Chinese restaurant syndrome

[GeneChing]

© 2019 MEL MAGAZINE
FOOD Andrew Fiouzi 2 weeks ago
THE RISE AND FALL AND RISE AGAIN OF MSG

You probably know monosodium glutamate from its link to so-called ‘Chinese Restaurant Syndrome’ — and that’s precisely the problem

I’m a casualty of the MSG subterfuge. I was fooled more than a decade ago — when I was still an impressionable high school student in the suburbs of L.A. In “the valley,” the main street — Ventura Boulevard — was beset by sushi spots, weed dispensaries, and of course, a bevy of Chinese restaurants.

Some of these were hiding in strip malls behind beige signs and tinted windows, while others stood alone, clear, beneath the glow of a neon-lit sign, one of its letters sometimes burned out — an easy tell that the food was worth the wait. My favorite, The Plum Tree Inn, boasted an aquatic experience in the form of a tank that housed lobsters that could be delivered to your table — all you had to do was order the special. I loved it there.

Until, that is, the anti-monosodium glutamate lobby told me that if I loved myself, I shouldn’t love those places anymore.

For the uninitiated, monosodium glutamate, more commonly (and ominously) known as MSG, is a chemical compound often used to enhance the flavor of food. It’s kind of like salt, only supercharged. “In 2002, the discovery of the umami taste receptor officially established umami as the fifth basic taste,” explains Taylor Wallace, a food scientist at George Mason University. “MSG combines sodium (like that in table salt) with glutamate, the most abundant amino acid in nature and one that provides umami, a savory taste.”

So despite its unsettlingly scientific moniker, MSG is nothing more than sodium mixed with one of the 20 amino acids crucial to the human body. “MSG is glutamic acid, which is an amino acid that, when it forms a salt with sodium, changes to glutamate instead of glutamic acid,” says Wallace. “And so, if you think about it, your body is made up of many essential amino acids, one of which is glutamic acid.” As per John Mahoney’s 2013 BuzzFeed article on MSG, we consume this substance in three different ways: Through proteins that contain glutamic acid; foods like Parmesan cheese, tomatoes, seaweed or soy sauce; and lastly through MSG itself — “of which the FDA estimates that most of us eat a little over a half a gram of every day,” according to Mahoney’s article.

But the decades-long hysteria around MSG has largely ignored the facts above, and indeed its history, which — though easy enough to uncover — isn’t widely known. The substance was originally discovered by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda in 1907, after he noticed a common flavor between foods like asparagus, tomatoes and the broth his wife made with seaweed. “Ikeda was as enterprising as he was curious, so soon after his discovery, he refined and patented a way to produce pure glutamic acid, stabilizing it with a salt ion to create what we now know as monosodium glutamate,” reports Mahoney. “He called the company he founded to produce MSG Ajinomoto (‘the essence of taste’), thus forever linking umami, the taste, with glutamic acid, the chemical. It remains one of the largest producers of MSG in the world today.”

But despite being created by a Japanese chemist, MSG would, as we all know, gain notoriety in the U.S. due to its association with Chinese-American cuisine. “A lot of it has to do with political, social and cultural trends that were happening in the 1960s,” says journalist Thomas Germain, who has previously written about the MSG debate for the Columbia Undergraduate Research Journal. “So at the beginning of the 1960s, a writer named Rachel Carson published a book called Silent Spring, which is about the dangers of pesticides and chemical companies.” Carson’s book, says Germain, spurred an idea “that became really popular in the U.S.” — namely, that chemicals and additives that are made artificially are inherently dangerous and able to harm you in mysterious ways. “You don’t even realize it’s happening,” Germain says in summary of the book’s main takeaway about pesticides. “It can be invisible, almost.”

Germain continues to say that just a few years later, in 1968, Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok — a then-recent Chinese immigrant — wrote a letter to the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, stating that he got headaches when he ate in Chinese restaurants, but didn’t get them with his own home cooking, reasoning that the culprit might be MSG. “Almost immediately, this idea caught on and it just exploded,” says Germain.

Compounding this, Germain notes in his article on MSG that, in 1969, a different study showed a “causal link” between MSG, headaches and CRS [Chinese Restaurant Syndrome]. “That same year, Washington University’s Dr. John Olney published an article in Science which found that mice dosed with MSG developed brain lesions, stunted skeletal growth, obesity and female sterility,” writes Germain. “A few years later, Olney published a new study that found similar defects in infant primates.”

