Hacker News Reader

Comment by galoisscobi | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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-...

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

Seriously?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com