Pat Hartman | Childhood Obesity News

The Tangled Narrative of MSG

Pat Hartman June 18, 2019 No Comments

The illustration on this page is a list of the secret names of MSG, blurred on purpose because the people at Mamavation.com went to a lot of work to compile it, so the least we can do is refer readers to their website. MSG is short for monosodium glutamate, also known as glutamic acid or glutamate, but the tricky part is that it appears on food labeling under several dozen terms, some of them very innocent-sounding.

Why the long list? Because the MSG labeling is only required by the Food and Drug Administration if it is 99 percent pure MSG. If the additive is MSG mixed with something else, manufacturers can call it anything. The brand-friendly euphemism is “umami,” which is the taste that keeps people coming back for more.

Thanks to the red-flag-raising efforts of many researchers, a lot of consumers don’t want the stuff in their food. Narrowing the objections down to obesity, there are two major indictments against MSG. When that irresistible umami taste is added to food, people eat a lot more of it and gain weight. More concerning is the evidence that MSG has intrinsic obesogenic qualities that affect the body’s inner workings in ways that are hard to track but increasingly worrisome.

On the other hand, many MSG-positive scientific studies exist, the problem being that they seem to have been paid for and possibly rigged by the manufacturer. The Ajinomoto corporation has also been accused of suppressing data and framing suffering patients as anecdotal-evidence drama queens.

Speaking of studies…

As we have seen, MSG has long been used to make lab rodents plump enough for scientists who require obese rats. After years of knowing that MSG causes animals to gain weight, in 2008 somebody finally decided to see what it does in humans.

University of North Carolina researchers worked with 750 residents of remote villages in China and found that 82 percent of the subjects ate meals prepared with MSG. The subjects were divided into three groups, according to heavy, moderate, or no use of MSG. Hannah Punitha reported,

The researchers found that the group which used the most MSG, were nearly three times more likely to be overweight than non-users.

In the following year, activist Arun Gupta appeared on TV to talk about McDonald’s bacon, remarking with astonishment that it actually contained 18 ingredients in all. These included six different varieties of umami (see Paragraph 1 above), which he described as a “highly addictive” ingredient that “elicits an actual neurochemical, physiological response.”

The Chicken McNugget is another item that suffered from extreme adulteration. Initially, chicken was introduced as a healthy alternative to red meat. According to the discussion on the DemocracyNow.org show hosted by Amy Goodman, “on average, a Chicken McNugget has twice as much fat as a McDonald’s hamburger.” It also contains a hellish cocktail of flavor-enhancing chemical additives — and that doesn’t even include the dipping sauce.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Hidden MSG Ingredients: 90 You Should Avoid,” Mamavation.com
Source: “Flavour Enhancer MSG Causes Obesity Says a Research,” MedIndia.net, 08/14/08
Source: “Bacon as a Weapon of Mass Destruction,” DemocracyNow.org, 08/03/09

MSG Foe John Erb

Pat Hartman June 17, 2019 No Comments

In the summer of 2006, scientist and book author John Erb presented a report to the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee On Food Additives. Among many other aspects of the substance, it discussed several claims regarding how MSG triggers obesity. Glutamate increases the appetite, and true to the stereotypical Chinese food joke, a person feels hungry again sooner.

Faced with equal amounts of the same food, with or without MSG, a subject with the additive-laced food will eat more. It messes up a rat’s sense of how to regulate its intake amounts, and then something else happens. Erb wrote,

MSG has been shown in rats to over stimulate the pancreas resulting in hyperinsulinemia. The excess insulin in the blood increases the conversion of glucose into adipose tissue… MSG has been shown in rats to reduce Ketone secretion, resulting in an obese rat with a propensity for creating adipose tissue(fat)…

Of course lab rodents and humans are far from identical, but MSG increases insulin release in people, and apparently affects ketone excretion too. Not only that, it interferes with the secretion of Growth Hormone, producing not only stunted rats, but human children deprived of the crucial hormone in their teenage years. The main thing is, when researchers want obese or diabetic rats to try out a theory on, they can obtain special “MSG treated rats.”

