Is MSG the victim of a racist conspiracy?
One of the more absurd claims I have seen online is that MSG is the victim of a racist anti-Chinese/anti-Asian conspiracy.
This claim depends on distortions and misrepresentation of history, which I will dispel below.
What is MSG?
Is MSG natural? Well the same ions (sodium and glutamate) are present in food produced without any MSG, but it is not correct to say that MSG is natural, in that MSG can only be produced by an industrial process. This is different from, say, salt, which can be found in naturally occurring mineral deposits. MSG is NOT salt. Absolutely not.
What is MSG? MSG is in chemical terms the sodium salt of glutamic acid. What does this mean? Well glutamic acid is an amino acid, and specifically one of the 22 proteinogenic amino acid that exist in all of existence (of which 21 are used by the human body, of which 9, not including glutamic acid, are essential, which means they cannot be synthesised by the body, hence having to be consumed in food).
A protein consists of amino acids bound together. In addition, food may contain free amino acids, which is to say amino acids not bound to other amino acids. Free amino acids contribute to the flavour of food, for example the free glycine in crab makes crab taste sweet. Free amino acids are more easily absorbed and used than those bound to other ones.
MSG as the sodium salt of glutamic acid, means that MSG is a crystalline powder. It contains positively charged sodium ions (Na+) bound to negatively charged glutamate ions (C5H8NO4-).
The advantage of salts is they tend to dissolve in water. That means when you add MSG to your food, it dissolves. Therefore, when you have pure water and dissolve pure table salt (sodium chloride), that water contains sodium and chloride ions floating around. The bonds in the salt crystals break, and if you drink that water then it will taste salty, because the salt taste receptors in your mouth respond to sodium. Because chlorine is a heavier atom than sodium, NaCl is approximately 40% sodium (which is what makes it taste salty), and 60% chlorine.
For MSG, the single sodium ion is far outweighed by the large glutamate ion (C5H8NO4), which means MSG is only around 13.5% sodium by weight. Since the 86.5% glutamate activates the umami (savoury) taste receptors, known as T1R1 and T1R3, MSG doesn’t taste salty, since the umami overwhelms any saltiness when tasting MSG on its own.
(Note, there are two forms of glutamate: L-glutamate and D-glutamate. D-glutamate is an isomer (rearrangement), which doesn’t have the same taste effects as the L-version. The industrial process of creating MSG involves trying to create a salt that contains as much L-glutamate and as little D-glutamate as possible; this is said to be pure.)
Is MSG natural
It is not reasonably possible to describe MSG as natural. This following table shows the free and bound glutamate in various foods, in mg per 100g.
As can be seen, cheese reaches around 1.3% free glutamate, while human breast milk is only around 0.02% breast milk, but that figure is in turn around 10 times higher than cow’s milk.
By contrast, as we noted above, the specific salt of glutamic acid that is MSG, is more than 85% glutamate. Therefore it doesn’t really make sense to talk about MSG being ‘natural’. MSG was originally produced by breaking the bonds between amino acids in kelp using hydrochloric acid. Currently the process involves specialist glutamic acid bacteria, which produce a high purity of free glutamic acid, which is then reacted with sodium hydroxide to produce MSG.
It is not a very good argument to say ‘glutamate occurs in food already, so it must be harmless’. There is a difference between foods containing up to around 1% glutamate, and a pure hit of glutamate. While it’s true that glutamate exists in nature, and in our bodies, and is a building block for life, there isn’t really a logical process whereby we can assert that adding volumes of glutamate to food that cannot be produced by any traditional cooking process must be harmless, or cannot result in unpleasant reactions.
We do now know that glutamate is safe, and there certainly isn’t a difference in our bodies between the glutamate we get when we add this to food:
which is made from “Sea salt, Hydrolysed Vegetable Protein, Potato Starch, Palm Oil, Vegetables 8% (celery, onions, carrots, leeks) Lactose, Spices, (turmeric, white pepper, garlic, mace, nutmeg) Parsley, Lovage”, and adding MSG.
