MSG is neither terribly dangerous nor perfectly fine

the Public Health hysteria over MSG is just that an irrational fixation driven in no small part by anti-asian xenophobia there is no particular reason to fear or avoid MSG any more than you should fear or avoid the other ubiquitous food additives in our lives I'm pretty sure what I just said to you is true I mean that's the basic scientific consensus these days it is also true that the processed food industry has spent a lot of money to build and popularize that consensus should that give us pause I don't know I have no hesitation about eating msg in fact I'm gonna show you some of my MSG cooking experiments but there is some research indicating that a small number of people can experience mild adverse reactions when they eat a lot of msg and I mean a lot perhaps more significantly scientists are now exploring whether MSG might be a causal factor in metabolic problems like obesity and type 2 diabetes though that research is in its early stages the best single text I've ever read about msg is this University of Toronto doctoral thesis by dr. Sarah Tracy a historian of science and food she's got a book coming out soon about msg and much of what I'm about to tell you is drawn from her research msg of course stands for monosodium glutamate the sodium salt of glutamic acid which got its name from gluten the wheat proteins that make bread dough all stretchy German chemist Carl Heinrich RIT Heusen first isolated glutamic acid in 1866 by treating gluten with sulfuric acid yeah that doesn't sound very wholesome but glutamic acid occurs naturally in tons of whole foods in particular meat tomatoes mushrooms and seaweed / algae our bodies also make glutamates inside of us from other amino acids that we eat another German scientist named Herman Fisher described the taste of glutamic acid as insipid indeed the acid aloe and apparently does not taste like much and it wasn't the focus of much more scientific attention until a Japanese chemist named kikoenai Ikeda came along he studied in Germany for a while and then while researching Japanese seaweed broths Ikeda isolated monosodium glutamate and called the taste of it in Maumee which roughly translates to savory or yummy or both by 1909 kaida had developed a process for mass producing msg it was cheap to make chemically inert shelf-stable heat-stable easily dissolved in water and it tastes well you should try for yourself pure msg is widely available in grocery stores here in the united states you can just go to the spice aisle of any mainstream supermarket and look for this brand-name accent look at the back it has one ingredient monosodium glutamate so the first thing that strikes me is that it's way less salty than salt to me it's immediately recognizable as the taste of processed snack foods which of course are literally coded in msg defenders of MSG say it's reputation has been unfairly tarnished by it's incidental association with these industrial food like products the powder itself these defenders say is natural but while glutamates do occur in nature dr. Tracey would not call the contents of this bottle natural that's a product that is created in factories by processes of industrial fermentation and the way that companies source that glutamate is that they they use particular strains of bacteria to excrete it into these big tanks and then they harvest the glutamate and then they stabilize that amino acid with sodium molecule so it's a product of industrial manufacture just like a million other things that we eat indeed gross though that may sound industrial fermentation is how we get a lot of things like vitamin C supplements ascorbic acid it's also how we get insulin for diabetics should you care that MSG is not natural at least in one scholars opinion I don't know I don't really some of the deadliest substances on earth are 100% natural here have some botulinum toxin it's all natural the real question is is MSG harmful unfortunately that totally legitimate line of inquiry has been permanently muddied by the bizarre case of a 1968 letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine it was in retrospect a weirdly momentous event in the history of food and the history of food is a topic I've been learning a lot about lately thanks to the sponsor of this video curiosity stream whom I shall now take a brief moment to thank curiosity stream is subscription streaming service that offers thousands of really great documentaries and nonfiction titles from some of the world's greatest film makers including exclusive originals I've been watching this terrific five-part series on the history of food but - how did we go from hunting and gathering on the Serengeti to grabbing a snack from the fridge perhaps the answer was as elemental as the kiss of fire take that raw food advocates cooking is what enabled the rise of civilization says science there's so many great films here about anything you're curious about my older son and I like watching the nature shows together you can watch them via the web app the mobile apps Roku Xbox one Apple TV whatever curiosity stream was created by the founder of the Discovery Channel and compared to other streaming services it is astoundingly cheap you can get unlimited access starting at just $2.99 a month or in 1999 for a whole year and because you watch me your first 30 days are absolutely free just go to curiosity stream dot-com slash Ragusa and enter the promo code Ragusa I've got a sign-up link with that code down in the description do us both a favor and check it out so yeah about that 1968 letter in the New England Journal of Medicine it was sent by dr. Robert ho man Kwok a chinese-american physician and researcher in the Washington DC area and the journal headlined it Chinese restaurant syndrome after eating American Chinese food dr. Kwok complained of numbness at the back of the neck gradually radiating to both arms and the back general weakness and palpitation basically a mild fever now I've read a lot of the subsequent scholarship about this letter and the public health panic that it's sparked and I think I've come up with the right analogy to explain what was going on here these correspondence pages in the New England Journal this was not the rigorous peer-reviewed research part of the journal this was read it this was our slash medicine this was a place where doctors of that time could talk shop and kick around ideas that were not ready for primetime it's also a place where doctors joked with each other and we know that the New England Journal in particular had this tradition of doctors sending in prank letters about joke syndromes it was like Pro tokens trolling we don't know what doctor quacks intention was we're not even totally sure it