Tag: msg

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Fraud?

Almost 30 years ago RN’s Rose Chop and Mary Silva writing in the Journal of Professional Nursing noted that “Scientific research typically has been founded on high ethical standards established by researchers in academia and health care research institutions. Scientific fraud, an act of deception or misrepresentation of one’s own work, violates these ethical standards. It can take the form of plagiarism, falsification of data, and irresponsible authorship. Scientific fraud has been attributed to misdirected attempts to attain high levels of personal and professional success. Researchers so prone commit scientific fraud in a search for promotion, status, tenure, and the obtaining of research grants.

With Big Food, we have seen another kind of scientific fraud – one that has nothing to do with attaining high levels of personal and professional success. Research grants are not needed by those who are paid up front to turn out these studies. And there is no need to falsify data as these studies were rigged in advance to produce the numbers that would be needed to draw the conclusions that their sponsor(s) had pre-ordained.

In a 2018 article titled “How do we tackle scientific fraud?” Anne Cooke writing for the British Society for Immunology stated that “fraud or scientific misconduct includes fabrication of data, falsification of data (including data selection and image manipulation), plagiarism (including self-plagiarism and use of other people’s data/ ideas), failure to meet ethical obligations such as obtaining patient consent, misuse of research funds, misrepresentation of data by, for example, not disclosing relevant findings, making inappropriate claims to authorship or failing to include an author who has made a significant contribution.”

Ajinomoto’s program for scientific fraud incorporates little or none of that. They don’t fabricate or falsify data, they simply design studies that will produce the results they are looking for.

If you use only subjects who have never had any reactions known to be caused by MSG, chances are good that the subjects in your study won’t have MSG reactions. If you limit your subjects to people on anti-migraine drugs, chances are that your subjects won’t have migraines. However, those designs aren’t foolproof.

Foolproof

There’s nothing second rate about Ajinomoto’s research. A variety of academics from various universities and medical schools were given study protocols and supervised by Andrew G. Ebert (Ajinomoto’s agent in charge of research) without the involvement of Ajinomoto being disclosed. Although they had common elements, no two studies were identical.

There was, however, one element that was shared by all — the use of excitotoxic amino acids in “placebos.” It’s actually elegant in its simplicity.

In a double-blind study, test material is given to a subject on one occasion, and on another occasion the subject is given a placebo. The placebo, if it’s a true placebo, looks, tastes and smells like the test material, but it will not cause a reaction. If the subject reacts to the inert placebo, the researchers could conclude that the subject is some kind of nut case who might react to anything, and therefore any reactions to MSG test material are coming from what the subject was thinking or imagining, not from the MSG. In industry studies of MSG-safety, subjects were not given true placebos.

That’s it. Simple. By giving subjects alleged placebos that cause the “right” reactions, there may be as many reactions to placebos as there are to MSG test material. From that, researchers could declare they had demonstrated that people really don’t react to MSG. But to make sure the conclusion that MSG is harmless would be beyond reproach, glutamate-industry researchers guaranteed that subjects would react to placebos with the same reactions that are caused by MSG. They did that by using aspartame as the toxic ingredient in their placebos, which worked well for them because the aspartic acid in aspartame and the glutamic acid in MSG cause virtually identical reactions (as well as identical brain damage). Having set that up, glutamate-industry researchers (and the propaganda artists who quote them) will say “These people aren’t sensitive to MSG, they reacted to the ‘placebo’ too.” Case closed!

Resources
FDA Adverse Reactions Monitoring System (ARMS) – Collected Reports of Adverse reactions to monosodium glutamate.

FDA Adverse Reactions Monitoring System (ARMS) – Collected Reports of Adverse reactions to Aspartame.


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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Without MSG, processed food wouldn’t sell — and there would be no obesity epidemic.

Have you ever stopped to consider that before there was ultra-processed food there was no obesity epidemic? And without MSG there wouldn’t be many, if any, ultra-processed foods on the market.

Flavor-enhancing ingredients aren’t highly visible in processed food, but they’re absolutely essential. Flavor enhancers mask off-flavors, make chemicals taste like food and bring what industry calls an “umami taste” to otherwise bland and unappetizing products.

Those who reap huge profits from the sale of processed foods wouldn’t have a foot in the door without flavor enhancers and won’t be giving them up any time soon. That’s despite the fact that each and every one of them contains excitotoxic (brain damaging) glutamic acid – a.k.a. glutamate.

