It’s not just in the chicken. MSG is in the sides, including green beans, dressings, and condiments.
https://www.kfc.com/nutrition/food-allergies-and-sensitivities
I /also/ don’t like KFC, store ‘gravy’, or the stock used for Vietnamese beef soups.
On the other hand, (unlike some vegetarians I’ve known, who don’t eat TVP because they don’t like the taste) I do like lamb, beef and some cheese, so I’m not totally against glutamates. I think just not when MSG is a dominant flavor.
**@ Derleth, **as someone who didn’t drink coffee or caffeine beverages at all, it didn’t surprise me when he suggested that. The symptoms I was getting were exactly like what I get when I have too much caffeine; shortened breath, slight anxiety, heart palpitations etc. Presumably for me that’s a few cups of coffee.
@ Jasmine - You’re welcome. He does a great podcast, short, explanatory and full citations. I think of it as what a Straight Dope should have been from an imparting actual knowledge & fighting ignorance perspective. Plus, because he takes it seriously - he updates and corrects older podcasts, so he doesn’t promote misinformation. You’ll see in the transcript he has updates to the MSG episode since he published it in December.
**@ CairoCarol **- listen to or read the podcast I posted, if you haven’t. In 12 minutes, he explains what MSG does biologically, the history of its use, how it became vilified (which is a great story - one letter started it all plus add in the “naturalist movement” and a dose of good-old anti-asian racism) and then modern scientific consensus. MSG: How a Friendly Flavor Became Your Enemy
F’rchrisf*****ngsake, D’Anconia, are you looking at a web site in the same universe as I’m looking at? That page goes to a KFC “Nutritional Wizard” page where you check boxes to note what things you’re sensitive too (MSG being one of the choices) and it brings up another page that lists page after page of items that do NOT contain the selected allergen and not a single item that does. Did you even look at the page you linked, beyond those checkboxes, and the additional pages it goes to?
Maybe my browser is fucked and only shows items without MSG. (I searched for items with “milk” and didn’t find any of those either.) The page with the list of items has what looks like an option to filter only on items that don’t contain the allergen (which seems to list their entire menu) and an option to list items that DO contain the selected allergen, which I couldn’t get to work at all.
Do you have a way to post images somewhere on-line where I can find them? Take a screen shot and let me know.
All that site teaches me is to distrust ANY information coming from KFC and their food too.
Clicking on the items that DO contain MSG worked just fine for me. Here’s a list of items that DO CONTAIN MSG:
ORIGINAL RECIPE CHICKEN
[more info]Original Recipe® Chicken Breast
!
[more info]Original Recipe® Chicken Drumstick
!
[more info]Original Recipe® Chicken Thigh
!
[more info]Original Recipe® Chicken Whole Wing
!
EXTRA CRISPY CHICKEN
[more info]Extra Crispy™ Chicken Breast
!
[more info]Extra Crispy™ Chicken Drumstick
!
[more info]Extra Crispy™ Chicken Thigh
!
[more info]Extra Crispy™ Chicken Whole Wing
!
KENTUCKY GRILLED CHICKEN
[more info]Kentucky Grilled Chicken® Breast
!
[more info]Kentucky Grilled Chicken® Drumstick
!
[more info]Kentucky Grilled Chicken® Thigh
!
[more info]Kentucky Grilled Chicken® Whole Wing
!
SPICY CRISPY CHICKEN
[more info]Spicy Crispy Chicken Breast
!
[more info]Spicy Crispy Chicken Drumstick
!
[more info]Spicy Crispy Chicken Thigh
!
[more info]Spicy Crispy Chicken Whole Wing
!
EXTRA CRISPY TENDERS
[more info]Extra Crispy™ Tender (each)
!
[more info]Nashville Hot Extra Crispy™ Tender (each)
!
POPCORN NUGGETS
[more info]Popcorn Nuggets - Kids
!
[more info]Popcorn Nuggets - Large
!
NASHVILLE HOT CHICKEN
[more info]Nashville Hot Extra Crispy™ Chicken Breast
!
[more info]Nashville Hot Extra Crispy™ Chicken Drumstick
!
[more info]Nashville Hot Extra Crispy™ Chicken Thigh
!
[more info]Nashville Hot Extra Crispy™ Chicken Whole Wing
!
