Breakthroughs Today

The new thing that we know of right now about MSG is that it does not result to long-term build up of glutamine in our blood, and thus gets easily flushed out of our system after intake.   SOME three months or so after the Breakthroughs article, Tasty Dish and the Risk You Know, came out in the last day of August last year, Dr. Josefa S. Eusebio, president of the Glutamate Association of the Philippines (GAP), wrote me to share what she knows about monosodium glutamate (MSG). The GAP objective is “to undertake programs and activities for generating and disseminating scientific, culinary and other related information about glutamates and its umami taste.” Dr. Eusebio shared to me how “96 percent of all glutamates (from food and MSG) are utilized in the intestines as major source of energy metabolism and for carrying out the vital functions of digestion and absorption.” The remaining four percent, she wrote, enters the blood, and “immediately” transformed into other am...

Unrequited love can be a bed of heartaches. But getting loved in return may not be that good an idea at all when we are talking of food. The stake is as bad as a brain tumor itself. WHILE Francis Bacon believed that “in charity there is no excess,” when we talk of food, there are always those who simply eat in excess. In an earlier article, a review on many toxicity studies on MSG gave us some reassuring news that sweetening our meat dishes may not be that unhealthy after all. But that’s for the average eater. We have to consider that Filipinos eat at least three times a day, and more in between. Someone who really loves food, and that food somehow loves in return, may still breach our toxicity threshold for the day for brain tumor of 500 mg... [ READ  MORE ] This article appears in SunStar Cebu on 7 December 2011.

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 ...