As Wallace points out, though, these rat studies were highly medically problematic, with rats being given an IV injection of MSG at levels far above those you’d ever experience with your food. Even had those studies been more realistic, he adds, they still wouldn’t necessarily be relevant. “We do a lot of rat studies at George Mason, but the bad thing about rat studies is, it’s only about 10 percent of the time they translate to what actually happens in humans,” he says. “It’s kind of like how chocolate is a neurotoxin in dogs, but we can all eat chocolate and we’re just fine. It’s the same thing with rats.”

A similar example, according to Wallace, occurs in studies on saccharin. “If you drink 20,000 Diet Cokes a day for 15 years, maybe it’s detrimental, but who’s going to consume that level of it?” he says. “And when you have an intravenous injection, that’s completely different than what happens when you digest something and it’s broken down and then absorbed.”

Beyond the dubious nature of these studies, there’s also the simple fact that MSG isn’t unique to Chinese food — it’s in everything from Campbell’s soup to Doritos to Ranch dressing, not to mention that it’s naturally found in, for example, kelp. So why, then, did Chinese restaurants shoulder the brunt of the MSG hysteria?

“At the base of it, it’s really xenophobia that’s been passed down,” says food and travel journalist Kristie Hang. “MSG is found in so many food items, but no one complains or even thinks twice about it until they set foot in a Chinese restaurant.” Germain agrees, telling me that the anti-MSG narrative plays into a long history of anti-Chinese racism in the U.S. “Part of that has to do with the fact that this was happening at the height of the Cold War,” he says. “So the idea that the Chinese were doing something that was sneaky and harmful with chemicals was just a very easy idea to believe for a lot of Americans. It was just this confluence of all these different ideas that hit at once that made it the perfect storm to strike fear in the hearts and stomachs of America.”

continued next post

[GeneChing]

crass iron skillet
@SouthrnGothHick
· Nov 24, 2019
Controversial food opinions are frequently used to be Overtly Racist about different people's cuisine https://twitter.com/jonbecker_/statu...05486907052033 …

Jon Becker
@jonbecker_
Please quote tweet this with your most controversial food opinion, I love controversial food opinions

crass iron skillet
@SouthrnGothHick
If you are "allergic to MSG" but it only strikes when you eat Chinese food and not when you eat a tomato, then you're having headaches because you're a dehydrated racist

1,106
7:32 AM - Nov 24, 2019
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440 people are talking about this

According to Wallace, in spite of the fact that you’ve probably heard someone tell you that they have an “MSG intolerance,” or that they’re “allergic to Chinese food” because of the MSG, the truth is, that’s physiologically impossible, considering “seven pounds of your body weight is actually made up of glutamic acid.” For those reasons, Wallace says that even though there’s been plenty of pressure advocating for an MSG ban, it’s always remained on the FDA’s “generally recognized as safe” food list.

It should be noted that some researchers believe there are those who’ve shown signs of genuine MSG sensitivity. “In my research on the effects of MSG in individuals with irritable bowel syndrome and the chronic pain condition fibromyalgia, I observed headache (including migraine), diarrhea, gastrointestinal pain and bloating, extreme fatigue, muscle pain and cognitive dysfunction — all of which improved when subjects were put on a diet low in free glutamate, and which returned with re-introduction of MSG,” writes Kathleen Holton, a professor in the School of Education, Teaching and Health and the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at American University, for Live Science.

Interestingly, Hang tells me that it’s not just non-Chinese people who share the anti-MSG opinion. “Chinese and Chinese-Americans have thought very lowly of their own food as well,” she says. “It’s a cultural perception, unfortunately.”

But as is often the case with the winds of food trends, the direction appears to be changing. Thanks in large part to chefs like David Chang, who have worked to rewrite the narrative around Asian cuisine being considered “cheap food,” MSG is no longer the universal food ingredient pariah it once was.



