Sugar

saigonmonkey wrote:

From personal experience, I'll have to beg to differ with that...

Last year, I started having blinding migraine headaches for no apparent reason. This occurred for several months. Up until then, I had never had very many "regular" headaches, and don't recall ever having a migraine. (Symptoms were severe pain, nausea and "seeing stars" during the worst times.) During that same time period, I was eating lunch almost every day in the owner/managers' cafeteria at the Taiwanese factory where I do business. The cooks are 3 Vietnamese ladies who cook Chinese food. It's just like what my wife cooks at home, except it often tastes better than my wife's cooking. Why? Because the VN cooks are dumping MSG by the kilogram into the various dishes they are preparing. My wife uses very little (and now, none) MSG. During a conversation on the phone with my mother, she said my sister told her to ask me if I was eating food with MSG, because when she ate anything containing MSG in the states, she had migraines. BINGO! I immediately stopped eating lunch at the factory, and within a few weeks, no more headaches.

Headaches are one of several symptoms people report when consuming MSG, especially in soups. Most of the research doesn't dispute those symptoms but where the disputes come in is does MSG have any adverse long term effects on your body. As of yet I don't believe there has been any study to show that it does. Personally I try to stay away from it as much as possible but if it is in the food then so be it.