MSG is a salt, so when you put it in water, it dissolves into sodium and glutamate. Glutamate is an amino acid found naturally in a variety of tasty foods. So, you already consume it and you&#x27;re fine.<p>To be more sure of yourself, you can run an controlled, blinded experiment where you have group A consume food with monosodium glutamate added and group B consume food without the additive. So long as you don&#x27;t tell which food is which, then group A won&#x27;t have a different response from group B.<p>But these things don&#x27;t actually answer your question. They answer the question &quot;How do we know it is safe?&quot;<p>To explain &quot;why MSG is safe&quot; seems like it would be impossible for the same reason that proving a negative is impossible: you would have to go through all of the possible metabolic processes and show that and it does not screw with them.