Why? The words ‘hydrolysed vegetable protein’. That refers to a vegetable protein, likely soy, which has been processed using hydrochloric acid. This breaks the bonds between the amino acids, leaving free amino acids, including free glutamate. One free (L-) glutamate ion works the same as another, and HVP contains around 30% free-glutamate.
MSG is slightly different to that powder, in that that powder contains many different amino acids, other flavour compounds, herbs, etc., so will change the flavour of our soup. If we add too much, it will taste of soup powder. If we add MSG to a soup, then it won’t add any new flavours, it just increases umami, since it’s just sodium and the umami amino acid.
Is MSG’s bad name racist?
No.
While studies have shown that MSG is harmless, and there is no possible way for our body to tell the difference between MSG and other sources of free-glutamate (so any reference to MSG sensitivity is illiterate — it should be ‘free glutamate sensitivity’), the idea that this originates in racism is clickbait gutter press journalism.
I quote from the article I link above:
“ In 1968, the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter from a doctor complaining about radiating pain in his arms, weakness and heart palpitations after eating at Chinese restaurants. He mused that cooking wine, MSG or excessive salt might be to blame. Reader responses poured in with similar complaints, and scientists jumped to research the phenomenon. “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” was born.”
Here is the letter:
As you can see, it was written by Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok, a Chinese doctor who had moved to the US in 1960 (note, there is an actually racist claim that Dr. Kwok didn’t exist, which was cooked up by a white man, in 2018, a Dr. Howard Steel. Steel said that he wrote the letter and that the name was a pun on ‘crock of shit’. This was a total lie, and there is documentary evidence that Dr. Kwok exists, from his own children, and proof that he worked at the National Biomedical Research Foundation.)
Kwok specifically said he felt pain after eating in Northern Chinese restaurants, and said he did not get this with the Chinese food he and his friends cooked.
Kwok referred to this as “a syndrome”, and said it occurred whenever he ate in a “Chinese restaurant”, and speculated about possible causes — varying from the use of Shaoxing wine to MSG. The letter’s title “Chinese restaurant syndrome” was added by an editor at the NEJM, and appears to be reasonable description of the letter — Kwok wasn’t identifying a supposed problem with MSG, but rather a supposed problem that he, a Chinese doctor, had with Chinese restaurant food. His suggestion was that there was something wrong in the Chinese food being made in America.
Having suggested such a thing, it is not particularly surprising that people agreed with him. I live in Indonesia, and the Korean or Western restaurants here taste bad compared to the ones in Korea or the West, respectively; I would not want to eat at them regularly. Likewise if you are a 1960s/1970s American used to eating, American food every day, then it is not surprising that your stomach would be unsettled at eating a different food, particularly if you are told that there may be a ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome’ by a Chinese doctor.
If I’ve been out to a restaurant and my dining partner tells me the food hasn’t sat well in their stomach, then I will immediately start feeling a little queasier myself.
We cannot assert that food is safe: the early to middle part of the 20th century brought a lot of new industrial processes, which were promoted with heavy advertising.
This vintage advert sold us the lie that Crisco, made by the newly discovered process of hydrogenation. was healthy:
In fact, the hydrogenation created trans fats. This turns out to have killed many people from cardiovascular disease. Much of the new food processing technology, while it may have brought cheaper food, also brought a burden of disease and obesity.
In this context, the idea that we should insist that MSG is harmless, just because it was widely used in China, or that fear of it is somehow racist is absurd. There are many additives that are asserted to be harmless, and in most cases that is indeed the case. However we have a duty to investigate, and withdraw from sale, those additives or new processes, which turn out to be harmful to our health.
This 1970 NY Times article shows the results of a study, which followed a 1969 campaign by Ralph Nader to stop using it in baby food, finding it was safe for public health. This followed a study showing brain damage in mice.
Subsequent studies have further proven that MSG is harmless, but given the fact that MSG is a ‘magic’ powder, which does not occur in pure form in nature, and which has powerful effects on the taste receptors, it is not surprising that people are suspicious of it. Indeed, while we know that vaccines save lives; there is no need to assert that opposition to them has something to do with racism: MSG is a novel compound that did not exist before the 20th century, and people are going to be suspicious of it, regardless of the outcome of studies into its safety. Furthermore, when studies were produced in 1969 before the US Senate claiming brain damage in mice & monkeys, it is not particularly surprising that there is still some suspicion, even though that suspicion cannot be justified. The outcome of these studies was that MSG was withdrawn from school meals and baby foods.