In his conclusion, Erb wrote:

Consider the children of the world who eat MSG in their school cafeterias, hospitals, restaurants and homes. They deserve foods free of added MSG, a substance so toxic that scientists use it purposely to trigger diabetes, obesity and epileptic convulsions.

On an even less cheerful note, MSG can penetrate the so-called placental barrier and affect a fetus in utero. They have glutamate receptors, and being inundated with too much of that may cause bad consequences, like brain injury. And if by chance the mother has achieved the feat of keeping her diet free of MSG, never fear. The industry has that covered — the stuff is in infant formula… as if a hungry baby needs added inducement to eat.

More recently, concern has increased about damage to the unborn, because it seems pretty clear that their endocrine systems can be damaged. Furthermore, it is strongly suspected that later on, no amount of subsequent diet correction or exercise will make up for that disability. As time goes on, researchers become more adept at pinpointing the exact mechanisms by which glutamic acid works its dark magic.

Let’s wrap this up with some words from Dr. Pretlow:

Hedonic foods are addictive, plain and simple! The pleasure of the foods cancels emotional pain for the time it takes to consume them and perhaps during the anticipation phase and after thoughts. But once the pleasure fades, reality comes crashing back in that we’ve done something that will now make our lives more miserable. That misery causes the cycle to repeat, further strengthening the addictive hold of the hedonic foods.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Slow Poisoning of Mankind,” HolisticMed.com, August 2006
Photo credit: Matt Baume on Visualhunt/CC BY-SA

MSG = Bad?

Pat Hartman June 14, 2019 No Comments

In the previous post we introduced Carol Hoernlein whose bio says, among other things, that with degrees in Engineering and Food Science, she worked in research and development for several gigantic corporations. Although she had set out aspiring to feed the world, Hoernlein quit her job as a Food Process Development Engineer more than 15 years ago. The precipitating incident was when, in her words, the Food and Drug Administration “failed to honestly inform the public about the science behind this widely used food additive in American processed food.”

Hoernlein’s pages are full of interesting and alarming information about the problematic substance made from wheat gluten. Glutamate is a useful amino acid except when it roams around unsupervised. It is called “non-essential” because beyond what the body makes on its own, any more is excess to requirements. Of even the natural kind, there can be too much, and it plays hell with Type 1 diabetes, as Hoernlein carefully explains.

And then, there are things we don’t even know about yet, including how much worse manufactured MSG is than the body’s own naturally produced glutamate. Hoernlein says,

[T]here are right-handed amino acids and left handed ones. They are like mirror images of each other. Processed MSG contains not only the kind of amino acids the body is used to handling, but mirror image ones too. This may cause problems because it is like putting the wrong glove on your hand. It’s not quite the same. We don’t exactly know what problems this may cause…

Why do we care?

We care because anything that even comes close to linking up with childhood obesity needs to be looked at at least once. The most obvious reason to blame MSG is that it makes food taste better, which is of course a cue to overeat. It encourages appetite by stimulating the pancreas to produce insulin, and that increases hunger.

Also, free glutamic acid is a chemical messenger and neurotransmitter. When the blood concentration rises, some people don’t even notice, while others experience unpleasant symptoms. So that is another strike against it, because feeling sick is stressful, and many stressed people, seeking to blot out pain and gain comfort, tend to eat.

Mixed signals

Even though MSG may cause adverse effects, the body does not recognize it as a true allergen, so that is another problem. Another drawback is that the body converts excess glutamate to GABA, a calming substance, and what’s not to like about that? It affects the same brain receptors as valium, and might even be addictive.

Next, some people are really mad because this whole MSG thing is a big scam designed to separate consumers from their money. MSG tricks the tongue’s perceptions, and persuades the body that it is ingesting actual protein. Thus, the manufacturer can include less real food in the recipe.

