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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MoneyPenny who wrote (191894)	6/17/2012 4:34:51 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 543676

Interesting list- thank you for posting it.

To: MoneyPenny who wrote (191894)	6/17/2012 4:55:44 PM
From: Aggie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543676

Hi MoneyPenny Thanks for this information, it's very useful. I have avoided MSG for years, but never in an obsessive way, just as a way of limiting my intake. I can always tell when food has had MSG added, and sometimes when it is in excess I get a headache from it. Oddly enough the material occurs naturally in many foods - but as you say it's the spiked ingredient lists on restaurant recipes (trying to keep you eating) that many run foul of. I had an internist once explain to me how this amino acid product works - your flavor receptors (on your tongue's surface) are shaped like miniature mushrooms. MSG causes them to swell temporarily in response to the chemical, thus increasing the surface area of the taste receptors, thus increasing the overall taste sensations. Neat huh? Since this can cause a severe allergic reaction in some I agree it ought to be clearly listed on the label, by law. And I have written a couple of food companies (Progresso is one) requesting that they (a) list it clearly so that I can avoid buying the product and (b) make a product line that doesn't have it as an ingredient, which oddly enough they have started doing. Aggie

To: MoneyPenny who wrote (191894)	6/17/2012 8:34:43 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 543676

Yes, when I read the thing about "natural flavors", my immediate thought was, oops, big loophole. MSG, or glutamate to use the more common biochemical name, is a little strange. It's just an amino acid, really, so you'll always have it present in your body, and it's going to be produced whenever you digest protein. But there's no doubt it can have an effect when consumed in a non-protein form. It's also a neurotransmitter. It makes perfect sense for it to be present in any hydrolyzed protein product. A disturbing little blurb: Glutamate Glutamate is an excitatory relative of GABA. It is the most common neurotransmitter in the central nervous system - as much as half of all neurons in the brain - and is especially important in regards to memory. Curiously, glutamate is actually toxic to neurons, and an excess will kill them. Sometimes brain damage or a stroke will lead to an excess and end with many more brain cells dying than from the original trauma. ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, results from excessive glutamate production. Many believe it may also be responsible for quite a variety of diseases of the nervous system, and are looking for ways to minimize its effects Glutamate was discovered by Kikunae Ikeda of Tokay Imperial Univ. in 1907, while looking for the flavor common to things like cheese, meat, and mushrooms. He was able to extract an acid from seaweed - glutamate. He went on to invent the well known seasoning MSG - monosodium glutamate. It took decades for Peter Usherwood to identify glutamate as a neurotransmitter (in locusts) in 1994. webspace.ship.edu Ok, in my pedantic mode I would object to anybody saying they invented a natural amino acid, but I guess purifying and packaging it as a flavor enhancer is an inventive process of sorts.