Are there reasons for MSG to have a bad name/is MSG life?
Malaysian Chinese comedian, Nigel Ng (Uncle Roger) has made a Youtube career of saying ‘just add MSG to food, it will taste good’:
This feeds into a wider narrative that real food (i.e. Asian food) contains MSG, while bland white people food doesn’t, so white people should learn to use MSG. This narrative is false, as we can see in the earlier table, things like Parmesan or Roquefort cheese contain plenty of free glutamate, so the umami sensation is very much a part of the European diet.
Moreover, one big issue with MSG, which has given it a bad name, is the fact that it is widely used to turn cheap, processed food into something tasty. If you consider a ‘jus’ produced in a French restaurant from veal bones, then the resulting certainly contains free amino acids such as glutamate, but they result from a long and laborious process involving expensive ingredients such as wine (which also contains glutamate). Food prepared with good quality ingredients, time and attention is going to taste better and be healthier than highly processed food.
Pringles
contain potatoes, emulsifiers, salt, sugar, various artificial flavours, artificial colours, MSG and the the so-called super MSG disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate, which are 5'-ribonucleotides, DNA precursors, which make MSG more potent against our umami receptors. Like MSG, I&G are harmless, BUT that doesn’t mean everything that contains them is harmless. Most foods containing MSG are junk foods, which are not good for human health. That’s not because MSG is bad, but because MSG allows processed shelf-stable food to taste good and deliver high profits, a lot foods that contain it ARE bad. Fresh foods don’t have any MSG added to them, and if you eat food cooked from fresh then it’s going to taste better and be healthier, then pre-packaged food — which just happens to contain MSG. So food without MSG, is on average, of higher quality.
I live in Asia, and MSG has a stigma, because many people don’t have a lot of money so a cheap bowl of noodle soup is made with very little meat, and lots of artificial chicken powder/MSG combo. A noodle soup advertised as ‘no MSG’ is on the whole going to use much more chicken, and be of higher quality.
That’s not to say if David Chang puts MSG in his food, there’s anything bad about that. If his pork ramen contains MSG then that’s no bad thing, in that he charges $18, so that can contain high-quality fresh ingredients. On the other hand, I can buy a bowl of meatball noodle soup near where I live for $0.55 (local currency equivalent). That is made to the lowest possible cost, and it’s not going to be as nutritious or as tasty as the $18 version.
The idea that Asians are all putting MSG in their food or that MSG is inherently Asian is in itself racist. MSG was only invented just over 100 years ago, but there are plenty of foods with lots of umami before that. Fish sauce, shrimp paste, miso, soy sauce, oyster sauce, are some common ingredients which contain high levels of glutamate (for oyster sauce MSG is usually added, for the others, usually not). Fish sauce is a pride of Vietnam, which sells a variety of fish sauces in different grades. The top grade fish sauce is made ONLY from fish, salt and water. MSG is in some of the cheaper sauces.
If we are going to eat food, and have some money to spare to buy it, then it makes sense to buy high-quality ingredients, such as good fish sauce. Of course if you have MSG in your kitchen that’s fine too. And if you want to add it to food, that can improve it. But lazy memes about MSG don’t really address the fact that food is much more complex chemistry than just ‘add more MSG’. If I make some Malaysian fried rice, then the primary source of umami should be fish sauce (belacan). It’s not MSG, like in the Uncle Roger video. This is a national dish and a source of pride and identity. Traditional umami sources exist everywhere. MSG is not one of them. Sure, if you make your fried rice with some Malaysian belacan, you can add MSG to it as well. That’s something to try. If you add too much belacan, maybe it will not taste good, whereas MSG is just glutamate and sodium, so it could be that belacan plus MSG is better than just belacan. But that doesn’t make MSG key to Asian food.