On this page the author points to several studies relating MSG to obesity. Another page lists dozens of ways in which MSG affects the system. One of them is Type 2 diabetes. Hoernlein says,

MSG, when eaten triples insulin release. Quickly. Glutamate is what tells the pancreas cells to release insulin. This is despite the fact that glutamate is not a carbohydrate. If the body is not getting rid of free glutamate fast enough, excess insulin may be the clue. In obesity studies, diabetes and obesity can be reliably induced in mice.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “MSG Truth,” MSGTruth.org, undated
Source: “What Exactly is MSG?,” MSGTruth.org, 12/31/18
Source: “What Makes Me MSG Sensitive?,” MSGTruth.org, 05/5/2018
Photo credit: illuminating9_11 on Visualhunt/CC BY-ND

Food Process Engineer Tells All

Pat Hartman June 13, 2019 No Comments

Sorry for the misleading title. Nobody, of course, tells all. Carol Hoernlein, who worked for half a dozen global corporations, says they are better than national security agencies at keeping secrets. Although she still has to honor the non-disclosure agreements she has signed, some things can be revealed in a general way.

For starters, she explains how members of her profession, Food Process Engineer, are the natural enemies of Food Scientists. Food Scientists always want to add some kind of ersatz potion they picked up a sample of at a trade show. Their mindset is all about experimenting with kinky molecules, rather than respecting the molecules they started with.

Hoernlein reminds consumers that a food label (along with other deficiencies it might possess) only tells us what was initially put into the cauldron, ignoring “the abuse, chemical, mechanical, or genetic, they subjected it to afterwards.” She says,

Every time a food scientist throws a new ingredient in to solve a problem, an engineer groans somewhere because the food scientist just threw a new curve ball into the mix, and probably lowered the taste and quality for a product when the fix could have been a simple, low tech tweak to time, temperature or order of steps.

When Hoernlein was a bright-eyed college student, the goal of food processing was to do as little of it as possible. Substances meant for human consumption were supposed to be freshly picked, harvested, hatched, or butchered — “fresh” being the operative word in all instances, because:

Everything else you do, is not an improvement on perfection, it is going to damage the nutrition or the flavor and aroma somehow. The trick was to minimize the damage. That was our job.

The author mentions a norm that probably has not changed much. While nursing students had to take a course in nutrition, future doctors only took a day of nutrition. At Rutgers, her alma mater, there was the Food Science Building, which somehow later ended up being retitled in homage to an international corporation, inspiring the comment,

I am glad I studied food science before college texts and buildings had brand names on them.

Meanwhile, Big Food became fascinated with devising genetically modified “frankenfoods.” As if that were not interference enough, the industry also demanded another group of tinkerers to come in and do weird things to the product.

After joining the world of work, Hoernlein observed a kind of race to the bottom. Her colleagues in research and development were increasingly people with degrees not in agricultural engineering, biology, or food science, but in chemical engineering.

“Creeping degradation”

Meanwhile, most of the industry, the public, and the politicians who were supposed to guard against wrongdoing, totally lost sight of the concept of adulteration, so let’s look up that word. To adulterate something is to corrupt, debase, or degrade its quality by adding an inferior substance. For instance, flavorful fats are removed, to be sold separately as boutique items, while cheap and tasteless fats are substituted in products destined for the general public.

As an example, the author offers the addition of palm oil or hydrogenated soybean oil to chocolate:

Years ago, that would have been considered adulteration — removing cocoa butter and adding shortening to cocoa powder. Conversely, while they can take good flavor fats out of a food to sell at a premium elsewhere, another company can buy those flavor compounds to make another undeserving food-like substance taste like something good.

In a time of war or famine, mixing food with some nutritionally inert but bulky filler might be the only merciful course. But the very great majority of food adulteration is motivated by greed. In present-day America, there is no excuse for adding sawdust to grated cheese.

Hoernlein says,

Many Americans are not eating real food, but a facsimile of it, an imitation. Food, undone, what I call Unfood, separated into ever smaller components and reassembled again to look like what the consumers are supposed to assume it is… [W]hat was once considered adulteration has become Standard Operating Procedure.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Creeping Degradation — The Demise of Good Taste,” MSGTruth.org, 02/04/19
Source: “The Real Problem with Wood Pulp in Cheese,” Eater.com, 01/23/17
Photo credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture on Visualhunt/CC BY

Poison and Water

Pat Hartman June 12, 2019 No Comments

The average human mouth and throat are home to about 10,000 taste buds, and each one contains around 100 receptors. There are several kinds of taste receptors, and although most of them are in the mouth, they are also scattered around in different body parts.

