&gt;If people who claim to be MSG-sensitive are eating typical dishes (the kind where MSG is buried in the label as &quot;yeast extract&quot;) and reporting symptoms, but aren&#x27;t responding to a blue cheese burger with mushrooms, something&#x27;s wrong wth the reporting.<p>This was the point of my comment: there is far more free glutamate in (some) foods containing powdered MSG, like Zatarain&#x27;s, than there is in naturally high glutamate foods like mushrooms and parmesan. I&#x27;m talking potentially an order of magnitude. This is partially because of the way people use the powders, and partially because the processing of MSG involves freeing bound glutamates. As someone who cooks with powdered MSG, I&#x27;m speaking from personal experience here - I don&#x27;t have a sensitivity to glutamate, so I cook with a lot of it. So do many other people I know.<p>&gt;The question is whether you get a roughly equivalent dose of glutamate from common umami-forward dishes than you do from dishes where umami is added through MSG.<p>The answer is &quot;not at all&quot; for many types of food (like a typical corner Chinese restaurant, who uses powdered MSG a lot like I do).