If you’re still afraid of the seasoning MSG giving you headaches, you’ve bought into a decades-old myth: MSG isn’t causing it, and it’s not actually “bad for you” the way you were told. And now that you know the truth, you can celebrate with a meal at your favorite MSG-using restaurant.
Why do people think MSG is bad for you?
The monosodium glutamate (MSG) scare started with a 1968 letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, in which a Chinese researcher living in the US said that he felt a numbness in his neck and arms after eating at certain Chinese restaurants, but not after eating home-cooked meals. Maybe it had something to do with cooking wine, he suggested, or more likely the large amounts of sodium in the combination of soy sauce and MSG. Shortly afterward, doctors and everyone else were talking about a “Chinese restaurant syndrome” and blaming it on MSG.
The problem? The syndrome couldn’t be reproduced in the lab. Chemically, it never made sense: monosodium glutamate is just what it sounds like: sodium plus the amino acid glutamate. Both of those ingredients are present in plenty of foods, and not just in Chinese restaurants either. Soy sauce is rich in glutamate, and so are tomatoes and parmesan cheese. That there was no “Italian restaurant syndrome” suggests that maybe (white, American) people were eager to blame Asian restaurants long after the syndrome’s existence was disproved.
Is MSG actually bad for you?
If MSG had the serious health effects that it’s accused of, scientists would have no problem finding that people (or mice) show harmful effects after eating the stuff. But the research that found negative health effects was in rodents that had enormous quantities of MSG injected into their bodies—no relation to what happens when you happen to eat a sprinkling of the stuff on our dinners. A 2019 review discussed these studies and concluded that “many of the reported negative health effects of MSG have little relevance for chronic human exposure to low doses.”
It’s possible that some people are sensitive to MSG in the same way that people can be sensitive or allergic to other foods, but there doesn’t seem to be a widespread health issue that makes MSG “bad” for us.
One last concern that people often have is the sodium content of MSG—after all, sodium is in the name—but sodium only makes up 12% of the weight of MSG (as opposed to 40% of table salt). A serving of Ajinomoto contains about 60 milligrams of sodium, about 3% of the daily value.
So if you feel weird after a big meal—Chinese food or otherwise—you may be imagining the symptoms, or you may be experiencing something totally unrelated to MSG. If that’s the case, consider seeing a doctor.