There are three prerequisites for producing brain damage that will lead to obesity.

First is a brain that is vulnerable to damage due to injury or the immaturity of a fetus or newborn.

Second is sufficient free glutamate — or other potentially excitotoxic material to produce the excesses needed to become excitotoxic. More than enough free glutamate is present in processed foods to accomplish that.

Third, there needs to be a way to deliver this excitotoxic material to a vulnerable brain.

The fetus and newborn have brains that are vulnerable to damage by excitotoxins

In the 1970s it was demonstrated that the brains of newborn animals are vulnerable to glutamate insult. Brain damage, followed by obesity was produced in newborn mice (whose brains, like those of humans, are not fully developed). A student in Dr. John Olney’s lab had observed that mice being used in studies of glutamate-induced retinal dysfunction had become grotesquely obese. A series of studies by Olney and others followed. Many were studies of MSG fed to animals.

Today, there is more than sufficient excitotoxic glutamic acid in ultra-processed food, “fake” food, protein substitutes, and dietary supplements to cause excitotoxicity

When present in amounts needed for normal body function, the neurotransmitter glutamic acid is essential. But when accumulated in amounts greater than the body requires, glutamic acid becomes an excitotoxic neurotransmitter, firing repeatedly and damaging the cells that host targeted glutamate-receptors and/or causing death by over-exciting those glutamate receptors until their host cells die.

Additional confirmation of the brain-damaging effects of excitotoxic free glutamic acid comes from research focused on identifying and understanding human diseases and abnormalities associated with glutamate, often for the purpose of finding drugs that would mitigate glutamate’s adverse effects. By 1980, glutamate-associated disorders such as headaches, asthma, diabetes, muscle pain, atrial fibrillation, ischemia, trauma, seizures, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, depression, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), epilepsy, addiction, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), frontotemporal dementia and autism were on the rise, and evidence of the brain-damaging effects of glutamate were generally accepted by the scientific community.

To become excitotoxic, glutamic acid must be accumulated in considerable quantity. There have always been excitotoxins, although not in food in excessive amounts. But that changed in 1957 when extraction of glutamate from a protein source (which had been a slow and costly method) was replaced by carefully selected genetically modified bacteria that excrete glutamate through their cell walls. That transformation allowed, and still allows, for virtually unlimited production of manufactured free glutamate and MSG.

It wasn’t long before food manufacturers found that profits could be increased by using manufactured free glutamate to produce their own flavor-enhancing additives, and dozens of excitotoxic ingredients were added to the food supply.

Over the next two decades foods containing manufactured/processed free glutamate in ingredients such as hydrolyzed proteins, yeast extracts, maltodextrin, soy protein isolate and MSG flooded the marketplace. And the large amounts of manufactured free glutamate needed to cause excitotoxicity became readily available to anyone consuming multiple processed food products during the course of a day.

Excitotoxins are delivered to the vulnerable brains of fetuses and newborns by their pregnant mothers

Delivery of excitotoxins to the fetus and newborn is easy to understand. Nourishment (and not so nourishing material) is delivered to the fetus in the form of material ingested by a pregnant woman and passed to the fetus through the placenta. A newborn is nourished through its mothers’ milk.

Data from Frieder and Grimm and others confirm that free glutamate can be passed in excessive quantities to neonates and fetuses by expectant mothers who ingest excessive amounts. Glutamate can cross the placenta during pregnancy, can cross the blood brain barrier (BBB) in an unregulated manner during development and can pass through the five circumventricular organs (unique areas of the brain that lie outside the BBB) which are leaky at best at any stage of life. Moreover, the BBB is easily damaged by fever, stroke, trauma to the head, seizures, ingestion of MSG, and the normal process of aging. Similar to drugs and alcohol, free glutamate can also be passed to infants through mothers’ milk.

The obesity epidemic was set in motion as the amount of manufactured free glutamate in processed food, “fake” food, protein substitutes, and dietary supplements became sufficient to wipe out brain cells in the area of the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus that would have controlled satiety, appetite, and food intake had they not been obliterated by flavor-enhancers like MSG.


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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Industry’s FDA

It’s no secret that the FDA represents the interests of Big Food and Big Pharma – not consumers. Here is a small example of its allegiance to large corporations that we hadn’t noticed before. Unfortunately, many people still believe that if the FDA says something it must be true.