was dr. Kwok because in 2018 a guy named dr. Howard Steele came forward and claimed that he wrote the letter is a hoax that probably wasn't true but even if you take the letter at face value dr. Tracy points out that Kwok is just kind of spitballing like the sodium I don't know if it's the line I don't know if it's vanished she all I know is I experienced these symptoms how about you guys and then it became this cultural phenomenon there's moral panics off into and it was a bandwagon effect and it happened to coincide with this moment culturally in which people were very invested in sticking it to the man and critiquing the influence of big companies of environmental degradation it was in the late 60s and early 70s this was very up a moment to do that expose motive aha what's behind the screen what are you hiding in our foods and also a moment of great stigma around immigrant populations and what were they doing in the back kitchen that we don't know about it's gotta be that foreign science powder they're putting in the food I mean why else would I feel bad after eating an absurdly large portion of white rice with batter fried chicken chunks covered in a cornstarch and sugar sauce with enough salt in it to attract wandering deer out of the woods I mean why else would that make me feel bad for the record I freaking love American Chinese restaurant food but yeah scholars now regard Chinese restaurant syndrome as a xenophobic moral panic and not a real medical thing but it is also true that there is a huge amount of money to be made with MSG and dr. Tracy's research documents how some of that money has paid for MSG's rehabilitation and now she's worried that we might be in the midst of a cultural overcorrection the argument about Chinese restaurant syndrome having been racist and Nancy's silence and discriminatory it acts as this really powerful smokescreen for other questions about corporate interest and the bias that goes into scientific research and I think those are important and it should be said that real science has shown some health problems associated with msg the first thing researchers looked at in the 1970s and 80s was whether MSG might be a neurotoxin because that was the theory the time that MSG could in the food supply have the effect of over stimulated neurons in your brain and causing them to die at an accelerated rate so there were studies that using very large doses of MSG often delivered by needle they were given as an as an injection where I'm very hot high amounts they did result in strange symptoms like lesions but of course we're not out there on the streets shooting up huge doses of MSG so this is not persisted as a big area of concern for scientists what about when we you know eat the stuff well here is a very widely cited report commissioned by the US Food and Drug Administration in the 1990s the researchers here concluded that some small subset of the population does indeed appear to experience mild symptoms like the ones dr. kwok wrote about folks with asthma in particular but even those experiments involved people eating at least three grams of msg on an empty stomach you want to know what three grams of msg looks like yeah that's a lot that's probably not what you're eating these days the focus of research is on whether MSG might be a direct contributor toward problems like obesity glutamates in our body are deeply involved in processes like appetite regulation and while the jury is still out on that dr. tracy has what I think is a very good point she argues in her thesis and in her upcoming book that msg is certainly an indirect contributor toward obesity why because it makes terrible junk foods taste really good this kind of I hate to say addictive like this really delicious irresistible almost combination of enhanced flavor and crunch and aroma and and all the things mouthfeel that make us want to eat a million burritos I really buy this theory and I'll tell you why I brought this bottle home thinking oMG this is going to be the magic secret ingredient that revolutionizes my home cooking the first thing I tried it in was a homemade mushroom stock I feel terrible about wasting mushrooms for mushroom stock so I usually just make it with the stems that I take out of the mushrooms that I plan to put in my risotto yes that recipe is coming anyway it's not quite enough mushrooms to sufficiently flavor a broth so I figured I'd goose it up with a little bit of msg I put in a few Pinchas and then some more and honestly I could taste the difference but it was not transformative then I tried putting msg and tomato sauce a lot of people on the internet say this will revolutionize your red sauce I shook some in then I shook some more in and some more and honestly I could barely taste it at all in there which led me to this personal conclusion MSG doesn't do much to improve the taste of things that already taste good or at least things that already taste savory indeed I had the best results when I sprinkled msg on my standard workout meal of bland tilapia and cauliflower rice what MSG is really good for is giving taste to something that otherwise would taste like almost nothing like a cheeto is virtually indistinguishable from a starch-based packing peanut until it gets coated in the magic flavor powder here's a fun experiment you can do get yourself some normal tortilla chips the ones that are just corn oil and salt sprinkle some msg on there and then all of a sudden that tastes like a Dorito there's no cheese powder no other seasoning just fried corn salt msg and to me that's totally a Dorito though when I mentioned that to dr. Tracy she pointed out that Doritos have other things in them too things that work synergistically with the MSG to be even more tasty namely these flavor potentiate errs called iymp and GMP science is amazing science is amazing but it is also taken foods that are terrible for us and made them addictively delicious and that may prove to be the biggest health hazard posed by this ubiquitous white powder now it's all over my kitchen

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,056,168

Rating: 4.896749 out of 5

Keywords: monosodium glutamate, what is msg, glutamic acid, chinese food, amino acid, chinese restaurant syndrome, monosodium glutamate (chemical compound), is msg bad, glutamic acid benefits, glutamic acid pronunciation, glutamic acid production, glutamic acid vs glutamine, amino acids, glutamic acid pronounce, what is msg made from, what is msg in chinese food, what is msg made out of, what is msg used for, what is msg in seasoning, what is msg and what does it do

Id: E-POAKKH5IM

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/arigatosushi]

I've been waiting for this video. Thank you for covering the topic Adam!