[more info]Nashville Hot Kentucky Grilled Chicken® Breast
!
[more info]Nashville Hot Kentucky Grilled Chicken® Drumstick
!
[more info]Nashville Hot Kentucky Grilled Chicken® Thigh
!
[more info]Nashville Hot Kentucky Grilled Chicken® Whole Wing
!
[more info]Nashville Hot Spicy Crispy Chicken Breast
!
[more info]Nashville Hot Spicy Crispy Chicken Drumstick
!
[more info]Nashville Hot Spicy Crispy Chicken Thigh
!
[more info]Nashville Hot Spicy Crispy Chicken Whole Wing
!
HOMESTYLE SIDES (INDIVIDUAL)
[more info]Green Beans
!
[more info]Mashed Potatoes With Gravy
!
[more info]Potato Wedges
!
HOMESTYLE SIDES (FAMILY)
[more info]Green Beans (Family)
!
[more info]Mashed Potatoes With Gravy (Family)
!
[more info]Potato Wedges (Family)
!
SANDWICHES
[more info]Chicken Littles
!
[more info]Chicken Littles - Buffalo
!
[more info]Chicken Littles - Honey BBQ
!
[more info]Chicken Littles - Nashville Hot
!
[more info]Crispy Colonel’s Sandwich
!
[more info]Crispy Colonel’s Sandwich - Buffalo
!
[more info]Crispy Colonel’s Sandwich - Honey BBQ
!
[more info]Crispy Colonel’s Sandwich - Nashville Hot
!
[more info]Crispy Twister®
!
[more info]Honey BBQ Sandwich
!
POT PIE AND BOWLS
[more info]Chicken Pot Pie
!
[more info]KFC® Famous Bowl
!
[more info]KFC® Famous Bowl - Snack Size
!
DRESSING AND CROUTONS
[more info]Hidden Valley The Original Ranch Fat Free Dressing
!
DIPPING SAUCES & CONDIMENTS
[more info]Buttermilk Ranch Dipping Sauce Cup
!
[more info]Finger Lickin’ Good™ Dipping Sauce Cup
!
REGIONAL MENU ITEMS
[more info]KFC® Gizzards
!
[more info]KFC® Livers
!
Sorry, D’Anconia and RitterSport, but I’m not able to see that display of items that DO have MSG. I am only able to pull up the list of items that do NOT have MSG.
I played a bit more with it. I see now that the listed items I can see are not their entire menu (because searching for other allergens, like Milk or Gluten or Fish) appear to bring up different subsets of their entire menu – but in each case, only items that do NOT contain the chosen allergen. For example, choosing Milk gives a list that omits several obvious milk, buttermilk, and cheesy items.
But I can’t get it to bring up a list of items that DO contain the selected items. I can’t get it to show me the list of items that RitterSport copied, above.
In any case, I still wonder just how much MSG they put in. I see Pot Pie on RitterSports MSG list. I’ve eaten that without problem. Other items on that list too.
I’ve been under the impression that way too much MSG affects me badly, as was reputedly used in some Chinese restaurants years ago. Nothing in this thread has yet to show me otherwise. So how does KFC MSG usage compare? @Chronos, it was you who wrote, above, that KFC uses more MSG than Chinese restaurants. Cite?
I doubt anything will dissuade you from your stance that MSG from Chinese food makes you ill.
That is probably correct. I’d still like to learn more about MSG in KFC.
Despite the fact that you’ve received cites that it was all made up in the first place? That you eat msg all the time in your food? That you don’t even know how much msg may or may not have been added at the restaurant? That there could have been any other ingredient that disagreed with you? You insist on clinging to a made-up myth?
Some of the restaurants, like the one my housemate worked at, used to buy drums of the stuff, and throw handfuls of it into the product. I think it’s entirely reasonable to notice that some foods have higher levels of one particular glutamic salt than other foods have, and to take an interest in food preparation. I don’t think there is any need to be rude about it.
He states:
. So he has no idea if that particular restaurant even used msg. He has no idea if any other ingredient caused his problem. He’s grasping at a false myth he heard and insisting it must be true. Ignorance is winning here.
A really long time ago (like maybe a decade, I’m not sure) the New York Times ran an article about MSG - not safety, but flavor. They convened a panel of food critics/chefs and fed them two meals that wer identical in every way except that one contained MSG and the other didn’t.