The following comes from the FDA page called “Questions and Answers on Monosodium glutamate (MSG)” found here: https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/questions-and-answers-monosodium-glutamate-msg accessed on 7/22/2020.

What is MSG?

The FDA says that monosodium glutamate (MSG) is the sodium salt of the common amino acid glutamic acid. Glutamic acid is naturally present in our bodies, and in many foods and food additives.

How is it made?

The FDA says that MSG occurs naturally in many foods, such as tomatoes and cheese. People around the world have eaten glutamate-rich foods throughout history. For example, a historical dish in the Asian community is a glutamate-rich seaweed broth. In 1908, a Japanese professor named Kikunae Ikeda was able to extract glutamate from this broth and determined that glutamate provided the savory taste to the soup. Professor Ikeda then filed a patent to produce MSG and commercial production started the following year.

What is MSG?

Mono (single) sodium glutamate in science-speak is glutamate tied to a sodium ion, just as monopotassium glutamate would be glutamate tied to a potassium ion. That’s the makeup of the mono sodium glutamate occurring naturally in our bodies. (Glutamate is rarely found “free,” but is ordinarily tied to an ion such as sodium or potassium.)

The monosodium glutamate that Ajinomoto is selling is made up of manufactured glutamate, the impurities that invariable accompany manufactured glutamate, and sodium.

How is it made?

MSG doesn’t occur naturally anywhere — it’s made – manufactured! The monosodium glutamate that Ajinomoto is selling is a product made in Ajinomoto’s plant in Eddyville Iowa where glutamate is produced by genetically modified bacteria that secrete glutamate through their cell walls, which is then mixed with sodium. (The process for manufacturing MSG has been patented, and as the process is improved over time new patents are awarded.)

Want to learn more about how the FDA cooperates with industry? You’ll find it on the webpage of the Truth in Labeling Campaign, on Pinterest, in It Wasn’t Alzheimer’s, It Was MSG, in The toxicity/safety of processed free glutamic acid (MSG): A study in suppression of information, and in countless books such as White Wash by Carey Gillam, and Eating May Be Hazardous To Your Health – The Case Against Food Additives by J. Verrett and J. Carper.


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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Infertility? You could blame it on your mother – but there really was no way for her to have known.

According to the American Pregnancy Association, there are three main causes of infertility in males: a hypothalamic or pituitary disorder (1-2%), gonad disorder (30-40%), and sperm transport disorder (10-20%). That leaves 40-50% of cases with unknown causes.

None of these, however, is a root cause of infertility. They are names of categories of disorders that define infertility. Infertility may be traced back to a hypothalamic or pituitary disorder, for example, but the question remains –what caused those disorders to begin with?

Science combined with simple logic focused on problem solving says that hypothalamic, pituitary, gonad and sperm transport disorders are caused by damage done to the vulnerable, developing brains of fetuses and infants by brain-damaging chemicals, delivered by pregnant and lactating women.

1) Brain damage, followed by reproductive disorders, can be produced in human fetuses and newborns whose brains are not fully developed.

2) Excitotoxic amino acids (glutamic acid and aspartic acid) will cause brain damage when delivered in quantity to developing, vulnerable brains.

3) Brain-damaging amino acids consumed by pregnant and lactating women will be passed to their fetus through the placenta and to infants through mother’s milk.

4) Excitotoxic amino acids are readily available in processed and ultra-processed foods, protein powders and protein drinks, protein substitutes, flavor enhancers, pharmaceuticals, dietary supplements, cosmetics, and vaccine excipients.

Here’s how it works

A study demonstrating glutamate-induced brain damage was published in Science by John Olney, M.D. way back in 1969, titled “Brain lesions, obesity, and other disturbances in mice treated with monosodium glutamate.” Olney established that:

1) Brain damage, followed by reproductive disorders, can be produced in newborn mice, whose brains are not fully developed. A student in Olney’s lab had observed that mice being used in studies of glutamate-induced retinal dysfunction had become grotesquely obese. A series of studies by Olney and others followed. Many of them were studies of MSG fed to animals.

2) Excitotoxic amino acids (glutamic acid and aspartic acid) will cause brain damage when delivered in quantity to the vulnerable brains of neonatal mice.

