MSG - seems to be in just about everything storebought!

Hard to get away from, unless you grow your own food.

Here are some good details on what contains MSG. Includes some other names it goes by, as well as non-food products.

MSG article

I posted this here because it is also apparently in organic fertilizers.

WOW! That should be required reading for anybody that buys any food.

Thanks for the link...I have several people that I need to send it to...they think they are eating healthy!

My wife gets instant migrains when eating MSG, so we try to watch all labels and eat non-processed foods, preferably what we raise ourselves.
kent

Read the labels for sure. We don't use MSG in any of our product. Our hot dogs and sausage are free of MSG, Nitrate/Nitrites, gluten, etc. Do your own preparation and buy your ingredients as basic as possible.

Cheers

-Walter
Sugar Mountain Farm
Pastured Pigs, Sheep & Kids
in the mountains of Vermont
Read about our on-farm butcher shop project:
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/butchershop
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/csa

If you're buying un-processed healthy stuff from the bulk bins and the produce isle, msg isn't much of an issue. This strategy also prevents the purchase of excess salt, sugar, fat and packaging.

Dale Hodgins wrote:If you're buying un-processed healthy stuff from the bulk bins and the produce isle, msg isn't much of an issue. This strategy also prevents the purchase of excess salt, sugar, fat and packaging.

I mostly do this, but the article was saying that even the wax put on organic produce, and the fertilizers used to grow organic produce may have msg in it.

I received the lifetime recommended dosage of msg while "dining" at the Fung Lung, Chinese restaurant ,a greasy little choke and puke for the less than picky traveler.

The name should have been my first warning.

Yes, MSG is in EVERYTHING. It has over 50 aliases which food manufacturers use to hide it in the ingredients label. This is one reason why Americans buy so many over the counter painkillers from the constant MSG headaches!!

MSG can even be in things marketed as "health foods" and not labeled at all. For example, Bragg's Liquid Aminos sauce. I'm MSG sensitive and react strongly to Bragg's. The ingredients say only soybeans and water, but the truth is that the soybeans are processed in a way that created much MSG, but they don't have to put it on the label. It used to actually say "No MSG" on the bottle, but they were sued and had to remove the "No MSG" label because there was MSG in it. However, they still don't have to label that there's actually MSG in there created from the processing.

It's best to skip the Bragg's and use a naturally fermented soy sauce. Also, avoid the soy sauces that have "hydrolyzed soy protein" in them because that is another way of creating MSG.

I started having real issues with my blood pressure about 2 years ago. Doc, of course, wanted to put me on the brand name drug du jour. I (as I usually do) resisted. I started removing individual items from my menu to try to solve by cause & effect, and started wondering about MSG. Made it a priority to not eat anything with MSG in it for at least a couple of months. My BP dropped like a rock and has stayed down. Even experimented with adding it back in to do my usual scientific analysis; bingo - guilty as charged, and the speed and scale of the result was scary. We try to eat well and healthy, but we had a habit of throwing a brand name (starts with a 'K') vegetarian veggie broth bouillon flavor cube into sauces for a flavor kick, not realizing that they were mostly MSG or compounds thereof. The real problem is that the gub'mint that professes to protect us from these villains allows manufacturers to use a more aliases than Americas Most Wanted. A couple of them from the FDA's own website, so now I have to take a magnifying glass to the grocery;

Glutamic Acid
Hydrolyzed protein
Autolyzed protein
Textured protein
Yeast extract
Autolyzed yeast extract
Protein isolate
Modified food starch
Calcium caseinate
Sodlium caseinate
Broth
Maltodextrin
Seasonings
Natural flavor
Monopotassium glutamate
Glutamate
Gelatin
Hydrolyzed vegetable protein
Hydrolyzed plant protein
Yeast food
Yeast nutrient
Torula yeast

We've tried to adopt Michael Pollan's advice from his great books, "don't eat anything with more than five ingredients; don't eat anything that your grandmother (you younger folks might want to go with great-grandma) wouldn't recognize as a 'food', don't eat anything that you can't pronounce. It's been working pretty well. BP is down and staying down and I've deprived Big Pharma of profit.

Yeah. If you need a PhD in chemistry to read the ingredient list, you don't want to eat it.

MSG can actually break the synapses in the brain, leaving gaps. It does not process well in the liver, and everyone has some symptoms from ingesting it, although some are so silent those people actually think they can eat it safely. They can't. I get horrible migraines which last for days, totally disabling me from doing anything, and it stops my heart or causes at the very least heart palpitations. I can block the effects a bit by taking a large dose (2000 mg.) of Vit. C., or an electrolyte mix with lots of C in it. I've done this on occasion when I found out after the fact that something I ate had this stuff in it. I would never knowingly ingest it.

This substance is so deadly it should have been banned long ago. Badger your state representatives until they do something about it. People will never get what they want if they are so complacent they don't do anything about things they don't like. Toxic substances like this cost people and employers a lot of money in lost work days.

Just another good reason to grow our own or know someone we trust who does, who can supply us with quality food.

Melba