Tasty Dish and the Risk You Know

While current research on monosodium glutamate indicate that it is not possible to ingest the lethal dose, it remains uncertain whether this substance gets flushed out of the body and not accumulate.

WHEN I was barely a grader in a public school somewhere in the province of Zamboanga Del Norte, I heard this talk about this food additive we used to call Vetsin. Someone in town supposedly dissolved a small pack of it, and placed a No. 2 iron nail into the solution. After two days, the rumor claimed, the iron nail dissolved totally. (Someone may have stolen the iron nail to play a prank. I don’t know.)

At that age, the experiment was impressed into my mind as something “amazing!” But adults who heard the story outlawed the food additive from their homes. Even today, each time I bring home an unfamiliar cooking mix, my mother would scrutinize the list of ingredients to check if it contains monosodium glutamate (MSG).

Involvement in the field of research, however, taught me a more tentative attitude toward information. Unless I can verify it myself I will consider it neither positive nor negative; but simply a piece of information I cannot commit a definitive “agree” or “disagree” on. But what I cannot be certain about, I usually avoid. The risk we do not know is always more dangerous than the risk we know.

A joint review of the University of Surrey (UK) and the Food and Nutrition Division of the FAO (Rome, Italy) noted that newborn mouse needs 500 milligrams of MSG per kg of body weight to produce... [Read more.]

This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 31 August 2011.

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