The Rotten Science Behind the MSG Scare | Hacker News Reader

The Rotten Science Behind the MSG Scare

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53 pointsTomte34 comments

I just wish there were better studies done on the effects of msg but the pendulum has swung in the other direction. Initially bad science came out of xenophobia, now questioning msg is seen as xenophobic.

My wife gets really bad headaches and migraines from msg, and it’s a wide variety of food. She can’t eat dishes with parmesan, no Doritos, no tomato heavy dishes, as they all have naturally occurring msg. In the early days, when I didn’t know about my wife’s msg reaction, I put msg in her food and didn’t tell her and she still got a migraine. So it’s not “in her head” like this article says is, for people living in NYC and SoCal.

Even Kenji mentions while msg is fine for most people, his sister gets bad headaches from it.

I'm a fellow MSG-migraine sufferer myself that can beat any double-blind test (my wife pulled the same stunt on me multiple times over the years; she refused to believe I wasn't making it up).

Having lived in both NYC and SoCal, what they have in common more than crack-smoking warlocks is easy access to MSG-laden Chinese food. Could be coincidence, but my own problem only manifested when I went a couple years eating an admittedly-unhealthy amount of ramen and Chinese (my constant feeling like shit afterward was attributed to me eating like shit...and dehydration), yet they persisted incidentally years later, which makes me wonder if the headaches are a reaction to too much exposure and it's become an allergen or something to me now.

FWIW [takeout] Chinese, kewpie mayonnaise and [Maruchan] ramen are still completely off the table for me, but I can eat a vending machine/kids' size bag of Doritos without issue. The smallest store-bought size will trigger a migraine though. Your wife might be able to indulge a little herself if she's willing to be masochistic in testing how much sets her off.

That is a single-blind test unless your wife consistently made two portions with labels, randomized which one you got, tracked your migraines against a blinded list of the labels and examined the data afterward.

I commend your wife's and the parent poster's admirable scientific approach.

Eh, I would be pretty pissed if my girlfriend spiked my food to give me migraines because she was curious

I have a suspicion that histamine plays a role in how people react with MSG. All of those foods you mention are high histamine foods, in addition to MSG itself causing histamine release. Chinese food is often high histamine. White rice if not served quickly after preparation can even trigger histamine intolerance.

If there is a connection, it could also provide some level of explanation for studies. Histamine intolerance can seem random, depending on what foods the test subject has eaten in proximity to the test. There are lots of factors that determine whether or not a person with histamine intolerance will experience symptoms when eating a high histamine meal, because it depends on the accumulated levels currently present in the body.

It could still be the MSG for some people. My post-doc research was related to Parkinson's disease. Glutamate toxicity is a recognized aspect of the disease [1]. Furthermore, glutamate is a neurotransmitter. Many of the receptors hit by glutamate are targets of anti-migraine meds [2]. Sure, for most the dietary glutamate may have little effect on blood glutamate concentrations. However, if MSG does readily enter the blood of certain people, migraines could certainly be a possibility.

1. [Glutamate-induced excitotoxicity in Parkinson's disease: The role of glial cells](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2020.5855...)

2. [Glutamate and Its Receptors as Therapeutic Targets for Migraine](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5935645/)

Interestingly my sister is intolerant of MSG and also allergic to lidocaine.

I also have a family member who gets migraines triggered by msg.

To be fair, people can have migraine triggers from just about anything, it's not well understood. Sure, some triggers are more common than others. But these anecdotes don't seem very meaningful to me on a public health level.

I also suspect that MSG is migraine trigger for me. I have been noticing headaches cause by other migraine trigger foods. I realized after having sauce with MSG immediately caused headache but another sauce without MSG and same dish didn't do anything.

MSG as migraine trigger fits a lot of the old reporting of MSG intolerance. I wonder if science didn't know about food triggers food triggers, and there was less recognition of migraines. It is interesting that there hasn't been studies finding MSG as migraine trigger. I have seen studies that didn't find headaches in general but I wonder if focusing on migraines sufferers would show something different.

If you’re downvoting, please also explain your arguments and contribute to the discussion. I think it is more beneficial if we talk instead of shutting people down because their views are different than what you expect.

If I had to guess a lot of people view the article as ethno-politically motivated instead of just involving science.

And we choose to downvote to depict what we want HN to represent rather risk getting piggy backed with “how dare you” rebuttals and downvoted as I’m sure I’m about to receive…

I have a giant bag of Aji-No-Moto in my pantry. It’ll last me the rest of my life because I use it sparingly. And I do so because it seems like we truly don’t know if msg is harmless. I couldn’t imagine a synthetic food product being harmless but that’s obviously my uneducated guess.

It frustrates me that there’s people out there who think I can’t hold those opinions without being labeled some sort of Xenophobe.

That’s the problem I have with this article being on HN of all places.

MSG is no more synthetic than tofu or yogurt.

That MSG isn't any more synthetic than the lactic acid in kimchi.

> In the early days, when I didn’t know about my wife’s msg reaction, I put msg in her food and didn’t tell her and she still got a migraine.

Please retest double-blinded ;)

Honey, why is my food served in a petri dish labelled "A"?

This is the normal story for someone who claims to suffer from MSG sensitivity. People claim they experience the most extraordinary symptoms, with perfect specificity and reproducibility. Perhaps they experienced symptoms after eating a meal and only learned after the fact that it contained MSG. Perhaps, upon learning that Parmesan cheese and tomatoes contain MSG, they remembered that Italian food had always made them sick. Perhaps they tested their symptoms in a poorly-designed experiment. All of this is expected even if the condition is psychosomatic.

