It&#x27;s statistically more likely that you&#x27;re sodium sensitive than that you&#x27;re sensitive to glutamic acid. If you got a racing heart but no headache, that&#x27;s an even stronger indicator: people who are salt sensitive experience palpitations when they ingest too much of it, but people who are sensitive to glutamates usually present with intense headaches.<p>Another question to ask yourself: do you get headaches when you eat blue cheese, parmesan, mushrooms, or tomatoes? Those are naturally intense sources of glutamic acid.<p>I don&#x27;t think many people are arguing that it&#x27;s impossible to be sensitive to glutamic acid (the case is stronger that nobody is specifically allergic to <i>MSG</i>, though). But there are people sensitive to all sorts of things, including very basic food inputs like salt. We don&#x27;t dismiss people with shellfish allergies and say &quot;but shellfish is perfectly safe!&quot;. But we also don&#x27;t treat shellfish like hazmat because some people can&#x27;t eat it.<p>Finally: the reason people call out the nocebo effect is that the placebo&#x2F;nocebo effect is extremely and counterintuitively powerful. You&#x27;d expect people suffering from a nocebo effect to have a dismissive reaction to that explanation, because the effect plays tricks on our thinking.<p>(I upvoted you, by the way.)