If we address the claims in the Wikipedia article on glutamate:
“The misconceptions about MSG are tied to racial stereotypes about East Asians,[26][27][28] with people specifically targeting East Asian cuisine, whereas the widespread usage of MSG in Western processed food does not generate the same stigma.[29] For instance, the perpetuation of the negative image of MSG through the so-called Chinese restaurant syndrome has been attributed to xenophobic or racist biases.[30][31][32][33][34][35]”
We can see that they have a nice example of confirmation bias and groupthink. Articles such as this one here on Medium try to reframe the entire narrative about MSG in terms of orientalism, using a widely copied quote from a 1951 fourth edition of ‘the Joy of Cooking’, which is reduced, in articles trying to sell a simple racist narrative, to “Once exoticized by European imperialists as ‘the mysterious white powder of the orient’”.
The full description reads:
Monosodium glutamate, the mysterious “white powder” of the Orient, which by stimulating the taste buds, intensifies the basic flavors of many foods except sweets and egg dishes…’M. S. G.,’ as it is nicknamed by its devotees, may be added at any time to stews, sauces and vegetables, but it is usually rubbed into meats before boiling, roasting or sautéing them. This is now available under trade names or at the druggist under its own.
This was a fairly accurate description of MSG, especially given that it was in fact invented in the Orient (later editions changed this word to ‘East’), while the description was written by an American housewife (not exactly a European imperialist), Irma Rombauer. There is certainly nothing in the article that suggests an association with Asian food, merely that it came from Asia. The suggestion appears to be to use it in American food.
Prior to Dr. Kwok’s letter, MSG certainly did not have a negative reputation in the West. A look at references from the 1950s and 1960s shows an increasing use in school meals, processed foods. Adverts for the product Ac’cent shows that it is was advertised as ‘pure monosodium glutamate’ by ‘Amino Products’
This 1966 New York Times Menu Cookbook contains no less than sixteen recipes with MSG such as this chicken soup with mushrooms:
Note that the crushed ginger is optional — the MSG is not.
It is completely accurate to say that until Dr. Kwok wrote to the New England Journal of Medicine, MSG had no kind of negative stigma whatsoever.
His letter was published 4th April 1968.
In July/August 1969, following a chain of events that would not have come about without Dr. Kwok’s letter, hearings were held in the US Senate on the safety of MSG. A key party was Ralph Nader. Speaking on July 15
he wrote ‘it was not until last year’ that ‘the first report of the Chinese restaurant syndrome emerged’ ‘the report’ [which was just a letter, but never mind] ‘was by an independent physician’. [Dr. Kwok]. Here we see plainly that the entire MSG scare originated with Dr. Kwok, a doctor born in China.
It is also clear that Nader was not concerned with Chinese food, but with the use of MSG in baby food.
The Staff Paper provides:
that they believed the ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome’ was caused by MSG, while Dr. Kwok himself said that MSG was only one of several possible causes.
Needless to say, thanks to Dr. Kwok’s letter, and subsequent dubious scientific studies, MSG developed a bad name. This resulted in MSG being removed from baby food.
There are many lessons we can learn from the MSG saga, but racism should not be our main take away. The point is that while ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome’ (a supposed syndrome described by Dr. Kwok, before it had been blamed on MSG) and ‘MSG sensitivity’ do not exist, it does show how suggestible we as humans are. A doctor, and a Chinese one at that, suggesting he got physical symptoms after eating at Chinese restaurants? Why yes I have experienced such things too, and no I hadn’t thought about it before. Eventually if we think about it enough we can convince ourselves that it is true. There are many examples of food and medical scares that are similar. Ralph Nader in the same hearings was insistent that sodium cyclamate was a harmful sweetener, and indeed it was banned in 1970 in the US. Despite this it is approved in more than 130 countries including the EU, and is certainly safer than many ‘natural’ products we consume. Similarly, if we want to believe that covid-19 vaccinations are harmful, then there are many reports of adverse reactions, people dying the next day, and so on, that will confirm our preconceptions.