Your wife is part of a large minority that tells stories like these, yet we have proven that at most a tiny minority can have a physical condition. The majority of people with self-reported MSG sensitivity cannot demonstrate it in a laboratory. These symptoms are curiously unheard of in Asia. The huge majority of people who claim MSG sensitivity are wrong.

Maybe your wife is the rare on who is right. Science can't easily prove that MSG sensitivity doesn't exist. But she is making an extraordinary claim with only ordinary evidence.

Without seeking to contradict your main point, it's worth noting that "These symptoms are curiously unheard of in Asia" could be genetic. In the same way that most westerners are OK(ish) with alcohol, but many asians aren't- they 'have a genetic variation that means their aldehyde dehydrogenase is either ineffective or less efficient' [1]

[1] https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/interviews/myth-...

This is such a dumb comment. Bodies are weird and have all kinds of reactions to all kinds of things. People should take peoples experiences with their own bodies at face value.

>I put msg in her food and didn’t tell her and she still got a migraine

Seriously?

<<Stranger still, some doctors declared the syndrome occurred only in certain geographical locations. New York and Southern California were deemed risky, while Hawaii and London were absolved.>>

NY and SOCAL, that explains it all ;)

I remember I never had any symptoms from eating Asian food with MSG from being gluttonous with the chili sauce or ate too much and had a normal, expected belly ache, and the sudden revelation that MSG was to blame for a few of my NYC peers' varying maladies, and how people would triple ask if there was no MSG in their takeout to the point of hysteria at some Chinese takeout restaurants to the dismay of the cashier. Not surprised to see the revelation of a lot of bad science from MSG, to P values and so many papers being audited and struck down, to faking heart study data ala Darsee and Slutsky, to the FDA's food pyramid, to disease mongering by big pharma and the media's effect on having everyone think they have this or that syndrome with some more gullible than others.

It's disappointing that people on media platforms get satisfaction by labelling those of us sensitive to MSG as xenophobic, however, I understand that it's human nature to invent enemies such that one can feel a sense of self-righteousness. Perhaps the food industry is providing some form of compensation to them in exchange for promoting MSG. Artificial opinions for an artificial flavor enhancer - still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I get very bad headaches from eating seaweed snacks. I absolutely love them, mind you, but it's like clockwork. I've had this postulated to be as the result of MSG, but that doesn't track with me. There's MSG in all sorts of things, and no other food comes to mind as specifically giving me a headache.

Could it be the iodine? If you have a funky thyroid that might be a trigger.

Live in Southeast Asia my whole life, cooked and consumed significants amounts of MSG since childhood. By the grace of God, I am still fine today. I got more headaches coding than MSG.

For those of us who are reactive to msg, the results can be absolutely debilitating. For those who are tolerant of msg, it offers zero nutritional benefit. Banning it would help millions of migraine sufferers and harm no consumer. In fact, it could benefit the obesity epidemic by removing that overeating urge msg creates. You know, that feeling you get when you try to eat just a handful of Doritos but then can’t stops. What’s worse is that modern food labels are misleading so it’s hard for people to choose to avoid it. The FDA allows msg to be labeled under the umbrella term “natural flavors”. We have embraced warning labels like “contains nuts” for those who are allergic to nuts but then hide the msg. It’s just not right. Then made worse by articles like this that try to say it xenophobic. And the absolute ridiculous suggestion that no one in China gets headaches.

> For those of us who are reactive to msg, the results can be absolutely debilitating. [...] Banning it would help millions of migraine sufferers and harm no consumer

Reaearch has consistently failed to verify the existence of MSG sensitivity; while it may exist in some small number of cases, its mostly a misattributed cause.

Also, its not true that it would have no consumer harm; its a lower-sodium palatability enhancer than table salt, and removing it from the set of options would have consumer harms.

> In fact, it could benefit the obesity epidemic by removing that overeating urge msg creates.

That's an effect of sugar, salt, and fat (separately, but even more in the right combination); MSG is mostly irrelevant to it (except that banning MSG probably means more salt.)

I don't think banning MSG makes sense or is feasible, but my understanding is that it's possible that adding MSG screws with the body's responses for seeking protein. The tongue tells the brain that food item X is probably full of protein, but when the body doesn't end up absorbing any, it fires off more pangs looking for protein. In that sense, MSG can enhance the effects that sugar, salt and fat create.

  For those who are tolerant of msg, it offers zero nutritional benefit. Banning it would help millions of migraine sufferers and harm no consumer.

You cannot ban a natural, ubiquitous amino acid, any more than you can ban salt. You can try to ban adding MSG to foods, but sooner or later, you would also have to ban yeast extract, soy sauce, tomatoes, hard cheeses, and so on, at which point we would definitely run into trouble.

"that feeling you get when you try to eat just a handful of Doritos but then can’t stops"

that surely contributes to obesity then, if we are ignoring our fullness signals and regularly overeating because msg is nearly ever-present and suppressing our key mechanism

Uncle Roger would have you thrown in jail. Haiyaaaaaa

I lived in Hong Kong for a decade, and I am disturbed by how many people think "Aiya" was somehow invented by a dang comedian and is automatically a reference to them.

Ever heard of the placebo effect?

Not a placebo... I can feel the effects of msg. It is there.

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