When present in amounts needed for normal body function, glutamic acid is essential. But when accumulated in amounts greater than that needed for normal body function, the neurotransmitter glutamic acid becomes an excitotoxic neurotransmitter, firing repeatedly, damaging the cells that host targeted glutamate-receptors and/or causing death by over-exciting those glutamate receptors until their host cells die.

3) Excitotoxic amino acids can be delivered to neonatal mice through feeding.

In the laboratory, researchers manipulated dosage of glutamic acid and aspartic acid until they found those that were lethal to brain cells.

Additional confirmation of the brain-damaging effects of excitotoxic free glutamic acid comes from research focused on identifying and understanding human diseases and abnormalities associated with glutamate, often for the purpose of finding drugs that would mitigate glutamate’s adverse effects. By 1980, glutamate-associated disorders such as headaches, asthma, diabetes, muscle pain, atrial fibrillation, ischemia, trauma, seizures, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, depression, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), epilepsy, addiction, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), frontotemporal dementia and autism were on the rise, and evidence of the brain-damaging effects of glutamate were generally accepted by the scientific community.

Having provided evidence that brain lesions can be induced in fetuses and neonates thru the introduction of excitotoxins, and having pointed out that glutamic acid is an excitotoxin, the only question that remains is how excitotoxic glutamic acid could get to the vulnerable brain of the infant or the fetus causing brain damage, destroying those areas of the arcuate nucleus that would regulate reproductive function had they not been obliterated.

To be excitotoxic, glutamic acid has to be accumulated in considerable quantity. There have always been excitotoxins, although not in food in excessive amounts. But that changed in 1957 when there was a transformation in the method of producing the glutamate used in MSG from extraction of glutamate from a protein source, which had been a slow and costly method, to using carefully selected genetically modified bacteria to excrete glutamate through their cell walls. That allowed virtually unlimited production of manufactured free glutamate and MSG.

It wasn’t long before food manufacturers found that profits could be increased by using manufactured free glutamate to produce their own flavor-enhancing additives, and dozens of excitotoxic ingredients were added to the food supply. Over the next two decades, the marketplace became flooded with manufactured/processed free glutamate in ingredients such as hydrolyzed proteins, yeast extracts, maltodextrin, soy protein isolate and MSG — and the large amounts of manufactured free glutamate needed to cause excitotoxicity became readily available to anyone consuming a number of processed food products during the course of a day.

Today, there is more than sufficient excitotoxic glutamic acid in food, “fake” food and dietary supplements to cause excitotoxicity.

Once it is understood that excitotoxins are readily available, transport to fetus and newborn becomes easy to understand. Nourishment (and not so nourishing material) is delivered to the fetus in the form of material ingested by a pregnant woman and passed to the fetus through the placenta.

Data confirm that free glutamate can be passed in excessive quantities to neonates and fetuses by expectant mothers who ingest excessive amounts. Glutamate can cross the placenta during pregnancy, can cross the blood brain barrier (BBB) in an unregulated manner during development and can pass through the five circumventricular organs (unique areas of the brain that lie outside the BBB) which are leaky at best at any stage of life. Moreover, the BBB is easily damaged by fever, stroke, trauma to the head, seizures, ingestion of MSG, and the normal process of aging. Similar to drugs and alcohol, free glutamate can also be passed to infants through mothers’ milk.

But a crisis? All of a sudden?

There has always been infertility, but not in such numbers that it could be called a crisis. There have always been amino acids that could become excitotoxic, but not to the extent that they could accumulate and become excitotoxic. The infertility crisis began after amino acids with excitotoxic potential became available in the quantity necessary to cause them to become excitotoxic – made possible by the 1957 introduction of monosodium glutamate produced by bacterial fermentation.

Science combined with a good dose of logic tell us that glutamic acid passed to fetus and neonate by pregnant and lactating women is the root cause of the infertility crisis.


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.

Resources

American Pregnancy Association https://americanpregnancy.org/getting-pregnant/male-infertility/

Olney JW. Brain lesions, obesity, and other disturbances in mice treated with monosodium glutamate. Science. 1969;164(880):719-721.

Olney JW. Glutamate-induced neuronal necrosis in the infant mouse hypothalamus. J Neuropathol Exp Neurol. 1971;30(1):75-90.

Burde RM, Schainker B, Kayes J. Acute effect of oral and subcutaneous administration of monosodium glutamate on the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus in mice and rats. Nature. 1971;233(5314):58-60.

