MSG: Is This Silent Killer Lurking in Your Kitchen Cabinets?. (Huff Post)
One of the best overviews of the very real dangers of MSG comes from Dr. Russell Blaylock, a board-certified neurosurgeon and author of “Excitotoxins: The Taste that Kills.” In it he explains that MSG is an excitotoxin, which means it overexcites your cells to the point of damage or death, causing brain damage to varying degrees — and potentially even triggering or worsening learning disabilities, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease and more.
Part of the problem also is that free glutamic acid is the same neurotransmitter that your brain, nervous system, eyes, pancreas and other organs use to initiate certain processes in your body.[4] Even the FDA states:
“Studies have shown that the body uses glutamate, an amino acid, as a nerve impulse transmitter in the brain and that there are glutamate-responsive tissues in other parts of the body, as well.
Abnormal function of glutamate receptors has been linked with certain neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Huntington’s chorea. Injections of glutamate in laboratory animals have resulted in damage to nerve cells in the brain.”[5]
Although the FDA continues to claim that consuming MSG in food does not cause these ill effects, many other experts say otherwise.
Of course, I don’t think so.
A subject dear to my heart. We do not use MSG at any of the restaurants, but only because of the mass hysteria surrounding it. If I could, I would use it, as certain dishes require it to have the true flavor, most notably noodle dishes. If we could use MSG, less of other forms of sodium would be necessary to properly flavor the food.
Interestingly enough, in Thailand there is starting to be an anti-MSG movement amongst the educated, though it is driven by the same misinformation we have been getting in the west for the past 3-4 decades. Luckily, almost everything we use to season the food (fish sauce, soy sauce, fermented soy beans, fermented fish) is packed with free glutamates already!
Here is a decent article with plenty of references:
http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Glutamic_acid_%28flavor%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamic_acid_(flavor)