The diners were all certain that they would be able to tell which was which, and that the MSG-free food would be tastier.
In the event, as I recall it, they did as a group show a statistically significant preference for one of the meals, so they all claimed that that one was the MSG-free meal.
Need I add, they were all quite wrong 
.
What hole did you just pull your head out of? Did you not notice that RitterSport posted this same KFC information yesterday (Post #25) and that I acknowledged it (Post #26)?
I envision further discussion later today, in my copious spare time. For the moment, just now, I have useful errands I need to be doing.
L8R.
Okay, here it comes. I suggest that the gentle reader wait until a substantial block of uninterrupted time is available before beginning to read this.
Well, I didn’t realize I was stumbling into a hive of MSG cult worship here. Sorry, folks, I didn’t mean to challenge all your inviolate certitudes. It doesn’t matter to me, really, how y’all react (or not) to MSG, and I’m not aiming to take all your MSG away. If MSG floats all your boats, then go for it! Chow down, me hearties! But the prevailing tone of this thread certainly seems obsessed with convincing me that I’m really just imagining my own sensitivity to the stuff. You’re really intent on proving someone wrong on the Internet!
And you’re certainly all twisting yourself into pretzels trying to do so.
Permit me to elaborate.
First, some premises:
(1) I noted that seemingly “normal” quantities of MSG added to a lot of foods (like Campbell’s Soup) seem not to bother me.
(2) There was a widely known (or widely believed) notion that in the past, Chinese restaurants added massive amounts of MSG to their food.
(3) This was thought to be the cause of “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome”, a compendium of vaguely off-kilter feelings that some people got when eating at some Chinese restaurants.
(4) MSG began to fall out of favor, as best I recall, about the late 1970’s or early 1980’s. So much so that a lot of Chinese restaurants not only didn’t use it (or quit using it), but even publicly proclaimed so on their menus.
(5) I myself had a long history, way back then, of consistently becoming vaguely ill when eating Chinese food. This could not have been a placebo (or “nocebo”) effect because in my teen years, I didn’t even know about MSG or Chinese Restaurant syndrome. But I sure knew that eating at certain Chinese restaurants consistently made me vaguely (and sometimes more than vaguely), but transiently, ill.
The cult MSG worship fans of this thread are bending themselves into contortions trying to prove this wrong, but most of their above posts are decidedly lame.
We begin with the OP by Melbourne who links to Cecil’s old article, Is the food additive MSG bad for you?, June 22, 1990. Cecil doesn’t specifically say the MSG is or isn’t healthful, but he does note:
Cecil does, however, quote (and link) the Mayo Clinic article, listing the commonly noted symptoms, and this:
Next is GMANCANADA with a helpful Skeptoid link:
This guy goes on an anti-anti-MSG ideological rant, insisting that the whole MSG problem is just a hysterical fear promulgated by American pop hippie anti-everything (including anti-Asian) woo culture. But wait! There are a few useful bits here. Unlike the FDA link (cited elsewhere in this thread), Dunning makes a distinction between glutamate and monosodium glutamate: He agrees with FDA that we get about 13 grams/day of glutamate in our daily diets without any problem, but he also notes that a small number of taste-party subjects reported symptoms on the much smaller dose of 3 grams of MSG (on an empty stomach), about six times the usual 0.5 grams of added MSG/day that we usually get. But there is no comparison given against eating large doses of MSG with meals! So this remains unresolved.
Then sir viks tangentially posted a link to a post from This American Life which contributes absolutely nothing of use to this thread. It seems that someone suggested that the letter to New England Journal of Medicine that started it all was in fact just a prank hoax forgery. While this post does mention a few times that the MSG sickness is a myth, it says nothing to confirm or refute this. Rather, this garbled and nigh-unreadable article focuses on investigating that claim that the letter was a hoax, and ultimately refutes that claim.
Not long after that, I came in with:
The rest of the thread seems to consist largely of MSG cult worshippers attempting lamely to debunk this first-person testimony that yes, someone does seem to get sick on large doses of MSG.
GMANCANADA, in Post #6, relies on the Dunning (skeptoid) article to say “the answer is crystal clear the evidence in 2020 is very conclusive that MSG is not a health risk.” (GMANCANADA’s emphasis.)