In “Taste and Its Complications” we mentioned the evolutionary value of this alarm system that warns the organism of encroaching toxins. When receptors are triggered by certain kinds of chemical molecules, they in turn tell the body to mobilize a defense mechanism. Then the body will sneeze, vomit, or take other action to basically get that stuff out of there.

Are there 14 basic tastes really?

An unlikely choice for the title of Basic Taste is carbon dioxide, the fizz in fizzy drinks, a sensation which has always been assumed to inhabit the realm of touch, but which might actually be a flavor. Another contender is kokumi, which means heartiness or “mouthfulness.” It is said to originate in foods that are aged, braised, or slow-cooked. However, kokumi was defined and glamorized by Ajinomoto, the company that gave the world umami (MSG), so its claim is seen as problematic. Another source adds “astringent” as a possible basic taste.

And then, there is plain old water, which only a couple of years ago began to be considered by neuroscientists as a candidate for one of the tastes — with a caveat. In fact, science seems rather confused. In 2017, Ephrat Livni wrote in her article for Quartz,

A study published in Nature […] shows that mammals respond to the stuff at a cellular level, on the tongue… Water may not be a taste all its own, however… On the one hand, this work seems to indicate that water is its own “taste” to the extent that specific taste receptor cells respond… But technically speaking, those TRCs have already been connected to our ability to taste sour.

The receptor cells in the mouth send a message to the brain, letting it know that water is being drunk. Mice are wired this way, and presumably humans also. But now, it gets interesting. The water receptor cells are not unique. They are the same ones that recognize the long-acknowledged basic taste known as sour.

How is it that the same receptors alert to both water and sour, and yet can tell the difference between them? Because what they probably are tasting is pH, the metric that describes acidity versus alkalinity. In addition, the activation of receptors to message the brain is not the only thing going on.

The story of how California Institute of Technology researchers figured this out is pretty amazing:

[T]he team used a technique called optogenetics that allowed them to stimulate sour cells with light instead of water. The researchers removed water from the animals’ water bottle and made it so that the bottle’s spout emitted a blue light when the animals touched it. They discovered that thirsty genetically engineered mice would go to the spout for water, encounter the light and “drink” it.

Even though a mouse brain can be tricked into thinking it is drinking water, it also knows somehow that the body is not really being hydrated. This is evident because the mouse does not stop the fake drinking. It really is all very strange.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “It turns out that we may have more than five basic tastes,” QZ.com, 06/01/17
Source: “Turns out, that humans may actually be able to taste water,” IndiaTimes.com, 06/04/17
Photo credit: Kiki Sorensen on Visualhunt/CC BY

Battle of the Tastes

Pat Hartman June 11, 2019 No Comments

The classic tastes were sweet, sour, bitter, and salty; and then along came umami. And then, for one reason or another, several more contenders turned up wanting to join the ranks of basic tastes. On the human tongue, researchers have discovered previously overlooked receptors; or at least reactions strong and distinctive enough to make them suspect that receptors might be involved, even if they have not been physically identified.

Other candidates for basic taste status are coolness (as experienced from mint or menthol) and piquancy or pungency (hot spiciness). When a taste conveys coolness, touch receptors are fooled into thinking it is objectively cold. Hot spiciness activates actual heat receptors. Metallicity might be a taste, or it might be a tiny electrical current. Some researchers make the case for calcium being a basic taste.

Since the 1800s, the notion has sporadically arisen that fat, or at any rate fatty acids, can claim to be a basic taste. In 2005, French rodents experiments caused the researchers to claim that fatty substances are the sixth taste. It would make evolutionary sense, for nature to include a signal to consume high-energy fat in food-scarce environments. On whether humans might have those receptors too, they could only speculate.