Olney JW, Sharpe LG, Feigin RD. Glutamate-induced brain damage in infant primates. J Neuropathol Exp Neurol. 1972;31(3):464-488.

Burde RM, Schainker B, Kayes J. Monosodium glutamate: necrosis of hypothalamic neurons in infant rats and mice following either oral or subcutaneous administration. J Neuropathol Exp Neurol. 1972;31(1):181.

Olney JW, Rhee V, DeGubareff T. Neurotoxic effects of glutamate on mouse area postrema. Brain Res. 1977;120(1):151-157.

Olney JW, Ho OL. Brain damage in infant mice following oral intake of glutamate, aspartate or cystine. Nature. 1970;227:609-611.

Lemkey-Johnston N, Reynolds WA. Nature and extent of brain lesions in mice related to ingestion of monosodium glutamate: a light and electron microscope study. J Neuropath Exp Neurol. 1974;33(1):74-97.

Takasaki, Y. Protective effect of mono- and disaccharides on glutamate-induced brain damage in mice. Toxicol Lett. 1979;4(3): 205-210.

Takasaki, Y. Protective effect of arginine, leucine, and preinjection of insulin on glutamate neurotoxicity in mice. Toxicol Lett. 1980;5(1):39-44.

Lemkey-Johnston, N, Reynolds WA. Nature and extent of brain lesions in mice related to ingestion of monosodium glutamate: a light and electron microscope study. J Neuropath Exp Neurol. 1974;33(1):74-97.

Bahadoran Z, Mirmiran P, Ghasemi A. Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)-Induced Animal Model of Type 2 Diabetes. Methods Mol Biol. 2019;1916:49-65.

Sharma A. Monosodium glutamate-induced oxidative kidney damage and possible mechanisms: a mini-review. J Biomed Sci. 2015;22:22:93.

Kurose T, Sugano E, Sugai A, Shiraiwa R, Kato M, Mitsuguchi Y, Takai Y, Tabata K, Honma Y, Tomita H. Neuroprotective effect of a dietary supplement against glutamate-induced excitotoxicity in retina. Int J Ophthalmol. 2019;12(8):1231-1237.

Moneret-Vautrin DA. Monosodium glutamate-induced asthma: study of the potential risk of 30 asthmatics and review of the literature. Allerg Immunol (Paris). 987;19(1):29-35.
Olloquequi J, Cornejo-Córdova E, Verdaguer E, Soriano FX, Binvignat O, Auladell C, Camins A. Excitotoxicity in the pathogenesis of neurological and psychiatric disorders: Therapeutic implications. J Psychopharmacol. 2018;32(3):265-275.

Binvignat O, Olloquequi J. Excitotoxicity as a Target against Neurodegenerative Processes. Curr Pharm Des. 2020 Jan 13. doi:10.2174/1381612826666200113162641.

Hashimoto S. Discovery and History of Amino Acid Fermentation.
Adv Biochem Eng Biotechnol. 2017;159:15-34.

Sano C. History of glutamate production. Am J Clin Nutr. 2009;90(3):728S-732S.

Frieder B, Grimm VE. Prenatal monosodium glutamate (MSG) treatment given through the mother’s diet causes behavioral deficits in rat offspring. Intern J Neurosci. 1984;23(2):117-126.

Gao J, Wu J, Zhao XN, Zhang WN, Zhang YY, Zhang ZX. [Transplacental neurotoxic effects of monosodium glutamate on structures and functions of specific brain areas of filial mice.] Sheng Li Hsueh Pao Acta Physiologica Sinica. 1994;46(1):44-51.

Yu T, Zhao Y, Shi W, Ma R, Yu L. Effects of maternal oral administration of monosodium glutamate at a late stage of pregnancy on developing mouse fetal brain. Brain Res. 1997;747(2):195-206.

Arya V, Demarco VG, Issar M, Hochhaus G. Contrary to adult, neonatal rats show pronounced brain uptake of corticosteroids.
Drug Metab Dispos. 2006;34(6):939-42.

Moretti R, Pansiot J, Bettati D, Strazielle N, Ghersi-Egea JF, Damante G, Fleiss B, Titomanlio L, Gressens P. Blood-brain barrier dysfunction in disorders of the developing brain. Front Neurosci. 2015 Feb 17;9:40.

Price MT, Olney JW, Lowry OH, Buchsbaum S. Uptake of exogenous glutamate and aspartate by circumventricular organs but not other regions of brain. J Neurochem. 1981;36(5):1774-1780.

