The Fat Diaries: Fast Food’s Dirty Little Secret

A few weeks ago, I saw a story in the news that a New York politician was trying to gain support for “anti-salt” legislation to remove or ration the use of salt in restaurants. We all laughed, it got shot down, life moved on as usual. But recently, so recently in fact that I had to rewrite this, the FDA announced that they will be monitoring sodium in food. Not in haute cuisine New York restaurants, but in processed foods.  I love this idea. Having once burned my mouth due to the 700mg of salt in a chicken nugget, I think the processed food industry could stand to cut back a little. Can I add a humble request to this movement? Can we please include MSG in those sodium compounds under suspect?  While table salt in food can make it tasty and give us valuable electrolytes and even some iodine, MSG serves no purpose other than to make food taste better than God’s sweat. It’s also one of the blacker secrets of the food industry. I prefer more natural salts like actual sodium chloride.

Going more natural is not for everyone, but it worked for me, especially since when I began to eat more fruits, vegetables and whole grains, I developed allergies to some preservative chemicals and food additives including sulfides and glutamates (like MSG), and became more sensitive to the amount of sodium in my food. I find this darkly funny since in college I mainly lived on cup noodles, flavored chips and beef jerky. It’s a wonder I didn’t die of scurvy. As most of my favorite foods became not only unhealthy, but downright dangerous, I found myself having to replace them or eliminate them entirely.

Example: I’m nuts about Ramen noodles. They’re comfort food, cheap and easy to make. BUT they’re loaded with MSG and don’t have a single nutrient. I solved this problem by tossing out the little silver package of powdered seasoning. Instead I make my own broth. I like the “Better than Bouillon” paste they sell in the stores. I also had the excellent fortune to find white miso paste at Wegmans that didn’t have MSG (a rare find in D.C.).  I add some sliced beef or chicken to the broth, some green peas, scallions, and a sliced hard-boiled egg, and I get a quick easy meal. It’s not the healthiest meal, but I’ve managed to make it healthier in a few minutes, and the egg and meat keep me full until my next meal.

Remember all those old jokes about Japanese and Chinese restaurants and MSG? They were referring to the 1969 “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome,” (CRS) which was coined by Robert Ho Man Kwok in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine. He was describing the various reactions he was experiencing after eating Chinese food, namely “…numbness at the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness and palpitations…” Kwok’s CRS was attributed to the amounts of MSG used by those restaurants. After that, Asian restaurants were the subject of jokes and even vilification because they used the food additive. I remember my mother’s Asian cookbooks from the 70’s and, yes, every recipe would require at least 1 cup of MSG.

I find it comforting nowadays that Asian restaurants proudly state that their food contains no MSG at all. In fact, when it comes to fast, cheap food, Chinese food is one of the few venues I can count on to be free of the dreaded flavor-enhancer.  But, while my sushi place won’t give me an allergic reaction I still find myself hoodwinked by some of the reputable American food chains.

I can’t mention names, but having lived in a particular income bracket, I found myself appalled when my friends, and coworkers confided in me that MSG was being used in American food products and fast food restaurants. It went in everything from fry seasoning, to chicken marinade, to burger sauces. Even a few restaurants that prided themselves on using pure ingredients, some going so far as to list them, omitted that they were using MSG, including it under the vague heading of “other spices.”

MSG (and glutamic acid) isn’t a chemical that’s gotten a lot of attention. The FDA has done and redone studies from the 1970’s to the early 2000’s all stating that MSG was “for the most part” a safe additive “if consumed in moderation,” and that while asthma sufferers (like me) may have adverse reactions, there were no conclusive findings that MSG caused any damage.

However in 2008, several institutions, like the University of North Carolina, INTERMAP, and the Washington University School of Medicine published studies about the link between MSG and obesity in America. The findings showed that people who regularly consumed MSG were three times more likely to be overweight than those who did not consume MSG or used very little. The results were consistent with controlled animal studies using MSG.

For products that list MSG as an ingredient, or that state outright that they do not use MSG, this doesn’t pose a big problem to us. We simply read the ingredients; use our head and “all things in moderation.” This poses a bigger problem, though, if we don’t know where our MSG is coming from.

My fight against MSG is a personal one, and I’m sure most of you don’t really have a problem with it. It is something to consider though, when we’re trying to look further into sodium levels and the many conditions that have contributed to the obesity epidemic in the United States. I don’t want to vilify the fast food industry, that’s the last thing they need right now and their willingness to comply with the constant demands of the nanny state should be lauded. I just don’t think that MSG is an “other spice.” It’s a little sketchy, and sketchy is the last thing the food industries want to be right now.

Monica Marier’s “Fat Diaries” appears on FrumForum every Friday.