Hi everybody this is Monica Reinagel welcome back to the nutrition

divas quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous this is the

second in a two-part podcast on monosodium glutamate or MSG.

As I talked about last week, MSG is an ingredient made of salt and the amino acid glutamate.

It's used to enhance the flavor of foods and the reason it has this effect

is that your tongue has special flavor receptors that respond specifically to

glutamate.

Glutamate is also found naturally in foods like parmesan cheese and tomato juice

and it has several important functions in the body including acting as a

neurotransmitter in the brain. The US, as well as various international food safety and health agencies,

consider MSG to be perfectly safe when used as a food additive or flavor enhancer.

In fact, adding a little MSG can help

manufacturers reduce the sodium in processed foods without sacrificing flavor.

However, a lot of people charge that MSG is not harmless, causing headaches, flushing, and other temporary

but unpleasant reactions in people who are sensitive to it.

There are also concerns that it might cause

neurological damage, diabetes, or even be linked to the obesity epidemic. Today

we're going to take a closer look at the evidence used to support these charges.

Concern about the effects of MSG and the brain appear to stem from an early experiment in which researchers injected newborn mice with very large amounts of MSG.

The mice developed brain lesions, never a good sign.

Of course, the experiment was not repeated on humans, but even based on this preliminary

data, I feel quite comfortable concluding that we should not inject huge doses of

...