But is fat technically a taste, or more of an oral sensation, belonging to a different sense, touch? The jury is still out. In 2015, Tibi Puiu reported that…

[…] to distinguish from what people generally refer to as “fat”, the researchers at Purdue University propose a new term to describe the sixth basic taste: oleogustus.

Journalist Adam Hadhazy points out an interesting observation gleaned from a study of this phenomenon:

Intriguingly, the subjects with the higher sensitivities to fat ate fewer fatty menu items and were less likely to be overweight than those with low sensitivity.

Nowadays, when the typical Western diet is about 40 percent fat, the enjoyment of it is no longer a survival trait but a liability. Like salt and sugar, fat is highly suspect for another reason. They all have the ability to get people “hooked.”

A BBC article credits Professor Nada Abumrad with this quotation:

As we gain more information regarding the function of this receptor, we may be able to devise better strategies to address the addictive potential of dietary fat.

So again, we are brought back to experts like Steven A. Witherly, Ph.D., who says fat is one of the substances that can make the pleasure centers of people’s brains “light up” and look just like the brain scans of hardcore substance addicts when confronted by their drug of choice.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Tip of the Tongue: Humans May Taste at Least 6 Flavors,” LiveScience.com, 12/30/11
Source: “Fat is recognized as the sixth basic taste, but it’s awful on its own,” ZMEScience.com, 07/27/15
Source: “‘Taste bud’ for fatty foods found,” BBC.co.uk, 11/0/15
Photo credit: Whit Andrews on Visualhunt/CC BY

More Taste Complications

Pat Hartman June 10, 2019 No Comments

Scientists have speculated on the existence of as many as 14 basic tastes, and there is plenty of room for discussion about the claims. Salt, however, is indisputable, classic, and primal.

The fact that a salting process can preserve food is too often overlooked. But if not for salt, human history would be very different. In the old days, nobody had refrigerators, and most did not have ice or the resources to do proper canning. By necessity, everyone’s eating pattern was alternating feast or famine, what we would now call binging and fasting, and they had no choice about it.

Salt was a “silver bullet,” a super-powered entity in tangible form, the miracle substance that fills a vital need and saves the day. The ability to keep meat until later was a massive technological advance. The catch-as-catch-can existence could even out into a more reliable schedule. People could give attention to more progressive agendas than just feeding themselves.

Salt and bliss

And yet, salt has a bad reputation for a number of reasons, some of them medical. Among those who wish to end obesity, the truism that eating inspires bliss is not a recommendation. If food can produce bliss, people will eat lots of it. Usually, the kinds of food that engender the most bliss are the ones with the least nutritional value and the most harmful additives.

The problem with food additives, of which salt is one, is that they make food delicious, and that is not necessarily a good thing, because some people eat too much and grow obese. Dr. David Kessler has suggested that the “bliss point” is reached through the right combination of sugar, fats, and salt, and that Big Food deliberately uses this information to get people hooked on their concoctions.

This opens up all kinds of counter-possibilities, like genetically altering people so they do not react so avidly to sugar, fats, and salt. But in the here and now, salt is a substance that a person can cut down on with relatively little struggle. Experts say that after a period of salt abstinence, an abrupt return to the previous level of use will cause physical revulsion. Still, tolerance always gradually rebuilds.

Bitter taste

Chemically speaking, the bitter receptor detects bases, or alkaloid substances, which is useful to prevent accidental poisoning. We have seen that taste receptors can be present in locations other than the mouth, but who would have guessed that roughly half of a human body’s allotment of bitter taste receptors are on the heart?

