I seem to get nightmares if I have eaten MSG and I’m too hot when asleep - does anyone else suffer from this or have any peer-reviewed research articles they can point me to?
I think those are symptoms of going to sleep after any heavy meal and not related to MSG.
Do you get headaches, too? I tend to get major headaches when I have a substantial amount of MSG…
~Ferry, not really helping
http://www.merck.com/pubs/mmanual_home/sec6/64.htm
MSG is a bad deal.
We have had several threads about MSG in the past and the evidence presented did not support that it was bad in any way.
There was evidence that blind tests have shown people are not sensitive to MSG as they say.
Also note that the “MSG is bad” thing is very restricted to the USA (and maybe other places). There are many countries where this has never been heard. If MSG did objectively cause those symptoms they would be universal. So, given the evidence I have I am very skeptical.
And I know I sleep badly after a big meal, whether it had MSG or not. So my guess is it’s not the MSG.
Calling MSG “natural” is like calling alchohol “natural.” They are both ferments of natural substances. There are alot of studies that show MSG does not cause headaches, asthma, heart rate increase, etc. and alot that show it does. The FDA recognizes it as “generally safe” - you can judge for yourself what that means. The FDA also recognizes “MSG Symptom Complex.” Alot of people have probably jumped on the “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” bandwagon but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist for some. Discretion is the better part of taste.
MSG tastes so good, though!
>> Calling MSG “natural” is like calling alchohol “natural.”
Exactly. Being natural does not mean good or bad for you like being artificial does not mean good or bad for you. But the calim by many of the opponents is that MSG is not natural. They’ll look at the label of some food product and read “carrots, celery, beans, . . . Monosodium Glutamate” and say “how can an artificial chemical with a name like that be good for you?”. They are implying it is artificial and therefore bad.
>> There are alot of studies that show MSG does not cause headaches, asthma, heart rate increase, etc. and alot that show it does.
As far as I have seen the ones done by mainstream medicine recognize it as safe and the ones against it come from the Whacky-vegeterio-macrobiotic-in-your-face-extreme-left-loonies. I have not seen a reliable double blind study showing MSG is bad for the average person.
I will also say that if you cook a meal like soup or pasta with just as much MSG but the person eating is not aware of it, they will not have the symptoms whereas they will have them with Chinese food even if you put in much less MSG or none.
And, again, why are other countries not subject to the MSG curse?many otehr countries consume MSH in quatities well above the US. They should all be dead by now.