That’s not how it works. If a hypothesis is made, one needs actual evidence to support it. Not the other way around, i.e. no one has refuted it, so it must be true.
What the metastudy said was: The evidence was inconclusive.
Just make sure your Himalayan rock salt is non-GMO.
It’s Kosher too!
And so?
How do you know it was MSG and nothing else?
And why go back? Why would you go back?
You believe in “Chinese restaurant syndrome”- which was made up out of fact free whole cloth by a racist asshole.
You don’t even know if they used MSG there.
Ok. So the hypothesis isn’t proven.
Yes, I don’t know anything, and will never know, since they are long gone.
But, even the article in the OP specifically states that it’s possible that MSG causes headaches.
I’ll have to do an experiment the next time my buddy uses MSG, and have him double up the dose.
It won’t be double blind.
Again, the brain has specific receptors for glutamate. I doubt most people would get a headache from eating a trivial amount of MSG but a few probably do. If a study that says people only get headaches if they knew about it does not change the facts headaches occurred. I have not looked to check the studies are appropriately powered because I doubt the connection is specious.
It’s hard (or impossible) to do a double-blind study, because the flavor is detectable. See my cite.
It can and has been hidden, such as in…Chinese food. Tomato juice supposedly hides it also.
What doesn’t work is giving a testee a glass of water with a tablespoon dissolved in it.
Probably not in the concentrations necessary to cause the symptom.
Why don’t we use MSG capsules vs placebo capsules? That bypasses the taste detection issue. Or are we removing a possible “headache trigger route” by bypassing oral absorption?
There’s a big difference between not poisonous and not bad for you. I lived in Viet Nam for several years, and I noticed a connection between eating high MSG dishes, like mì thánh mì sợi (basically wonton soup). and getting a sore throat. My wife is Vietnamese and feels the same way. However, it is possible that since MSG is used to improve the flavor of low quality food, that the quality what causes issues, and not the MSG itself. I definitely know that if disliking MSG indicates anti-Asian racism, then there are a lot of self-loathing Vietnamese over there.
That’s not really the thesis. It’s more that the popularity, or “hysteria,” as put by the OP of anti-MSG sentiment was at least partially fueled by xenophobia in addition to distrust of scary-sounding substances. I doubt current anti-MSG sentiment has much to do with the connection with Chinese/Asian food but, historically, I think it’s a plausible (and IMHO likely) thesis. (I do think it is somewhat difficult to discount a racial connection somewhere along the line when you call it “Chinese restaurant syndrome” and not “snack food syndrome” or “KFC syndrome” or “Campbells soup syndrome.” – although Campbells has “removed” MSG from a lot of their stuff except in the form of yeast extract. My can of Cambpells French Onion has straight-up “monosodium glutamate” on the label.)
But no, if you shun MSG that does not mean you’re a racist or are doing it for racist reasons yourself.
Why is it so hard to accept that the reason for that observation could be that you expect it to happen? Merely thinking anxious thoughts can cause the symptom you describe. Heck, throbbing temples without headache is just a common experience for everyone. It happens multiple times a day for me. If I happened to only pay attention to it after eating at a certain restaurant, I might think that restaurant was causing it. I literally have it right now, simply because I’m hungry. (I will make myself a sandwich after this post.)
Humans constantly seek patterns, but are bad at seeing them when they aren’t there. That’s the whole point of these double blind studies, where you try to eliminate any other possible causes. The most basic thing a double blind study does is make it where you don’t know if you got the real stuff or the fake stuff, and neither do the people judging you.
Sure, maybe there is some flaw in the studies. But you can’t prove that with personal anecdotal information. If you want to test it on yourself and your family, you’ll need to come up with an experiment where none of you know which food comes from where.
There are just so many variables that could lead to your results, and so many ways bias could leak in to make even the results suspect. You need a double blind trial to show causation.
Sure, and it could be alien brain-control lasers, too.
Or, maybe - it could be a poorly-researched, but real, phenomenon.
But why pin it on msg? There’s no reason to pick 1 ingredient retroactively and say that had to have been the cause. Simply because someone once pondered whether that scary-sounding chemical ingredient might be evil? There were lots of ingredients which you encountered only at Chinese restaurants. You have no way of knowing if/how much msg was even used.
Lots of households used msg back in the day - my mother used Accent in lots of stuff, including hamburgers (it was one of the suggested uses on the label). If the person who first suggested it as a culprit had any idea what it was or how often it was used in food production and kitchens, he probably would have glommed on to some other ingredient as a cause.
By no means is it poorly researched.
Indeed, as mentioned in the linked thread, MSG was shunned a lot in the UK here along with salt, just because there was a concern about sodium levels in the diet. Like so many ‘food x is really bad’ things, it was overblown, but the racism angle was never really apparent here.