Skultetyova I, Tokarev D, Jezova D. Stress-induced increase in blood-brain barrier permeability in control and monosodium glutamate-treated rats. Brain Res Bull. 1998;45(2):175-178.

Broadwell RD, Sofroniew MV. Serum proteins bypass the blood-brain fluid barriers for extracellular entry to the central nervous system. Exp Neurol. 1993;120(2):245-263.

Blaylock RL. Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Health Press; 1994.

Nemeroff CB, Crisley FD. Monosodium L-glutamate induced convulsions: temporary alteration in blood-brain barrier permeability to plasma proteins. Environ Physiol Biochem. 1975;5(6):389-395.

Brown RA, Dakkak H, Seabrook JA. Is Breast Best? Examining the effects of alcohol and cannabis use during lactation. J Neonatal Perinatal Med. 2018;11(4):345-356.

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CAUTION!

Are the plant-based diets you’re thinking about eating made with plants or in plants?

Don’t be taken in by the con artists whose “plant based” products are made out of chemicals in chemical factories with virtually nothing added that’s grown in water or in the ground.


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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The art of hiding MfG

Artists don’t just paint, sing, play an instrument or act. Some of the best artists out there utilize their talents to deceive you.

At the Truth in Labeling Campaign we’ve run into many great artists working in public relations firms. They understand human nature and can paint word pictures to sell you almost anything.

We’ve met men and women who have elevated lying to an art form. And rarely do their targets know that they’re being deceived. Then there are the marketing people who often employ a variety of specialized artists to push their products.

Some who hide manufactured free glutamate (MfG), the toxic ingredient in MSG, do it cleverly but not creatively. They use distraction to draw your focus away from the dangers of their product, talking about the benefits of low salt, muscle building, or the umami flavor. And they’ll very likely use ingredients that you’re not going to recognize as containing MfG.

Ingredients called “glutamic acid” and “disodium inosinate” are prime examples. You’ll find them in flavor enhancers like Braggs Aminos and soups and bouillon like Minor’s soup bases.

Not to be overlooked are those who sell products containing MfG to bakeries and restaurants claiming that their products are free of MSG, and the bakeries and restaurants that use those products as though they contained no MfG. Those businesses don’t routinely display the names of ingredients used in their products, and some are proud to make the misleading claim that they don’t use MSG (the name that most consumers give to all ingredients that contain MfG). That’s not even artful lying. It’s just a subterfuge.




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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Why would a thinking person eat something that contains MSG – or one of its toxic substitutes?

Research has demonstrated:

Dose dependent toxicity of glutamic acid: A review. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10942912.2020.1733016
(Samuels A. International Journal of Food Properties. 2020;23:1, 412-419, DOI: 10.1080/10942912.2020.1733016)

“Increased glutamate transmission in the brain is associated with addictive-like behaviors.” https://www.phillyvoice.com/temple-health-cocaine-addiction-augmentin-study-fmri-clavulanic-acid-philadelphia/ (Temple University)

An early increase in glutamate is critical for the development of depression-like behavior in a chronic restraint stress (CRS) model. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32505508/ (Jing LiLongze Sha, Qi X. Brain Research Bulletin. 2020 June 4)

Ameliorative effect of α-tocopherol on monosodium glutamate-induced cardiac histological alterations and oxidative stress. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22549309/
(Paul S, Mohanan A, Varghese MV, Alex M, Nair H. J Sci Food Agric. 2012 Dec;92(15):3002-6)

Monosodium Glutamate-Induced Oxidative Kidney Damage and Possible Mechanisms: A Mini-Review. https://jbiomedsci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12929-015-0192-5  (Sharma A. J Biomed Sci. 2015 Oct 22;22:93. )

Ginger and Propolis Exert Neuroprotective Effects against MonosodiumGlutamate-Induced Neurotoxicity in Rats. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6150236/
(Hussein UK, Hassan NEY, Elhalwagy MEA, Zaki AR, Abubakr HO, Nagulapalli Venkata KC, Jang KY, Bishayee A. Molecules. 2017 Nov 8;22(11):1928. )

Resistance exercise reduces memory impairment induced by monosodiumglutamate in male and female rats. https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1113/EP086198
(Araujo PCO, Quines CB, Jardim NS, Leite MR, Nogueira CW. Exp Physiol. 2017 Jul 1;102(7):845-853.)

