Word: msg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...dispute over monosodium glutamate (MSG) is more complicated. Although it occurs naturally in some foods, especially mushrooms, sugar beets and green peas, it is not essential to life. Yet preparations of a seaweed have been used for thousands of years to lend savor to bland food and give it a "meaty" taste. Japanese chemists discovered in 1908 that an active ingredient of the seaweed is MSG. Not only many Americans but some Orientals as well suffer a sensitivity reaction to MSG-sold in the U.S. under the trade name Ac'cent-and virtually all such sensitive people will react...
...Popeye Problem. Two things prompted the Food and Drug Administration to undertake a detailed study of other possible effects of MSG. One was the recent publicity given to the fact that some baby foods are laced with the stuff-simply to titillate their mothers' palates, as Consumer Crusader Ralph Nader (TIME cover, Dec. 12) pointed out. (Gerber is no longer putting MSG into baby foods.) The second factor was a report by a St. Louis psychiatrist, Dr. John W. Olney, that when he injected MSG under the skin of newborn mice it caused brain damage and other developmental defects...
...that even a minority might be hazardous, further testing of many additives, by chromatographic techniques that did not exist when the substances were first introduced, is clearly indicated. The FDA has already arranged with the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council to supervise such studies of saccharin and MSG...
...same opinion was expressed independently by Dr. John W. Olney, assistant professor of Psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. Olney gave infant mice and a rhesus monkey a highly concentrated dosage of MSG and found cell damage in the hypothalamus...
...according to Nader, is baby food. He told the committee that the salt and monosodium glutamate added to baby foods serves no nutritional purpose and may actually cause harm. A team of physicians backed him up. They testified that the salt could cause hypertension. They reported that flavor-enhancing MSG, which is added to baby foods to please test-tasting parents, produces the headaches and chest pains of "Chinese-restaurant syndrome" in adults and causes brain and eye damage in test animals. The doctors urged that MSG be removed from the Food and Drug Administration's list of "safe...