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Comment by padjo | Hacker News Reader

There’s no evidence linking MSG specifically with any chronic health issues and little reason to suspect there would be in healthy people at the quantities generally consumed. Funnily enough many people who are wary of MSG and try to avoid it would be better off looking at their sodium intake, which we know for sure has long term health risks.

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I am someone who is sensitive to MSG and the new substitutes they put in food to replace it.

It is not "dangerous", and I think that is the problem with the messaging, but it does increase my anxiety, insomnia and fibromyalgia symptoms. And I also thing for most people it is fine, but it certainly does not work with my family's genetics. My mother had the same issue.

Many things in food now replace MSG. Any time you see a protein isolate, what they are isolating is the glutamate. Malted Barley Flour also contains high levels of glutamate and purines (like inosine) that work synergisticly with it to enhance flavor.

Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter, and it makes your taste buds more "excited". My mouth tastes like metal whenever I have foods with glutamate. It is not pleasant for me at all.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9883458/

https://www.eurofins.com/media-centre/newsletters/food-newsl...

Well it seems pretty accepted that refined sugar is worse for you than consuming sugars locked up in fibrous fruits. From a similar intuition glutamates locked up in natural sources probably has a different bioavailability profile to refined MSG, incidental sodium intake notwithstanding.

In any case, everyone is different and catchall health advice lacks nuance. I have to very consciously consume more and more salt because I habitually cut it out to the point that I now suffer from hyponatremia especially as I exercise and sweat bucket loads.

salt is bad again?

salt was always advised to be limited, especially for those with high blood pressure. This hasn't changed, there are just vocal diet ideologues (mostly carnivore/keto) that are trying to post-hoc rationalize otherwise.

From what I understand it's only really a problem for a specific set of high blood pressure folks. Something genetic I think.

I'm on blood pressure medication, and haven't received any advice about sodium intake.

Only ~50% of the population is hypertensive, and only about half of them are sodium sensitive.

And half of the half that are sensitive, it lowers blood pressure.

Everybody is sodium sensitive, it’s a basic fact that your body retains additional fluids if you increase your sodium intake, just talk to some bodybuilders. Chronic long term exposure to a high sodium diet is a risk factor for all sorts of issues because of this basic fact of biology. Way more so than MSG or even artificial sweeteners. But people focus on the wrong thing.

My understanding is that most people's blood pressure does not increase in response to dietary sodium, which is the sensitivity described in this context.

Salt's bad if you have sodium-responsive hypertension (maybe 30% of the population).

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