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Comment by suryabeep | Hacker News Reader

I cannot comment about MSG in Chinese food but I can provide my own experience with MSG. As a kid in Bangalore I used to eat a lot of instant noodles that had MSG in the seasoning packets. One time I got a very bad case of food poisoning and ended up in the hospital for 5 days. At the time, the doctors said the food poisoning was due to MSG. The circumstances being what they were, I doubt the doctors were influenced by American systemic racism or racism exported from America. (They could well be just plain home-grown racist against the Chinese since Indians are generally not very friendly towards Chinese, but again, I didn't eat at a Chinese restaurant and the instant noodles were an Indian brand so...)

All in all, I am inclined to believe that MSG does actually have negative effects. However, I think one can build a tolerance to it, because I regularly eat it at restaurants and I haven't had any problems with it since that time as a kid.

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> However, I think one can build a tolerance to it, because I regularly eat it at restaurants and I haven't had any problems with it since that time as a kid.

It is much more likely that:

1. You haven't had any problems with MSG ever, including that time as a kid, just as every experiment ever done on MSG would suggest;

2. Your doctors were influenced by coverage of MSG in the medical press outside India.

Stupidity doesn't have to originate in racism.

> just as every experiment ever done on MSG would suggest;

> In 1995, the Food and Drug Administration asked an independent scientific group, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, to study MSG’s safety. It found that only a small number of people experienced any side effects, and that was only after consuming six times the normal serving of MSG on an empty stomach.

There is a _very_ small number of people who do in fact experience side effects when consuming MSG. Whilst it is pretty much harmless to most people, there is a population for who it creates discomfort. It isn't no one.

> It isn't no one.

Do you have a different citation? Because what you actually quoted says it is no one, unless you think people are going to Chinese restaurants and being served a plate of pure MSG. Show me one person who has ever eaten instant noodles while maintaining an empty stomach.

My family is Chinese. I love the traditional cooking AND American-style "Chinese" food. I have never had problems with the MSG in these, but I have had headaches after downing too much brewer's yeast and a broth made with a philipinno soup packet one time. Do you know what both of these have in common? It's Glutamate, which is an excitotoxin in excess amounts. Too much of that stuff absolutely will hurt your head.

Quite possible on both counts, yep.

I'm a little astounded that on an article talking about the hoax pejoration of MSG, you describe a lifetime of eating MSG that includes a single instance of getting food poisoning and therefore promote the notion that 'MSG actually does have negative effects'.

We wonder why it's so hard to counter the anti-vaxxer movement despite the initial studies that started them being disproven; this is such a perfect parallel.

Andrew Gelman frequently talks about a problem in the scientific literature, in which you see the following pattern:

1. A study is done at the typical (very low) level of quality, and it gets published somewhere.

2. A more careful study tries to replicate the effect and finds that it doesn't exist.

3. The world concludes that the effect doesn't occur in the very specific context observed in the second study, but does occur in all other contexts.

Gelman makes the point that if the two studies occurred in the other order -- first, a high-quality study finds no effect, and second, a low-quality study finds an effect -- no one would conclude the effect was generally present. But the order in which you perform studies is not actually relevant to anything.

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