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Comment by rubyn00bie | Hacker News Reader

FWIW I've always called MSG "Makes Stuff Good," because it does just that... I realized it wasn't bad mostly because there was no seeming regularity to if I felt bad after eating foods with it.

Eventually it dawned on me that perhaps overeating an abundance of oil in foods with it probably makes me feel like shit, and... yep, it was the oil (maybe others will have similar anecdotes).

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Same here. It’s especially bad if you normally eat a pretty balanced diet with a reasonable amount of fat and sugar, and then have anything from an American-Chinese meal or a fast food burger and fries. I can pretty much set a clock by the 3 hours until I um... well you get the picture. Maybe it’s not the same for everyone, but I suspect for people who don’t eat s ton of “high octane” food, a big meal of fat and sugar makes you feel a bit off at the very least.

MSG though? Love the stuff. It actually makes it easier to use less fat, sugar, and other things you want in moderation because it, as you say, makes stuff good.

I think it makes everything taste the same in an intense but uninteresting way, to be honest. It gives it the bad Chinese restaurant quality. Quantity matters, obviously.

I read a comment years ago about a chef who stays that msg makes water taste like soup. So yeah, it improves the taste, but not in a good way. It's similar to drinking tea with a cup of sugar mixed in. msg isn't as bad as sugar when normalizing on how much people consume, but it's still used as a replacemment for good food.

It's carbs for me, but yeah, it's never the actual MSG obviously.

Sugar and wheat are the worst combo for me... I'm very conscious about my food, and MSG isn't on my black list (I live in Asia)

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