As per Mahoney’s BuzzFeed article, one of the focuses of Chang’s Momofuku research and development lab in New York’s East Village is to find different ways to achieve the much-sought after umami flavor provided by MSG. And although technically speaking, what they’re developing there is done via a natural fermentation process, the final product is chemically identical to the much maligned non-essential amino acid. “It just so happens that inside that tin of MSG is the exact molecule Chang and his chefs have worked so hard for the last three years to tease out of pots of fermenting beans and nuts,” writes Mahoney. “It’s pure glutamic acid, crystallized with a single sodium ion to stabilize it; five pounds of uncut, un-stepped-on umami, made from fermented corn in a factory in Iowa.”

In addition to Chang’s reinvestment in MSG as a viable, non-hazardous flavor enhancer, researchers are also actively working to dispel the unfounded and racist MSG narrative. Most recently, Wallace and his team at George Mason found that glutamates like MSG can actually help reduce America’s sodium intake. “MSG contains about 12 percent sodium, which is two-thirds less than that contained in table salt, and data shows a 25 to 40 percent reduction in sodium is possible in specific product categories when MSG is substituted for some salt,” Wallace told Eureka Alert. “As Americans begin to understand that MSG is completely safe, I think we’ll see a shift toward using the ingredient as a replacement for some salt to improve health outcomes.”

Which brings us back to my decade-long abandonment of an entire nation’s cuisine, all because of a three-lettered ingredient I was brainwashed to believe was no good for me. The Plum Tree Inn, my favorite Chinese restaurant in the valley, has since shuttered its doors, and as such, I will never eat there again. This, I accept as my deserved punishment for a decade of ignorance. But as anyone who lives in any American city knows, Chinese restaurants are plentiful, and never have I been more excited to get some MSG — by way of a giant helping of sesame chicken — back in my belly.


Andrew Fiouzi
Andrew Fiouzi is a staff writer at MEL.

As my family hails from Hawaii, we had aji-no-moto on the table right next to the salt, pepper & soy sauce when I was growing up, long before the MSG thing hit.

[GeneChing]

I'm making a separate indie thread 'Chinese restaurant syndrome' off the 'Chinese food' thread now.

And I don't think all Asians are cringing. I think only the Chinese Amer-azns are cringing. The Japanese are laughing because aji-no-moto is a Japanese thing, and the rest probably don't care.

Asians cringe at 'Chinese restaurant syndrome' in dictionary
A social media campaign backed by a Japanese seasonings company is targeting the persistent idea that Chinese food is packed with MSG and can make you sick
By TERRY TANG Associated Press
January 14, 2020, 11:25 AM
5 min read


People are seen in the window eating at a Chinese restaurant decorated with menu items on its shop front on Friday Jan. 10, 2020, in New York City. A social media campaign backed by a Japanese seasonings company is targeting the persistent idea that Chinese food is packed with MSG and can make you sick. So entrenched is the notion in American culture, it shows up in the dictionary: Merriam-Webster.com lists “Chinese restaurant syndrome." as a real illness. But much of the mythology around the idea has been debunked: monosodium glutamate, also known as MSG, shows up in many foods from tomatoes to breast milk, and there's no evidence to link it to illness. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)People are seen in the window eating at a Chinese restaurant decorated with menu items on its shop front on Friday Jan. 10, 2020, in New York City. A social media campaign backed by a Japanese seasonings company is targeting the persistent idea that Chinese food is packed with MSG and can make you sick. So entrenched is the notion in American culture, it shows up in the dictionary: Merriam-Webster.com lists “Chinese restaurant syndrome." as a real illness. But much of the mythology around the idea has been debunked: monosodium glutamate, also known as MSG, shows up in many foods from tomatoes to breast milk, and there's no evidence to link it to illness. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)
The Associated Press
A social media campaign backed by a Japanese seasonings company is targeting the persistent idea that Chinese food is packed with MSG and can make you sick.

So entrenched is the notion in American culture, it shows up in the dictionary: Merriam-Webster.com lists “ Chinese restaurant syndrome " as a real illness that has been around since 1968. But much of the mythology around the idea has been debunked: monosodium glutamate, also known as MSG, shows up in many foods from tomatoes to breast milk, and there's no evidence to link it to illness.

“For me, it’s another thing to point to other people and say ‘Look, if you think racism toward Asians doesn’t exist in this country, like here it is,'” said restaurateur Eddie Huang. “I know how white people see us. ‘They’re cool, they’re acceptable, they’re non-threatening. But they’re weird, their food.'"

