On Saturday, September 3, 2016 at 2:18:22 AM UTC-10, Ophelia wrote:
> "Cindy Hamilton" wrote in message
> ...
>
>
> Autolyzed yeast extract is just their quaint way of hiding
> monosodium glutamate.
>
> Cindy Hamilton
> ==========
>
> Why is monosodium glutamate despised here so much? I use it, although in
> minute amounts, and I it would be good to know what the big problem is.
>
>
>
> --
> http://www.helpforheroes.org.uk

It may have started in 1968, when a doctor wrote a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine and described a set of symptoms he got while eating at a Chinese restaurant. He suggested that MSG, among other things, may have caused the problems. Other people wrote in saying they had the same thing happen to them. It was a misconception whose time had come. Up until that point MSG was a very popular food additive because it supercharged the taste of foods. Once Reader's Digest wrote an article on the weird symptoms associated with Chinese restaurant food and identifying MSG as the likely culprit, the whole thing snowballed. And the rest is history.

The irony is that the doctor that wrote the letter to the NEJM was a Chinese American named Robert Kwok. If it was me, I would have suspected aflatoxin in the fried rice.