Well, no, Dunning didn’t entirely say that. He did note that some people reacted badly to large doses of MSG, which is just what I claimed.
Next, Melbourne (the OP, remember) admits (Post #7) that he used to have problems with Chinese food, which only seems to add another data point to my own thesis. Ah, but he then rationalizes that it’s the sodium in MSG that’s doing it. That shouldn’t matter — if MSG is equivalent to glutamate, as the FDA page says and some posters here parrot, then it’s still the MSG that made him get headaches, even if it’s just the sodium component of it.
Next comes MSG cultist Chronos who, in Post #9, thoroughly distorted what I had previously written and added additional nonsense:
(I trust that we are all equally able to parse that convoluted triple-negative in the last sentence there.)
I already responded to some of this in Post #15. To give a bit more discussion:
(1) I said large doses, as Chinese restaurants were commonly thought to use, affect me while smaller doses as commonly added to other foods don’t.
(2) The notion that it must be some other ingredient is thoroughly speculative with utterly no support.
(3) It could still be the MSG because Dunning noted that MSG seems to be different than glutamate: 13g glutamate/day (as in lots of natural food) didn’t bother anybody, but 3g MSG did bother some people.
(4) Restaurants that may have used a lot of MSG caused this reaction, while other Chinese restaurants that were known NOT to use MSG did not. So you’re saying that restaurants that omitted MSG must consistently and systematically have omitted some other mystery ingredient too?
Next comes RitterSport with a link to the FDA page Questions and Answers on Monosodium glutamate (MSG). This page says MSG is indistinguishable from glutamate, but that contradicts Dunning’s report of some people having reactions to 3g of MSG but not to 13g of glutamate.
Now that’s 13g of glutamate/day with food, versus 3g of MSG all at once without food. Quite possibly, 3g (or more?) glutamate all at once would also be bothersome, and maybe with or without food. That’s what I suspect Chinese restaurants were doing by shoveling it in. But none of the links cited in this thread address those variables.
Next, GMANCANADA (Post #11) and Derleth (Post #12) suggest that it’s caffeine. And Rittersport already suggested it’s just too much salt.
Well, could be. I can believe that a megadose of either salt or caffeine would make one sickly. But the subject of this thread is what large doses of MSG do.
In Post #16, RitterSport tries to wave away Chronos’s remarks by suggesting that soups have at least as much MSG as Chinese food, and wonders why I think Chinese has more. Chronos, in Post #17, makes the totally unsupported suggestion that KFC has more MSG than Chinese food.
We note here that Chronos and others in this thread, like Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, doesn’t seem able to tell past tense from present tense. I’ve already noted (and it’s even part of Dunning’s thesis) that Chinese restaurants allegedly used massive amounts of MSG in years past, but quit using it more recently (in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s, I think). So nobody, not even me, is complaining about MSG in Chinese food NOW. The discussion of Chinese Restaurant Syndrome refers to a common complaint from years ago. I don’t know what Chronos is trying to prove by comparing MSG in KFC versus MSG in Chinese food NOW.
But DID Chinese restaurants really shovel it in? That was the common belief back then. Melbourne, in Post #30, offers second-person witness to that:
Well, getting rude about it is what cultists do when challenged. (I think he’s referring to needscoffee’s snarky Post #29.)
Derleth, et al, hand-waves it all away as confirmation bias:
But did I mention that I felt effects of “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” consistently and repeatedly at certain Chinese restaurants, and not at steakhouses or Mexican or Italian or KFC? And that this happened before I even knew what MSG was? Someone explain to me how confirmation bias happens in those situations? (needscoffee also waved it off as confirmation bias on Post #19, while also citing the This American Life post to show that the original NEJM letter was just made up, which is exactly what that post concludes it was NOT. The letter might be right or wrong, but it wasn’t a hoax as claimed. Dunning notes this too.)
I’ll pass over (for now) the other useless drivel that needscoffee wrote in his several posts. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that he should have had more coffee and gotten himself a little more awake before reading the linked cites or writing any of his posts. I’ll elaborate later, if I’m not too exhausted before I finish here.