Huang, a New York City-based chef and author (his memoir inspired the ABC sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat”), and TV's “The Real” co-host Jeannie Mai are launching a social media effort Tuesday with Ajinomoto, the longtime Japanese producer of MSG seasonings. They plan to use the hashtag #RedefineCRS to challenge Merriam-Webster to rewrite the definition.

When reached for comment Tuesday, Merriam-Webster said it had not received complaints before about “Chinese restaurant syndrome" but would reconsider the term.

“Our aim is always to provide accurate information about what words mean, which includes providing information about whether a use is offensive or dated,” senior editor Emily Brewster said in a statement. "We’ll be reviewing this particular entry and will revise it according to the evidence of the term in use.

Shifts in culture and attitudes put the dictionary in a constant state of revision, she added.

Before joining the effort, neither Huang nor Mai had any idea the phrase was in the dictionary.

“The dictionary I thought was a reputable kind of Bible that was fact-checked all the way through in order to get us information,” said Mai, who is Vietnamese and Chinese. “'Chinese restaurant syndrome' is truly an outdated, super racist term.”

The symptoms are listed as numbness of the neck, arms, and back as well as headaches, dizziness, and palpitations. It affects people eating food but “especially Chinese food heavily seasoned with monosodium glutamate.”

The campaign isn't looking to wipe the phrase out, but update it.

“I actually think it'd be interesting if they just kept it and just noted this is an outdated, antiquated thing,” Huang said. “I do think these things are important to remember and point to.”

Huang and Mai say the campaign is not about trying to help boost sales at Ajinomoto, which was founded in 1908 after a Japanese professor figured out how to isolate glutamate from a seaweed broth.

“They’re already selling tons of their products. They don’t really need my help to be honest,” Huang said.

So, how did the myth endure for more than five decades?

It started with a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine in 1968, according to Robert Ku, author of “Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA.” Dr. Ho Man Kwok, who was Chinese American, wrote a letter speculating that some Chinese restaurants left him feeling numbness and other symptoms. Other readers, doctors themselves, then wrote in saying they experienced something similar. Some researchers claimed that MSG was the source, Ku said. The journal's editors decided to call it “Chinese restaurant syndrome.”

“For a long time, Chinese restaurant syndrome was considered a legitimate ailment that the medical community seemed to back,” Ku said.

The New York Times picked up on the debate. Chinese restaurants everywhere were putting up signs and menus that said “No MSG” because of the backlash.

It wasn't until the 1990s that specialists doing more research began disproving the syndrome, Ku said. They found MSG was in just about every processed food.

“It made no sense that only Chinese food that has MSG causes these ill effects but you can't get it from Campbell's Soup,” Ku said.

MSG comes from glutamate, a common amino acid or protein building block found in food, according to Julie Stefanski, a spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition & Dietetics. Glutamate is present in foods like ham and some cheeses.

The Food and Drug Administration says MSG is generally recognized as a safe addition to food. In previous studies with people identifying as sensitive to MSG, researchers found that neither MSG nor a placebo caused consistent reactions, the agency said.

At a Chinese restaurant in Phoenix, some patrons had never even heard of the term.

Linda Saldana is bothered by one culture’s food getting singled out.

“I’m obviously not Asian,” said Saldana, who was having lunch with her husband, son and two nieces. “But if that was to be said about Mexican food, I’d feel a little offended because how could food cause all that?”

——— Terry Tang reported from Phoenix and is a member of The Associated Press’ race and ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ttangAP

[ShaolinDan]

MSG is good stuff. Naturally occurring in a lot of food we eat, including tomatoes, mushrooms, aged meat, and fermented foods...shows up when protein chains break down. It can really help when trying to make a dish vegetarian—For example I use it (and more salt) in place of fish sauce when I’m making Thai style curry.

[GeneChing]

Chef Eddie Huang and TV host Jeannie Mai are calling out the dictionary's outdated definition for "Chinese restaurant syndrome."
By Bettina Makalintal
Jan 16 2020, 5:00amShareTweetSnap


PHOTO BY PANIDA WIJITPANYA VIA ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES PLUS

Earlier this week, chef, author, and entrepreneur Eddie Huang began tweeting a new campaign, followed soon after by similar promotion from TV host Jeannie Mai: #redefineCRS, they wrote, calling out Merriam-Webster.