So why on earth would a thinking person eat something like MSG, hydrolyzed mung beans, yeast extract, autolyzed yeast or maltodextrin in things like Just Egg, Impossible Burger, Emerge Plant-Based Patties, Beyond Meat, Bragg’s Aminos, or Campbell’s Classic Cream of Chicken Soup?



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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Concerned about infertility?

In this study rats were given doses of MSG to lower testosterone levels and cause “toxicity in testicular tissue.” The group treated with zinc oxide nanoparticles/green tea were “significantly” protected against MSG damage to the testis.

Good to know, but wouldn’t it be better to avoid MSG ingestion in the first place than to search out an antidote?

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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Cries of hate added to claims of racism fuel Ajinomoto’s latest campaign to push sales of MSG

Fresh out of its victory lap in “convincing” the Merriam-Webster online dictionary folks to change its definition of Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, Ajinomoto, the world’s largest manufacturer of monosodium glutamate, has added a new dimension to their “swallow the MSG campaign,” hoping that people will swallow their propaganda and think nothing of consuming processed foods that contain MSG. This one is attempting to convince consumers that any choice to avoid Chinese restaurants is based on hate and racism – when it is more likely based on the good sense of decreasing exposure to toxic substances like MSG during a pandemic.

Led by one of its PR firms, Edelman Communications, the campaign dubbed #TakeOutHate, is flooding social media with a group of “influencers” telling consumers to order huge amounts of Chinese take-out and share a photo online. “Don’t let that hate get between you and these shrimp dumps,” we’re told.

Ajinomoto, it seems, has decided to play victim amid growing consumer awareness about the dangers of consuming MSG. In telling about its new #TakeoutHate blitz, Ajinomoto says on its website that “as the company that was founded on the discovery of MSG, we are no stranger to the impact of unfair stigma.”

But the stigma attached to a company that pumps excitotoxic (brain damaging) amino acids into processed foods is hardly unfair. What’s really unfair is how Ajinomoto can harness the power of the media with big bucks and a PR firm that has all the right contacts to lie to the public about the product it produces. Reporters of all stripes from media outlets of all sizes are more than happy to parrot numerous bold-faced falsehoods time and time again without giving it a second thought.

Truth be told, monosodium glutamate has been researched extensively by Ajinomoto-funded researchers who rigged their studies with things like excitotoxic ingredients in placebos and concluded that MSG is harmless. MSG is a manufactured additive, and the product called MSG can’t be produced without unwanted byproducts of production called impurities. The glutamate in the human body has none of those impurities. And since 1957, the glutamate in MSG has been manufactured using carefully selected genetically modified bacteria that excrete glutamate through their cell walls – hardly the way that yogurt and wine are made.

But as more and more people, some through personal experience and others through research, learn about the toxic nature of MSG and the other 40+ ingredients that contain its toxic Manufactured free Glutamate, or MfG as we abbreviate it, they are choosing to avoid it wherever and however they can.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool the people who know they get sick from eating MSG.

And that’s not “hate,” and it’s certainly not racism.

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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If you’re wondering what the umami flavor is, be confused no more

Umami is often described as that marvelous flavor experience you get when foods are at their peak, or served with a little something that gives the taste buds a boost to enhance that already delicious flavor.

Kikunae Ikeda discovered that little something early in the 20th century when he realized that pairing foods with a touch of seaweed could create a desirable taste sensation. It has also been observed by foodies that there is something about mushrooms and tomatoes that accomplishes the same thing. Start with good fresh food, pair it with seaweed, mushrooms, or tomatoes, and with those flavor-enhancers you can get heaven on a plate.

There are other ways to make food tasty. Garlic and onions have been recognized for centuries along with a multitude of other spices and seasonings. But they aren’t flavor enhancers. They don’t improve the flavor of foods, they simply add to it.

Ikeda, who was a chemist, did more than just notice the flavor-enhancing capacity of seaweed. That something else he found was chemically analyzed, put into a bottle, patented, and is now known as monosodium glutamate or MSG. Ikeda had discovered that it was glutamate, an amino acid found in considerable quantity in seaweed, that gave taste buds a boost, enhancing the flavor of foods seaweed was paired with.