Now, we get to some posts that were potentially helpful:
D’Anconia posted a link to KFC’s nutritional page, listing products with MSG. I never did manage to view the stuff he cited, but RitterSport helpfully found the page and cut-and-pasted the text into Post #25. I already noted that there are several items on that list that I do eat without ill effects. Again, I presume that these foods contain normal and reasonable amounts of natural glutamate and added MSG, but not the megadoses that I think some Chinese restaurants used to use. Again, Melbourne attests to at least one Chinese restaurant that did this.
CairoCarol, in Post #13, supposes that her ill effects, which happened just once, must have been from a bad batch of food that happened once upon a time. needscoffee, in Post #20, imagines much the same thing, that food may intermittently be bad. These ignore the stated claim that I got bad effects consistently at certain restaurants. Did low-budget Chinese restaurants routinely buy up the two-week-old unused ingredients that other restaurants didn’t use? Did they routinely shovel in megadoses of cadaverine and putrescine? (And, tangentially, can you believe that this spell-checker knows the words “cadaverine” and “putrescine”? But I digress.)
MSG cultist Chingon unhelpfully remarks, in Post #27:
Actually, I did say what evidence might be dissuasive there, way back in Post #18:
So, if somebody can demonstrate that some common food I am likely to be eating (KFC or otherwise) now has megadoses of MSG, and I’m not keeling over from it, that would be convincing. D’Anconia and RitterSport gave steps in that direction with their KFC cites — but nothing there to suggest KFC uses abnormal quantities.
This thread is, for the most part, little more than a compendium of Recreational Outrage that somebody on the Internet, in this day and age, still reports having had Chinese Restaurant Syndrome back in the day. Come to think of it, I really don’t have the energy or enthusiasm to respond much more to needscoffee or Chingon or Inner Stickler, whose posts are mostly just the sort of snark that cultists tend to spew when their particular religions are challenged. I’ll just leave that at that.
I give this rant an 8 out of 10. It would be tastier with some added MSG, I think.
I can’t tell whether I’m in the cult or not from the post, but want to applaud the use of Tralfamadorians (which the spell-checker doesn’t recognize, even after all this time :().
I don’t think it’s possible to go back in time to find out how much MSG Chinese food restaurants used to use, nor will it be possible to find out how to compare that to Campbell’s soup or KFC, since they wouldn’t give out their exact ingredients either. If they give out an ingredients list that doesn’t contain salt, that could put an upper limit on the amount of MSG depending on how much sodium is in the nutrition facts.
You could experiment with Accent (assuming you’re in the US) or whatever they call MSG where you are – have someone cook you a steak or soup or something and add either MSG or some other salty rub to it without telling you. Do this over a few days and keep a log without telling that person what you guessed. After a week, compare notes and see how well it lines up. It’s not a perfect experiment, but it might be fun to try out.
I haven’t tried straight up MSG, but if it tastes salty from the sodium, adding too much could make the food unpalatable, so that would put a limit on how many bucketfuls the Chinese restaurants used to add.
I’d eat it by the teaspoon as a kid. Very tasty, not overwhelming like salt. You can add a lot to a dish without making it inedible. We cook with it a lot; a friend who claims to not tolerate MSG helped herself to a dish loaded with it (a tbsp in 8 oz of dip), consumed a bunch before we found out hours later. Had no symptoms.
If someone is determined to believe that MSG specifically from Chinese food makes them sick, more power to them.
Damn that’s a lot of MSG!
I use it pretty liberally, as well, but I do notice that too much makes things taste a bit … I dunno … “processed”? It’s like up to a point it amplifies flavors and makes food more savory, but past that point it’s just too umami. For me, in a 4-to-5 quart stew/chili/soup that level is about a teaspoon of MSG; maybe two if I’m pushing it.
In China, MSG has a single-syllable, non-sciency sounding name, like “salt”. It’s popular, not just in restaurants but in home cooking, and when I’ve mentioned the concept of MSG sensitivity / intolerance to Chinese friends, they had no idea what I was talking about. AFAIK it’s not a thing in China.
It’s a bit frustrating reading posts like Senegoid’s self-awareness and skepticism-free rant in a forum that is supposed to be about fighting ignorance, but I can agree with Chingon’s pragmatic approach here; if a person chooses to believe that MSG uniquely in Chinese food makes them feel sick, well, at least it’s not going to affect me in any way.