I want to talk to you today about a really insidious little substance that may be significantly affecting your health. Here are some hints: It’s not just in Chinese food, it causes more than just headaches, and there’s a really good chance that you had some today.

Yep, I’m talking about MSG, also known as monosodium glutamate. What’s the big deal? Well, glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter that can have effects in areas much more far reaching than just your taste buds.

Excitatory neuro-whatever, you say? I know it sounds like mumbo jumbo, but allow me to explain…

A Little Physiology

A neurotransmitter is a substance that your nervous system uses to transmit a signal from one nerve, or neuron, to another. Your brain, and the rest of your nervous system, is made up of literally billions of neurons, and they each use various kinds of neurotransmitters to convey different signals to each other.

Glutamate is excitatory in that it stimulates any nerve that it acts upon, causing it to have a higher propensity to stimulate other neurons to perform functions that are as widely varying as your nervous system itself. This could be anything from causing a muscle to contract to getting your heart to beat a little faster.

Conversely, an inhibitory neurotransmitter is one that would cause the neuron it acts upon to be less likely to fire. It’s this balance of excitatory and inhibitory signals that determines what nerves fire, what signals are received, and the balance of your brain chemistry.

The actual molecule glutamate is an amino acid. Amino acids are the building blocks of protein. Put a bunch of them together and you have a strand of protein, which might be a muscle fiber or a pigment that makes your eyes a certain color. Individually, however, amino acids have varying roles and functions in the body.

The sodium part of monosodium glutamate is added to make the entire MSG molecule more stable, so that the effects of glutamate are more long lasting.

So What’s the Problem?

MSG stimulates the nerve endings in your taste buds, making the food you eat seem to have a more intense flavor. If you were part of a food study, being asked to rate the taste of a food on a scale of 1 to 10, you’d say the MSG-laced food might rate a 7 or 8, while the one without it would be down around 3 or 4.

The problem is that the effects are not confined to your taste buds. After you swallow it, MSG can go on to stimulate neurons all over your body, causing anything from headaches and heart palpitations, to numbness and shortness of breath.

Being a basic amino acid, glutamate obviously exists in nature, so you might think it’d be a relatively harmless substance. The form of glutamate we get with MSG is not the same as what you find in nature, however.

The processed MSG you consume actually ends up having a high percentage of molecules that have a geometric shape that is a mirror image of that found in nature. This is problematic for the body in much the same way that left-handed people have trouble from time to time working in a world that is dominated by right-handers.

Even though our two hands are identical in design and function, trying to use your left hand on a device designed for the other can be an exercise in frustration.

This simple difference in the MSG created in the food lab can make a big difference in how our bodies react to and process the substance. Additionally, there are many contaminants that come along in the typical MSG creation process that are known carcinogens.

The Labeling Game

On your average food label, you don’t see the phrase “monosodium glutamate” on too many things. This is because that particular phrase is reserved by the FDA for use by a product that has at least 99% processed freeglutamic acid (PFGA). PFGA is a term used to describe the processed, synthetic variety of glutamate mentioned above.

This means that a product can be 98% PFGA, with essentially all of the problems and side effects of MSG, without ever being listed as such on a food label. Instead, what you get are label names like “yeast extract”, “yeast nutrient”, “textured protein”, “hydrolyzed protein”, “gelatin”, and dozens of others. Additionally, labels like “flavor”, “flavoring”, and “natural flavors” may also contain high amounts of processed glutamate.

Regardless of the reason for its use, these products most likely carry all the inherent problems and sensitivity issues of run-of-the-mill MSG. (There is a much more comprehensive list of all the names under which processed glutamate might be hidden at http://www.truthinlabeling.org/hiddensources.html.)

Furthermore, any item on a food label that you know has ingredients, but does not list them, should be suspect. A classic example is a from a popular brand of canned tuna. The ingredients listed are “tuna, water, vegetable broth, salt”.

We know “vegetable broth” has ingredients. In this case, the “vegetable broth” is simply “hydrolyzed vegetable protein” (see our list above) and water. In other words, the only reason “vegetable broth” is added is to get MSG (orPFGA) into the product.

The intent of most of these products is the same: to enhance flavor based upon the properties of the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate. There is also a percentage of products that add in PFGA or MSG for their preservative and stabilizing properties, making foods or chemicals less susceptible to the effects of things like heat, light, or acidity.

The common flu vaccine FluMist, according to the CDC, includes MSG as a stabilizer. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not shoot something into my nostrils, to be absorbed by blood vessels just inches from my brain, that includes anything like MSG in it.

The Effects

By far the most common symptom I see in the office from MSG is headaches, particularly migraines. If I mention the possibility of MSG, the usual response I get is, “But I haven’t had any Chinese food recently!” Education about just how many places you can find MSG then begins.

Rashes, redness, stomach discomfort, or “brain fog” are examples of just a few, varied symptoms patients notice that they stop having once they make a concerted effort to eliminate their MSG intake. Once you know MSG is the problem, anytime your particular symptom crops up again, the question to ask isn’t so much “why am I having this headache?”, but rather “what new thing did I eat recently?”

Taking this approach allows you to get better and better at keeping MSG out of your system, keeping you where you want to be: pain free.

Regardless of whether you experience clear symptoms from MSG exposure, my recommendation is to stay away from the stuff. The health of your brain and nervous system isn’t worth a food company’s experiment to try and make their snacks tastier!