by dukey » Mon 06 Jul 2009, 06:03:28
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')hat's certainly true, BUT it's not just as simple as swallowing a neurotransmitter excites your brain. First off glutamate is an amino acid. Any time you eat protein you are eating glutamate along with a host of other amino acids. What's important for brain chemistry is how much of that glutamate makes it from your gut, to your blood, across the blood brain barrier, into the neurons, and then gets re-excreted into the synapse causing neural excitation. It should be rather obvious that process is regulated because we don't see people going into seizures every time they eat Chinese food or running around acting like they're on meth. It's the same reason that depression can't be treated by giving someone a big tablet of serotonin.
From my understanding of the debate many foods do contain glutamate. But they are normally always bound with other proteins so take a while to get broken down by your digestive system and the release into your blood is slow. The problem with MSG is, the glutamate is already in amino acid form and thus gets absorbed very quickly leading to a massive spike of glutamate in your blood stream, up to 25 times higher than normal. Maybe people don't get seisures from eating chinese food but they do get what's be dubbed as Chinese restaurant syndrome.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n April 1968, Robert Ho Man Kwok wrote a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, coining the term "Chinese restaurant syndrome":
I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant, especially one that served northern Chinese food. The syndrome, which usually begins 15 to 20 minutes after I have eaten the first dish, lasts for about two hours, without hangover effect. The most prominent symptoms are numbness at the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness and palpitations...[5]
I think we should all be very concerned about MSG.