They are also found in the stomach, urethra, and trachea, and have the ability to activate the immune system against such things as parasitic worms. A mouse has even more bitter taste receptors in various locales, including the thymus, ovary, kidney, small intestine, and testis. Here are some interesting details:

The synthetic substance phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) tastes very bitter to most people, but is virtually tasteless to others; furthermore, among the tasters, some are so-called “super-tasters” to whom PTC is extremely bitter. This genetic variation in the ability to taste a substance has been a source of great interest…

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Researchers find bitter taste receptors on human hearts,” MedicXpress.com, 05/04/15
Source: “About the Five Basic Tastes,” ScienceOfCooking.com
Photo credit: rvacapinta on Visualhunt/CC BY

Taste and Its Complications

Pat Hartman June 7, 2019 1 Comment

People today do a lot of recreational eating. Usually, what they are eating simply tastes too good to stop. Dr. Pretlow says,

Eating primarily for pleasure, rather than nutrition, is the great American pastime. I certainly don’t mean to condemn pleasurable foods, but in some individuals even everyday cooking, if laden with sugar, salt, and fat, can become a problem. Using everyday cooking for a “flavor rush” may still be using food to cope. In a segment of the population, this may result in dependence on those foods and inability to control the eating.

All sensations including taste reside in the brain. A lot of what we “know” about the subject comes from mice studies, although parallel human studies have not had clear results. Taste can be studied on a cellular level in mice by manipulating their genes to omit certain taste receptor cells. But while their subsequent behavior can be observed, these experimental subjects cannot be interviewed about their subjective perceptions.

The mechanisms of taste did not evolve for pleasure alone, but to detect chemicals in the environment, with the object of avoiding the harmful ones. Taste receptors are not exclusive to the mouth:

Bitter receptors (T2Rs) are found on the cilia and smooth muscle cells of the trachea and bronchi where they probably serve to expel inhaled irritants. Sweet receptors (T1Rs) are found in cells of the duodenum. When sugars reach the duodenum, the cells respond by releasing incretins. These cause the beta cells of the pancreas to increase the release of insulin.

Like everything else, it’s about survival. Eat this and die; eat that and live — to hunt and gather for another day.

Multifactorialism strikes again

There used to be only four identified basic tastes — sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. A previous post covered umami, the widely-acclaimed fifth taste. (As it turns out, there might be as many as 14.) But here is something new: the key to umami is more than MSG. It takes a couple of other substances too:

There is a synergistic effect between MSG, IMP and GMP which together in certain ratios produce a strong umami taste.

Also, as it turns out, umami tastes awful on its own.

In a post about hyperpalatable foods, we quoted Steven A. Witherly, Ph.D., who has expressed the idea that sugar acts on obese people much like an opiate acts on an addict. As time goes by, the person requires a larger dose to get any effect. This is called tolerance, and it is a trademark of addiction.

The following interesting information comes from an uncredited author at ScienceOfCooking.com:

At least two different variants of the “sweetness receptors” need to be activated for the brain to register sweetness. The compounds which the brain senses as sweet are thus compounds that can bind with varying bond strength to several different sweetness receptors.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Sense of Taste,” Biology-Pages.info, 03/08/18
Source: “About the Five Basic Tastes,” ScienceOfCooking.com
Photo credit: Michael Galpert on Visualhunt/CC BY

MSG, the Temptation Molecule

Pat Hartman June 6, 2019 1 Comment

MSG is the commercial additive form of glutamic acid, and it provides the taste sensation known as umami, which is called the fifth flavor. It is naturally found in protein-heavy foods, and may be described as savory, meaty, or more-ish. It is hedonic in that it exists solely in the service of pleasure, and is one of the substances added to give food that irresistible “hyperpalatable” quality. After looking back at what has been discussed so far, we will add to the cache of knowledge.

In one post we talked about excitotoxins, a matter of concern because they cause spastic overactivity that damages neurons, perhaps even to the point of contributing to the neuronal cell death that characterizes a stroke. Where does obesity come into this? Dr. Russell Blaylock has suggested a mechanism: Excitotoxins damage the hypothalamus (weight regulation area) and the pancreas (blood sugar regulating organ) and next thing you know, you have an obesity situation on your hands.

A controversial figure, Dr. Blaylock believes the three main causes of obesity are Vitamin D3 insufficiency, too many vaccinations, and way too much MSG. He calls the substance an excitotoxic food additive, and it is not the only one. The artificial sweetener aspartame, coincidentally manufactured by the same corporation that gave us MSG, is another.

Although the pathways of causation are not clear, researchers have noted that inflammation and obesity are often associated. Many of the foods and additives that obese patients are warned against are also known to cause systemic inflammation. They include sugar, saturated fats, refined carbohydrates, casein, aspartame, alcohol, and — wait for it — MSG.

