msg has always made me very sick.. now i find it makes me fat..
read on.


a recent study out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill cites what other studies have hinted at for years: MSG (aka monosodium glutamate) could be a factor in weight gain.

the study focused on 750 Chinese men and women, ages 40-59, living in 3 villages in China. the subjects prepared their meals at home without commercially processed foods and roughly 82 percent used MSG. those participants who used the highest amounts of MSG had nearly 3 times the incidence of becoming overweight as those who did not use MSG, even when physical activity, and other possible explanations for body mass differences were accounted for.

what is monosodium glutamate exactly, and what you can do to avoid it in your diet. MSG is a flavor enhancer in foods. what the Japanese call "umami" (roughly translated as "tastiness"). MSG is considered an "excitotoxin," since its action in the body is to excite neurotransmitters (important brain chemicals), causing nerve cells to discharge and also exciting nerves related to taste. perhaps this ability to excite these nerves is a factor in an association between increased MSG usage and weight gain.

how prevalent is MSG in the U.S. diet? Americans consumed about 1 million pounds of MSG in 1950, and today that number has increased by a factor of 300!

best bets for avoiding MSG

*buy organic produce whenever possible.
*make things from scratch, avoiding processed ingredients as much as possible.
*limit making stews or soups in a crock pot, since slow-cooking tends to cause small amounts of glutamic acid to be released from the protein sources (e.g., meat, chicken) in the recipe.

boy that last one was new to me. i do think i will stick to slow cooking, but just not add additional MSG to our diet.

what are your thoughts on MSG? i'd love to hear from you!



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