Amazing how many anecdotes are presented here with zero scientific research to back them up on a board apparently dedicated to fighting ignorance.
There is no satisfactory evidence that “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” is even a thing that exists in the real world in which we live.
There is plenty of “anecdotal evidence” that people have been abducted by aliens and anally probed.
I’ve experienced it.
And my daughter believes that beef tripe is an emetic. She would actually throw up if I made her eat it. She’d feel nauseous if she even saw it.
It doesn’t mean that beef tripe really is an emetic. It’s psychosomatic.
The article in the OP is about as fact-free as one can get.
Until better research is conducted, I am going to stick with my belief that MSG can cause throbbing in the temples. I’ve experienced it, and no study has refuted it.
From the article cited in the OP:
"While MSG might cause headaches in some people…”
This paper does not refute that:
BTW, I eat food flavored with MSG…
I take a more sanguine view. Although I have read a little about MSG causing headaches, in Canada very few restaurants of any type seemed to advertise “No MSG”.
Food sensitivity is a weird thing and it would not be unheard of for an ingredient to affect some people and not others. Headaches can also have unusual triggers, including sulphites found in wine, salad dressings and many sauces. Neither MSG nor Chinese food ever gave me headaches. I suspect many restaurants use MSG. A few bodybuilders pay good money to buy expensive glutamine as a supplement; MSG is metabolized into the same glutamic acid. I add it to my own food occasionally.
Chinese food remains pretty popular here. I would not be quick to ascribe dislike of MSG to racism, TBH. People protest about food additives in Subway bread and think common chemicals in food are worse than they usually are. More likely to be ignorance unless you can quote more specific examples. Perhaps if many restaurants use MSG but only Chinese restaurants were singled out, there is something there, but as I say this is not something I have heard many people complain about IRL.
Do you get headaches from eating tomatoes?
Nope.
But, the amount of MSG in a tomato is, I would imagine, any times less than some of the prepared food I’ve had. A tomato never, ever tastes salty to me.
Do you have any evidence that Chinese restaurants use “massive doses”?
And sure, they use other spices, veggies and such that many Americans aren’t used to. Why are you so sure it is MSG, since many double blind studies have shown that MSG (if hidden) doesn’t cause issues?
Strangely, if the testers could taste the MSG, those who claimed MSG gave then headaches got headaches. But in other tests, if the MSG couldn’t be detected, it did not cause headaches.
First, let me say I am firmly in the “science cult” that recognizes that MSG does not generally cause the side-effects anecdotally attributed to it (though I have no reason to think there aren’t a few people who are exceptionally sensitive who do experience side-effects, as long as they are consistent - ie, they get headaches from parmesan, mushrooms, etc., as well as from eating at particular Chinese restaurants).
Having said that, casually dismissing ALL anecdotal evidence is no way to proceed rationally either. Mefloquine is a case in point. There may be better articles than the one I linked (sorry, don’t want to get sucked into a long internet search), but it is now known that the serious psychological side effects some people experience from mefloquine are real and have an identified biochemical mechanism behind them. When reports first surfaced, however, sufferers were scoffed at.
I was actually one of the early sufferers - I started having weird middle-of-the-night psychotic episodes - I’d wake up feeling desperate and terrified, and wander the house sobbing. After a few weeks of this I figured out the pattern; the episodes occurred once a week, the day following my dose of mefloquine. I then read the fine print on the package insert, and it didn’t mention what I was experiencing. That was several years before reports started surfacing in the military of the once-a-week craziness that followed each administration of the drug to the troops. For several years, the medical establishment completely denied the link between mefloquine and serious psychological disruptions. I knew the medical establishment was in denial because of, well … my own personal anecdote.
The difference between MSG and mefloquine is that anecdotal reporting in both cases may have been pooh-poohed at first but has ultimately led to closer scrutiny. In the case of mefloquine, a link was found; in the case of MSG, not so much.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, a rationale scientific approach will eventually yield reliable answers, but not all anecdotal evidence should be dismissed out of hand. Equating reports of symptoms after consuming a particular food with reports of alien abductions and anal probes hardly seems fair. One is patently ridiculous; the other is much more plausible.