Danger on every side

Other writers also warn of addictive additives. These substances must be powerful indeed, if they can divert young people away from the more age-appropriate goal of wanting to be attractively toned into the wilderness of helpless overeating.

But take an alleged food product like potato chips, which Dr. Pretlow has learned from his young informants to regard as one of the most troublesome things on the market. Chips combine the attraction of a process addiction (plenty of satisfying crunch in the chewing) with the lure of an addictive substance, which salt may very well be. Nobody thinks of it that way, of course, but ask the average diner to stick with unsalted food for a week and see what happens.

As we discussed in “Hyperpalatable Foods: Science or Science Fiction? Part 4,” it is not by accident that foods, in the processing, are made super-tasty and seemingly addictive. They are carefully and deliberately engineered to be irresistible.

While some barriers still remain to keep cigarettes, alcohol, and hard drugs from children, sweets and junk food are not that hard to come by. In some circles, kids learn pretty fast that adults’ desire to be left unbothered can be parleyed into bribes of edible treats.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Photo credit: Ben Chun on Visualhunt/CC BY-SA

Umami Review

Pat Hartman June 5, 2019 No Comments

The Japanese word “umami” can be translated as deliciousness, yumminess, more-ishness. The purpose here is to look back over what has been said, and then see what’s new.

Umami is a taste sensation caused by glutamic acid, an amino acid that appears in fermented, aged, ripened foods. As with sugar cane and cocaine, the end users prefer the distilled and compacted version of it. In concentrated form, the temptation molecule is called monosodium glutamate, and its nickname is MSG.

For some people, it makes food taste better. For about 40 percent of Americans, it makes them feel physically ill in one way or another. This malady used to be called Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, but the joke, to people who know and care about such things, is that now it should be called Every Restaurant Syndrome.

And why should anyone care? Maybe because the corporation that makes quite a lot of money off MSG also financed most of the studies showing the product’s virtues. It makes food more tempting, which just might be a problem because most of the humans on the planet appear to already find food much too tempting.

In “Does Dr. Evil Work for the Food Industry?” we mentioned that MSG has been linked to more than 30 adverse physical conditions, including obesity. We discussed how researchers obtain obese lab rats if that is what their experiment calls for. Hint: The method involves injecting standard lab rats with a certain substance that has three initials, and the first one is M.

The rodents can develop a constellation of symptoms that looks like addiction, and MSG seems to increase their appetite by 40 percent, according to Spanish scientists.

Maybe we should care because extreme tastiness leads to overeating, and overeating leads to obesity, which is what we are here for. As Dr. Pretlow says,

The pleasure of the foods cancels emotional pain for the time it takes to consume them and perhaps during the anticipation phase and after thoughts. But once the pleasure fades, reality comes crashing back in that we’ve done something that will now make our lives more miserable.

And what does a miserable person do? A miserable person eats! Call it a vicious cycle, a vicious circle, a negative spiral, or whatever, this phenomenon is not good.

In “You and Umami: What the Heck Are We Eating?“, we learned how Dr. David Kessler would like to return to the good old days when people did not graze constantly, and certainly not in public; and why he calls modern food “adult baby food.” We quoted Arun Gupta, who says that umami “elicits an actual neurochemical, physiological response,” and believes that MSG is as highly addictive as the combinations of fat, sugar, and salt that people find irresistible.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Image by Jerry/Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Tangled Narrative of MSG

Speaking of studies…

MSG Foe John Erb

MSG = Bad?

Why do we care?

Mixed signals

Food Process Engineer Tells All

“Creeping degradation”

Poison and Water

Are there 14 basic tastes really?

Battle of the Tastes

More Taste Complications

Salt and bliss

Bitter taste

Taste and Its Complications

Multifactorialism strikes again

MSG, the Temptation Molecule

Danger on every side

Umami Review

Profiles: Kids Struggling with Weight

The Book

About Dr. Robert A. Pretlow

Presentations

Food & Health Resources