The story of how that works differs depending on the source. Is it being told by those who profit from the sale of MSG, or by independent scientists? Ajinomoto has developed a PR narrative built around changing MSG’s identify from a pre-1969 flavor-enhancer to a post-2000 fifth taste. According to Ajinomoto, MSG has a taste of its own. According to Ajinomoto, there are MSG receptors just as there are receptors for sweet, sour, bitter, and salty.

Independent scientists are more likely to point out that what Ajinomoto’s people refer to as MSG-receptors, are actually glutamate receptors. Glutamate, which is a neurotransmitter, stimulates glutamate receptors in the mouth and on the tongue causing the cells on which those receptors are located to swell, so to speak. And these larger, swollen surfaces triggered by MSG stimulation cause food consumed with MSG to be perceived as having a “bigger” taste than it would otherwise.

In 1969, John W. Olney, M.D., published the first of several papers that detailed the facts of MSG-induced toxicity. A year earlier, the New England Journal of Medicine had published a letter titled “Chinese-restaurant Syndrome.” Since that time Ajinomoto has worked vigorously to refute the findings of Olney and others or simply make sure they don’t have public exposure, downplay the reactions reported by individuals who are poisoned by MSG, or do whatever else is necessary to convince consumers that MSG is a harmless product. (That subject is dealt with in detail elsewhere.)

Possibly Ajinomoto’s most successful marketing tool has been to pair the acronym “MSG” with the word “umami.” Just as Pavlov’s dogs learned to anticipate food when a bell was sounded, so are humans being conditioned to associate the feel-good word “umami” with the food additive MSG.

Responding to the growing awareness that the ingredient called monosodium glutamate causes obesity and infertility, along with adverse reactions like tachycardia, migraine headache, asthma, and seizures, Ajinomoto has been striving to fool consumers by giving that ingredient a new name. Don’t reduce its toxicity (if indeed that could be done). Just covertly rebrand MSG.

The rebranding process has evolved slowly, and because Ajinomoto’s narrative changes from time to time depending on the PR firm employed and the marketing plan being executed, the details are not necessarily crystal clear. In hindsight it appears that the first step was to get people to believe that monosodium glutamate was more than the flavor enhancer previously described by Ajinomoto in food encyclopedias. That was before the game plan was changed to get people to believe that monosodium glutamate was a basic taste, and that there were specific taste receptors for MSG in the human body.

To facilitate that change, researchers were encouraged to conduct studies underwritten (directly or indirectly) by Ajinomoto for the purpose of finding something from which they could conclude the MSG had a taste of its own. Discussion of that research is beyond the scope of this paper, but it consists in large part of doing multiple studies, publishing only the one in a hundred that comes out as desired by industry and reporting none of the others. There are indeed numbers of published studies that Ajinomoto will point to as evidence that MSG is a fifth taste. (There are also published studies that Ajinomoto will point to as evidence that MSG is a harmless food additive – studies that included use of placebos containing excitotoxic aspartic acid which causes brain damage and adverse reactions identical to that caused by the excitotoxic glutamic acid component of MSG.) And there are no studies that would dispute the industry-sponsored ones because, at least in part, there would be no funding for such research.

With studies alleging that MSG has a taste of its own, different from salty, sweet, bitter, and sour, wordsmiths began spinning industry’s tale. Slowly, in story after story, MSG would be referred to as an ingredient – like sugar and salt are ingredients. Not a flavor enhancer. An ingredient with a taste of its own.

And then that ingredient, which had, and still has a bad name, would be rebranded. The new name would be “umami,” a word that has been in the Japanese vocabulary for over a century meaning “delicious taste.”

Today, the word “umami” means different things to different people. A chef concerned with use of wholesome ingredients may brag that his creations are flavorful — are the essence of umami.

But to those who manufacture and sell MSG, “umami” is a marketing tool used to sell their product. Clearly lots of people have bought into Ajinomoto’s story (or maybe it’s more correct to say that Ajinomoto has bought lots of people). But if you delve deeply into market reports, or have friends in the industry, you will find that their propaganda isn’t working the way they had anticipated, and Ajinomoto is losing money.

The rigged research, the deceptive and misleading statements, and the bold-faced lies haven’t stemmed the tide of reports of MSG-induced reactions. Not even Edelman’s multimillion-dollar campaign to clear MSG’s bad name seems to have made a difference. It will be interesting to see how quickly chefs and other celebrities who now talk about “umami” realize that they are being used by Ajinomoto to promote a toxic product.

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.