The ‘abundance of caution’ got MSG removed from baby food in the US. Even though it is not harmful, the process that began with Dr. Kwok and led a year later to Ralph Nader trying to find typos in studies produced by the industry which supported the safety of MSG, permanently damaged MSG’s image. I live many thousands of miles from America, in Asia, and many people believe MSG is harmful. Why exactly? Do they know that it’s a sodium salt of an unbound amino acid? They certainly do not. They do know that it’s a chemically looking crystal, that it doesn’t come from an MSG mine, that it’s found in the worst junk food you can buy, and the cheapest least nutritious food you can buy on the street. They are most likely influenced by some of the faulty studies done on MSG safety but only indirectly — if you want to say MSG is unsafe, then you can easily cook up a website with quotes and ignore all the evidence it’s safe, and these websites will affect people. Are the same people interested in proving that, say, nutmeg is unsafe, because it contains myristicin, which is toxic in sufficient quantities. Well no of course not, because nutmeg grows on a tree and has been used for centuries. MSG is feared because it is clearly ‘unnatural’.
Both using MSG and refusing to use it can signal virtue. For Asians where I live, not using MSG says ‘I can make my food taste good without chemicals, I know how to cook, I don’t need that artificial chicken powder’, and for Americans who have been sold a meme that Asians dump MSG in everything, buying a bag of MSG is an act of anti-racism, a statement that ‘Hey I’m smarter than Ma Kettle who thinks MSG is bad. I know it’s not.’ MSG isn’t bad, but sometimes the narratives are more complex than both the ‘Healthy Holistic Foods’ website would tell us (MSG bad, MSG gives you cancer) and the journalists who copy and paste the same story (MSG harmless, MSG only bad name because of racism), so that Wikipedia editors can add fifteen identical sources to support the claims in their articles.
But isn’t the name ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome’ racist? After all the NYT reported in 2020 on a campaign to have the term redefined.
The definition wasn’t perfect in that it did not accurately reflect the fact that the Chinese restaurant syndrome was in fact said to affect persons eating in Chinese restaurants — the MSG angle was only settled on a few months later.
However the revised definition is much worse:
This creates a false narrative. It suggest that there was a cause and effect from ‘MSG being identified as bad’ to ‘Chinese restaurants’. This is calculated to mislead. If people had decided that MSG was bad, there was no particular reason to link MSG to Chinese restaurants, and that would indeed suggest this was a racist conspiracy.
The link however was the other way round — the ‘reaction to Chinese restaurant food’ came first (which was entirely psychosomatic), then the link to MSG. Since the syndrome existed before it had been attributed exclusively to MSG, it’s standard medical practice to continue to use the name of the syndrome where it was first used, when the same conditions arise elsewhere.
That said, people complaining about McDonalds putting MSG in their McChicken are not doing so because of a fear of Chinese restaurants, they are doing so because food scares and health scares are very easy to create, and very hard to dispel. MSG has the reputation it does today because of Ralph Nader getting it removed from baby food after suggestions it causes cancer (at the same time sodium cyclamate was permanently banned), not because of Chinese restaurants! MSG acquired a bad name in countries which never used the term ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome’. MSG has a bad name in Europe as well, and this came about because ‘people believed MSG caused certain symptoms, and possibly cancer’, not because ‘Chinese restaurants are bad.’
It is difficult to comprehend how CNN can write ‘MSG in Chinese restaurants isn’t unhealthy — you’re just racist’, when it was Ralph Nader claiming that MSG caused harm to rats, that led to it being removed from children’s food, and further reports in the Senate in 1972 claimed (following faulty experimental protocols) that the symptoms of the syndrome could be induced by an intravenous injection of MSG and for susceptible individuals.
But Dr. Kwok never existed, and nor did his workplace, the National Biomedical Research Foundation?
Completely false. The National Biomedical Research Foundation definitely existed, and did pioneering work on bioinformatics, having been established by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ledley where https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Oakley_Dayhoff did important work.
Dr. Kwok published a paper on the use of computers in emergency medicine when he worked there.
The NBRF became a part of Georgetown University, Maryland, and now lives in through Georgetown University’s Medical Centre, and the Protein Information Resource, a joint project with the University of Delaware.
Dr. Kwok’s obituary shows he died in Washington, DC in 2014. His wife’s obituary shows she worked for the University of Maryland. Dr. Kwok existed and wrote the letter. His daughter said he was proud of having written the letter.
