Just some related threads, in case people have missed them:
Since the topic pops up frequently.
But you acknowledge that you didn’t know that cholesterol is an animal product, so they were still telling you something you weren’t otherwise aware of. (I’d bet most people still don’t realize it.)
My current favorite is “Evaporated Cane Juice” as an ingredient. Even I know that’s just sugar.
Yeah, but it’s still a lie, of sorts. I remember a buddy who, back in highschool, would never “technically” lie to the teachers, he’d just say things and let them assume things that weren’t true. Like, “I’m sorry I’m late this morning. My little brother needed a ride to the doctor.” Of course, he wasn’t he one who drove his brother to the doctor*, that’s just something that happened to happen while he was sleeping late.
But very few people ever caught on to that subtlety.
*Fucker didn’t even get a license until he was almost thirty!
As I’ve pointed out before, this is actually useful due to contamination, and the fact that you can’t label a product as gluten-free without testing either at the manufacturing or ingredient level.
Granted, “Gluten-free” was not always so regulated, and then it was often a crapshoot. I personally also would prefer they mention what sensitivity of test they used, e.g. “Gluten tested to be below 20ppm”–which is what “Gluten free” actually means.
Oh, hell, Yet Another Thread of the Monosodium Glutamate cult worship crowd. We’ve done this to death already. (This is the same link again that @ParallelLines posted a few posts above.)
That thread is “Ignorance Fighting” at its worst, a shameful miasma of non-infomation (not necessarily mis-information) for such a forum as The Straight Dope Message Board.
The gist of the MSG cult apologetics in that thread were along the lines that modest doses of MSG haven’t been shown to bother anybody, therefore anybody who claims to be bothered by massive doses of MSG must be imagining or mis-attributing it; that Chinese restaurants aren’t likely to be using massive doses in their food, therefore anyone who got sick at certain Chinese restaurants 50 years ago must be wrong, etc. etc.
The whole thread was full of fallacious arguments defending MSG – Not that this proved anything one way or the other, but the utterly vacuous argumentation there was a travesty of what The SDMB is supposed to be about.
Example: I wrote:
To which Chronos replied with this non-sequiter piled upon a non-sequiter:
Here, the first sentence is a total non-sequiter after what I wrote, and the second sentence of the second paragraph is just total speculation with no evidence given (which was repeated by other posters in the thread too). The whole thread was full of stuff like that, as is much of the present thread as well, for that matter.
See Post #35 in that thread for further elaboration.
Bolding mine. So you have no evidence that the Chinese food you ate even contained more msg than other foods you eat - you just heard that it was reputed to have high amounts, whatever that might be. You have no evidence that your claimed health effects are even due to msg, vs the many other ingredients that you don’t ordinarily eat, such as wood ear mushrooms, enoki mushrooms, bamboo shoots, etc. But it must be the added msg!
So, do you have this same problem when you eat tomatoes, mushrooms, or cheese, or when you drink milk?
@needscoffee and @Smapti , we thrashed over exactly those vacuous arguments in the prior thread.
I take it as a given that some Chinese restaurants used excessive amounts of MSG 50-some years ago, and that it caused problems for me. In fact, we had one poster in that thread who offered second-hand evidence: He knew an employee of a Chinese restaurant who said that they used large quantities. That alone was more evidence than anyone else posted towards their hypotheses that is must be some other unspecified ingredient, or that those quantities are comparable to that found in tomatoes, mushrooms, or Kentucky Fried Chicken.
And I guess this makes me a racist now too.
What is an “excessive quantity”? Is it larger than the 1680mg per 100g that occurs naturally in Parmesan cheese, which equals out to 1 1/2 teaspoons per pound of prepared food?
Are you unable to eat Parmesan cheese due to its excessive quantity of MSG?
Actually Melbourne just said his friend worked at a restaurant, he didn’t say it was Chinese.
Well, I think it was implied, given that some of the surrounding posts specifically discussed Chinese restaurants. Nobody else in the thread questioned that either.
This doesn’t even rise up to the level of a post hoc fallacy, because you don’t even know if large (whatever that means) amounts of msg were even used.
@Senegoid: the amount of MSG being studied was he amount you usually find in foods. You have given no basis to assumed that the levels measured were inaccurate.
But I would like to address a more meta issue: the fact that you have labeled those who disagree with you by citing science as a cult. I would argue this a red flag. If you actually believe that you have data that contradicts the scientific consensus, then you should be able to bring it without attacking the scientists.
And that is what people are doing. They reporting the scientific consensus on MSG—that its supposed effects are actually placebo, and are not due to the chemical itself. This is what study after study has shown.
Those of us who don’t worry about MSG (except inasfar as it increases sodium intake) are not part of some cult. Heck, I never actually heard the idea that MSG was supposedly a problem until later in life. I even picked up some Accent to try—and hated it. Soy sauce always worked a lot better to add for umami flavor.
Sure, maybe some rare person has MSG as a migraine trigger, as those can be very individual dependent. But there is no evidence of any widespread intolerance to MSG of any kind, nor that it triggers migraines in general. Glutamates, including ones made with sodium, are found naturally in many foods that people have been eating for millennia with no ill effect.
Heck, MSG has been used for centuries at least with no ill effect.
Yep, and there seems to be a compound effect when people see ‘scary chemical ingredients’ in a context where they already harbour some sort of prejudice.
I review foodstuffs on YouTube. There is always a distinct uptick in complaints about ‘OMG processed chemical crap’ when the foodstuff happens to be labelled as ‘vegan’ - if it’s the exact same ingredients in something that’s just a regular product, no complaints at all.
Not to mention dihydrogen monoxide
The fact of the matter is that no Chinese restaurant has ever been tested to have higher levels of MSG than common “American” foods like KFC or Campbell’s soups. Your argument is “Well, there was a rumor that they used lots of MSG, and I got sick at Chinese restaurants, therefore they must have actually had loads more MSG than other things that don’t make me sick, even though no test ever supported that conclusion”.
Have you considered alternative hypotheses:
- Your headaches were psychosomatic; and
- Confirmation bias is at work (i.e., you did sometimes have headaches after eating at Chinese restaurants, and based on what you heard, you attributed these to MSG)?
These seem a lot likelier to me than the idea that there’s some mysterious property to MSG that food scientists have yet to discover, despite the extensive research into just this area.
Objection: assumes facts not in evidence, your honor.
Oh crap, BigT, I think the cult invitation I sent you must have gotten lost in the mail! Expect a new one in 6-8 weeks.
My mother (a physician) was convinced that MSG triggered some of her migraines.* While she held certain bigoted views, I never heard her express any anti-Chinese/Asian sentiments.
*the list of potential migraine triggers, real and imagined is endless - cold, heat, food, drugs, pets, the presence of an Unbeliever etc. etc.
**my brother-in-law, a charter member of the Northeastern Asshole Society, once deliberately spiked my mother’s food with MSG to “prove” to her that it wasn’t really a migraine trigger. The experiment failed.