Ajinomoto’s double-blind studies had been laced with aspartic acid (in aspartame), an additive that kills brain cells and causes virtually the same adverse reactions as the glutamic acid in monosodium glutamate. One could, therefore, say with certainty, that the outcomes of the studies were skillfully manipulated — “controlled” — through the use of such placebos.
# 3: Chinese Restaurant Syndrome was the name given by editors to a 1968 article in the New England Journal of Medicine. In that article, Dr. Ho Man Kwok noted that after eating in a restaurant serving Northern Chinese food, he suffered three adverse reactions: numbness, tingling, and tightness of the chest that lasted for approximately two hours. Ajinomoto seized on this one man’s report of adverse reactions, and proceeded to act as though these were the only reactions caused by monosodium glutamate. For example, when subjects in certain double-blind studies did not react to monosodium glutamate treatment with numbness, tingling, or tightness of the chest, researchers would claim that once again it had been showed that monosodium glutamate is a harmless food additive. Other adverse reactions known to follow monosodium glutamate ingestion, rapid heartbeat, brain fog, and seizures, for example, would not have been considered.
# 4: A number of glutamate-industry studies used “well subjects” in their experiments, without defining “well subjects.’’ Only careful reading of a number of those studies will reveal that “well subjects” are people who have never experienced any of the reactions known to be caused by ingestion of MSG. These aren’t just healthy subjects — these are people who don’t react to monosodium glutamate (at least at the levels given to them). These people will be given monosodium glutamate and, as expected, won’t react. And glutamate-industry researchers running the study will claim that “Another study has failed to find that monosodium glutamate is harmful.”
# 5: A number of glutamate-industry studies were alleged to have been done using subjects who were sensitive to monosodium glutamate. In truth, subjects in these studies were volunteers, often university or medical school students, paid handsomely to participate — but only if they claimed to be sensitive to monosodium glutamate.
# 6: While companies like Monsanto represent themselves in defending the value of their products, until relatively recently Ajinomoto, a Japanese company, had Americans acting on their behalf, without mentioning Ajinomoto by name. Subtle though it may be, it’s not easy to criticize, or even think about something that doesn’t have a name.
# 7: It is said that authoritative bodies around the world have agreed that monosodium glutamate is a harmless food additive – and that’s true — sort of. Not revealed is the fact that those authoritative bodies did no research of their own. Instead, with rare exception, they were given material that had been produced and approved by the glutamate industry, and delivered by the glutamate industry’s International Glutamate Technical Committee (IGTC), or its agents. That includes material provided by the FDA, an agency with close ties to the glutamate industry.
# 8: Glutamate-industry agents take every opportunity to make legitimate research look bad. They will refer to studies wherein glutamate was administered to laboratory animals with phrases such as “…animal studies … often consisted of injecting super concentrated doses of MSG directly into creature’s abdomen…,” ignoring the fact that there are many studies that demonstrate that when monosodium glutamate is fed to laboratory animals, it causes brain damage and endocrine disorders such as obesity and infertility.
# 9: As of this writing, it is quite prevalent for MSG propaganda to say that “It all started with a 1968 letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine” (the letter from Dr. Ho Man Kwok mentioned above). In actuality, Ajinomoto’s defense of monosodium glutamate did begin in 1968, but it wasn’t about anything as benign-sounding as “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.” It was in response to research done by John Olney, M.D. of Washington University in St. Louis, which demonstrated that monosodium glutamate causes brain damage and endocrine disorders in unborn and newborn mice.
Although Olney’s findings were not published until 1969, he had shared them with Ajinomoto prior to publication.