The thing is- no one is denying the anecdotal evidence. If you went into a Chinese restaurant, and got a headache- we believe you.
The headache was caused through psychosomatic issues or by a ingredient. Now of the ingredients in Chinese food, one- MSG- has been tested repeated in double blind scientific studies. It is also quite common in other common food items.
So, we can say it wasn’t MSG. That does not mean it wasn’t one of the other many different and unusual ingredients found in Chinese food. Testing is sparse there. And it could have been psychosomatic.
The racist part is calling it “Chinese restaurant syndrome” without any evidence it is MSG, or even just Chinese food.
Show me the study, please.
I used that trick to get out of serving on a jury once.
It was a medical malpractice case and the lawyers were interviewing the potential jurors. I lived in a very busy jurisdiction and they typically didn’t have a judge present during the voir dire for civil cases. One of the lawyers asked me if there was any reason I couldn’t be impartial and I told him that I’d had a family member die after an emergency surgery.
What I didn’t mention was that the surgery was completely uneventful and the family member died several years later of an unrelated cause. I was excused.
Frankly, I don’t know if I would’ve had the nerve to pull that stunt if there’d been a judge in the room. I don’t know if I’d done it if I hadn’t watched the two lawyers excuse numerous candidates for the obvious bullshit they were pulling. By the time it got to me, I felt like there was some sort of “beat the system” game being played - it was literally like the losers would be the 8 people ( civil court, 6 jurors and 2 alternates) too stupid to trick the lawyers out of picking them. It was like neither lawyer wanted to come off as the bad guy by calling out the people that were trying to dodge their civic duty, so they let this happen. And I let my competitiveness get the best of me. I’m not proud of it.
BTW, Ive served on other civil juries selected under the same system - the two lawyers pick the jury without a judge in the room- and I’ve never encountered that dynamic before. But it was strong that day.
ETA: Sorry about the hijack. I didn’t intend to ramble.
What is different about glutamate is that the brain has specific receptors for it. If you were to take things similar to serotonin (tryptophan, melatonin) no one would be surprised if they had a neurological effect (mood, sleep, etc.). So the connection is not completely implausible. Ironically I read a book on critical care recently that referred to “glutamate restaurant syndrome”.
I posted quite a few in the last thread we had on this.
In all studies by Praworphardjono and Tarasoff, no difference of incidence of headache between placebo and MSG administration was found and the authors concluded that rigorous and realistic scientific evidence linking CRS to MSG could not be found.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-7599.2006.00160.x
Conclusions: MSG has a widespread reputation for eliciting a variety of symptoms, ranging from headache to dry mouth to flushing. Since the first report of the so-called Chinese restaurant syndrome 40 years ago, clinical trials have failed to identify a consistent relationship between the consumption of MSG and the constellation of symptoms that comprise the syndrome. Furthermore, MSG has been described as a trigger for asthma and migraine headache exacerbations, but there are no consistent data to support this relationship. Although there have been reports of an MSG-sensitive subset of the population, this has not been demonstrated in placebo-controlled trials.
also see post 42 from [Left_Hand_of_Dorkness
Your first link is the one I posted, which does not, in fact, refute the hypothesis.
One of the issues is the “blindness” of the studies, which says that since it was hard to create a placebo which could pass as MSG. Which is kind of the point - maybe it only occurs when a LOT is used…
It does, because as I said- when respondents could taste the MSG, they reported headaches. When they could not taste the MSG, as the taste was hidden, they did not.
Look,:
-
I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant- we all believe that. Pre covid so did I.
-
I got a headache after- we all believe that.
-
Thereby, it was the MSG- that leap of logic is the issue.
No, that’s not it at all.
It’s that EVERY time we would have dinner at a specific restaurant (mentioned above), we all would get throbbing temples (not headaches).
Very repeatable.