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Comment by madaxe | Hacker News Reader

HFCS reacts badly with the majority of the population, inducing adiposis. So does MSG. Don't forget about the pesticides you chow down on with every meal, or the chloride in your water, or the phthalates in your soda, or the BPA in your nalgene, or...

The US is terrible for substance safety. Dire. Awful. Hell, on the note of colouring, you still use bloody anthracine red, which has been banned for decades in the rest of the planet, as its carcinogenic.

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MSG reacts badly with the majority of the population? Source?

It's unlikely they'll find a good one. (For the thread): The initial studies on "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" seem to have conflated overconsumption of sodium with MSG. MSG has the misfortune of being known primarily by an acronym, which makes it sound scarier than it actually is (ie, not remotely scary).

Yeah, that's why I asked. As far as I know, the idea that MSG is somehow bad for you is entirely an urban legend. But, as always, I could be wrong.

I might be wrong about MSG. IIRC animals produce the D- entantiomer (MSG is chiral), and industrially produced stuff is D- and L-, and apparently L- can be harmful.

The studies that rebutted the MSG connection in Chinese Restaurant Syndrome used industrial products, like Ajinomoto MSG.

So, I was a little unclear: I offered two arguments against the CRS/MSG connection: first, that MSG is a scary-sounding name for a chemical that plays a central role in our metabolism and nervous system; second, that studies have attempted to isolate MSG as a cause of CRS and failed to find a link.

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