The CRS in this case is "Chinese restaurant syndrome," a relic of the late 1960s that's responsible for the backlash and negative discourse over monosodium glutamate, the umami food additive colloquially known as MSG. Huang and Mai's campaign to redefine the term is a collaboration with MSG producer Ajinomoto, which was started after Japanese chemist Ikeda Kikunae discovered a process to isolate MSG from sea kelp to create the savory flavoring in 1908.

Despite its promotional aspect, the redefine campaign has a point: The current definition of "Chinese restaurant syndrome" doesn't quite take into account the shoddy science supporting the existence of the "condition," or the term's xenophobic undertones.

Currently, Merriam-Webster's definition for "Chinese restaurant syndrome" describes the phrase in straightforward terms: "A group of symptoms (such as numbness of the neck, arms, and back with headache, dizziness, and palpitations) that is held to affect susceptible persons eating food and especially Chinese food heavily seasoned with monosodium glutamate." That isn't the whole story, though, and plenty of dishes beyond Chinese food contain MSG, from Doritos to Chick-fil-A sandwiches.

The anti-MSG controversy started in 1968 when Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok published a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine in which he, a researcher at the National Biomedical Research Foundation, described a condition that he dubbed as "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome." Kwok wrote that after eating at Chinese restaurants, he experienced numbness, weakness, and palpitations, which he attributed first to Chinese cooking wine, and then to MSG.

Kwok called on the medical community for more research, and what he set off was a decades-long discussion about the safety of MSG. People wrote in to the publication agreeing with Kwok's experience, and CRS gained coverage in places like the New York Times. In the 50 years since that starting point, MSG has continued to be demonized and avoided, with some Chinese restaurants still touting its exclusion.

But contrary to what Americans might have thought a few decades ago, today's perspective is more skeptical of the condition's existence, after scientific studies calling MSG into question were found to have large flaws. According to FiveThirtyEight, those issues included research that allowed participants to know whether or not they were eating MSG, scientifically frowned upon due to the placebo effect.

Today, the racist and xenophobic ties of the anti-MSG movement also seem more clear. As MSG's champions—including food science writer Harold McGee and chef Dave Chang—have pointed out, MSG occurs naturally in foods like Parmesan cheese, tomatoes, and steak—foods people eat without claiming feelings of "Chinese restaurant syndrome." Clearly, something about the cuisine MSG was most often associated with impacted public view of the ingredient and contributed to its backlash.

What the #redefineCRS campaign is asking for is a definition that reflects that increased knowledge, not one that simply validates the term. Emily Brewster, a senior editor at Merriam-Webster, told VICE via email that while Merriam-Webster had no record of anyone contacting it about the term until the morning the #redefineCRS campaign began, its staff will be reviewing the entry and "will revise it according to the evidence of the term in use." The Merriam-Webster Twitter account responded to Huang similarly.

Reviews like this are part of the process at Merriam-Webster as words change meaning and connotation over time.

"The ongoing evolution of language means that we are in a constant state of revision. Keeping up with it is a challenge, so we are always grateful to readers for pointing us to vocabulary that is in need of review," Brewster wrote. "As usages change, our entries change to reflect those shifts. Our aim is always to provide accurate information about what words mean, which includes providing information about whether a use is offensive or dated."

The dictionary's current definition might have seemed true at a time, but language changes alongside our understanding of science and culture, and the dictionary only really reflects the perspective of a given moment. Sometimes, we need to give it all a fresh look.

Naturally occurring in a lot of food we eat, including tomatoes, mushrooms, aged meat, and fermented foods...shows up when protein chains break down.

Very true but a lot of toxins are naturally occuring too. I'm just playing devil's advocate here.

[ShaolinDan]

Very true but a lot of toxins are naturally occuring too. I'm just playing devil's advocate here.

That’s also true. And MSG can be toxic...but the lethal dose for rats is five times the lethal dose of salt. Not that it’s necessarily the same for us... But we’ll die from lack of salt too. Gotta have balance. I only use MSG in my cooking rarely, but sometimes a dish just needs that extra savor.

It is hard to change people’s minds about things though. Those first “anti-gluten” studies were retracted years ago too, and gluten free is still the rage. Frankly, as a cook, all these special diets and sensitivities can be pretty irritating. It gets worse every year. Give your kids peanuts! Please!