My point is that people will hail MSG as the devil and then happily consume sushi wrapped in sea weed and have no ill effect. I have a friend she swears she is allergic to MSG but she eats sushi at least twice a week with no reaction. I don't have the heart to tell her that the very wrapping she is eating is where they get the MSG from.

That being said, there are people that legitimately have a glutamate allergy and they do have reactions when they eat sea weed.

> there are people that legitimately have a glutamate allergy

Glutamate is an amino aid and a neurotransmitter, your body produces it. Per [1], "It is used by every major excitatory function in the vertebrate brain, accounting in total for well over 90% of the synaptic connections in the human brain." Per [2], "Glutamate itself is ubiquitous in biological life."

I don't legitimately see how someone can have an allergy to it. It seems to be a basic building block of biological life. It's like saying you are allergic to DNA.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamic_acid [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate_(neurotransmitter) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate_flavoring#Natural_oc...

My throat burns when I eat more than just a dash. I wasn't diagnosed with an allergy though. So YMMV.

Just because the human body produces small quantities of it at a time doesn't mean that you can flood the digestive tract with orders of magnitude more and expect no ill effect.

An amino acid is a building block for proteins. It isn't something you produce small quantities of, it's a basic component of how organic life is made.

I say that to say you make a lot of them. And you eat a lot of them whenever you eat organic matter.

And to your point, even water can be deadly if you drink too much too fast. That doesn't mean you have a water allergy.

Monosodium glutamate is a salt not an amino acid. It does not disassociate perfectly (or instantly) in the gut and uptake through the digestive system is slow [1].

There are several steps before your metabolic system can turn MSG into amino acids and surprise, surprise: until then it behaves like a different chemical.

[1] https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Monosodium-glutama...

The first sentence in Section 10.2 (Absorption, Distribution and Excretion): "Glutamate is absorbed from the gut by an active transport system specific for amino acids."

I'm not convinced you read what you just cited.

Those same people usually have no problem with dry ramon noodle packets, either. It seems nobody even questions how a dry powder can make broth taste like it has some actual meat in it, when meat isn't even in the ingredients.

I, too, think fears of MSG are silly, but so is this argument.

You can extract formaldehyde and arsenic out of an apple, but that doesn’t make chugging the extract as safe as eating an apple.

The difference is MSG has been heavily studies and the evidence suggest it does not have long term health effects. There are some people that have an allergy to it but the gap between those that truly do and those that claim they do is wide and a lot of that has to do with belief of misinformation. The difference with arsenic in apple seeds is that most people are not eating the seeds, while sea weed is regularly consumed and everyone has a reaction to arsenic whereas only a minority of people have a reaction to the consumption of sea weed.

> The difference is MSG has been heavily studies and the evidence suggest it does not have long term health effects.

And that's a perfectly good argument.

"It comes from seaweed and you eat seaweed just fine" is not. You've singled out arsenic in your response, but I also mentioned formaldehyde, which is throughout the apple's flesh. Would you drink a bottle of it because of that?

The logic isn't "it comes from seaweed so it's not harmful" it's "you wouldn't really give a second thought as to whether seaweed salt was safe to consume if you saw it on the shelf but are naturally skeptical of MSG because it's a scary chemical name."

It’s as if you’re actively trying to miss my point.

The reports of MSG being called “the devil“ were greatly exaggerated. Your personal interpretation of what I said:

> The jury is still out on how (un)healthy MSG is

Was:

> people will hail MSG as the devil

The fact that it’s a seaweed extract, or that some people eat it and are ok are orthogonal to what I said. I said one should be careful about excessive use of anything that hasn’t been studied to the point where any reasonable shadow of doubt was removed. The fact that multiple published studies came up with these potential links and there’s no definitive one to contradict them at the very least warrants caution. Which is what I suggested. It’s sensible advice to not do anything excessively, even more so if you have any doubt.

Some people excessively drank alcohol, smoked, ate red meat, etc. (all plant based or at least natural) all their life and were just fine. But it’s still not an argument for doing the same.

And the link I gave didn’t come from personal opinion (these are strong on HN), or some random blog but nih.gov. And their advice is just as sensible: we need to study more (yeah, guess they weren’t told on HN that MSG was super extensively tested and we have the definitive results) and advised caution. That’s it.