Is MSG Bad for You? What the Double-Blind Trials Found
Mi-won's ingredient panel is short. On the bulk bag Korean restaurants buy by the kilo, the listed raw material is L-glutamic acid, sodium salt, 99% or more. The product listing for Mi-won S prints it as "원재료명: L-글루탐산나트륨 99% 이상." That single-ingredient purity is what makes people nervous about it, and it's also why "is MSG bad for you" keeps showing up in the same breath as Korean cooking. The question has a specific starting point, and it isn't Korean. On 4 April 1968, a Maryland pediatrician named Robert Ho Man Kwok wrote a short letter to the New England Journal of Medicine , volume 278, page 796, describing numbness, weakness and palpitations that started 15 to 20 minutes after eating at a Chinese restaurant. The letter itself, reproduced here , lists four possible causes: soy sauce, cooking wine, monosodium glutamate, high sodium content. It settles on none of them. NEJM titled it "Chinese-Restaurant Syndrome." Of Kwok's four guesse...