re is msg sensitivity superstition in article apr spdcc com dyer spdcc com steve dyer writes in article apr cunews carleton ca wcsbeau alfred carleton ca opirg writes maybe you missed it amidst the flurry of responses you mean the responses some of which pointed to double blind tests which show no such chinese restaurant effect unique to msg it s elicited by the placebo as well many people responded with more anecdotal stories i think its safe to say the original poster is already familiar with such stories presumably he wants hard info to substantiate or refute claims about msg making people ill similarly debunking such claims without doing research whether literature and lab is equally beside the point the original poster no doubt already knows that some people think chinese restaurant syndrome is bogus placebos are all very interesting but irrelevant to the question of what effects msg has you could have real effects and placebo effects people may have allergies in addition yet again the use of this newsgroup is hampered by people not restricting their posts to matters they have substantial knowledge of like youself someone who can read a scientific paper and apparently come away from it with bizarrely cracked ideas which have nothing to do with the use of this substance in human nutrition have you read olney s work i fail to see how citing results from peer reviewed studies qualifies as bizarrely cracked for cites on msg look up almost anything by john w olney a toxicologist who has studied the effects of msg on the brain and on development it is undisputed in the literature that msg is an excitotoxic food additive no it s undisputed in the literature that glutamate is an amino acid which is an excitatory neurotransmitter there is also evidence that excessive release of glutamate may be involved in the pathology of certain conditions like stroke drowning and lou gehrig s disease just to name a few this is a completely different issue than the use of this ubiquitous amino acid in foods people are not receiving intra ventricular injections of glutamate tests have been done on rhesus monkeys as well i have never seen a study where the mode of administration was intra ventricular the glu and asp were administered orally some studies used iv and sc intra ventricular is not a normal admin method for food tox studies for obvious reasons you must not have read the peer reviewed works that i referred to or you would never have come up with this brain injection bunk too much in the diet and the system gets thrown off sez you such an effect in humans has not been demonstrated in any controlled studies infant mice and other models are useful as far as they go but they re not relevant to the matter at hand which is not to say that i favor its use in things like baby food a patently ridiculous use of the additive but we have no reason to believe that msg in the diet effects humans adversely pardon me but where are you getting this from have you read the journals have you done a thorough literature search but you re right mice aren t the best to study this on they re four times less sensitive than humans to msg glutamate and aspartate also an excitotoxin are necessary in small amounts and are freely available in many foods but the amounts added by industry are far above the amounts that would normally be encountered in a ny single food wrong do you know how much aspartate or phenylalanine is in a soft drink milligrams worth compare that to a glass of milk do you know how much glutamate is present in most protein containing foods compared to that added by the use of msg the point is exceeding the window of course they re amino acids note that people with pku cannot tolerate any phenylalanine olney s research compared infant human diets specifically the amount of freely available glu in mother s milk versus commercial baby foods vs typical lunch items from the standard american diet such as packaged soup mixes he found that one could exceed the projected safety margin for infant humans by at least four fold in a single meal of processed foods mother s milk was well below the effective dose read olney s review paper in prog brain res and check his sources they are impecable there is no dispute impeccable there most certainly is a dispute between who over what i would be most interested in seeing you provide peer reviewed non food industry funded citations to articles disputing that msg has no effects whatsoever steve dyer dyer ursa major spdcc com aka ima harvard rayssd linus m c spdcc dyer hmm com why am i not surprised dianne murray wcsbeau ccs carleton ca
