Even those of my friends who know that the health concerns are bogus have a weird paranoia of MSG. I think it's a general suspicion of any chemical which makes food taste better (which somehow doesn't apply to salt and sugar).
I think part of the problem with MSG is the name. It's hard to convince the general public that something with the name "Monosodium Glutamate" is a naturally occurring substance, let alone one of the more abundant naturally occurring amino acids.
Hell, if we called table salt "Sodium Chloride" all the time, people would probably have a bit of a changed perspective.
Conversely, it winds me up when products boast that they have no artificial ingredients, yet have colours or flavours which are mixtures of natural substances that have little to do with the products that they are being used to imitate.
I think that's the idea behind the "All Natural AC'CENT® Flavor Enhancer" branding-- they don't say "monosodium glutamate" anywhere on the package except the ingredients.
I just call it supersalt. Because it's like salt, but not salty!
Technically, MSG is supposed to be the "extra" taste area they didn't know about/ teach in school. So although it seems salty, it's actually the savory flavor. MSG is found in just about every single food you eat that has that "savory" flavor.
To clarify, since your parent didn't actually misspeak-- There are actually only five main tastes your taste buds can detect. They just aren't organized by location.
To the best of my knowledge, MSG isn't actually found in most sources of umami, but it's an excellent source of that flavour.
Well-known umami-tasting foods include red meat, cheese and other fermented products, and tomatoes. None of these contain MSG directly (tomatoes get their umami from glutamic acid, according to umamiinfo.com). However, MSG can be used to add more umami flavour, which acts as a flavour enhancer.
You're probably right. Did you know that dihydrogen monoxide kills thousands of people every year? That substance has been found in the blood of every terrorist and serial killer in human history. Scary stuff if you put it that way.
One way to look at MSG (the way I look at it) is that it has been shown to stimulate the appetite. As a result of this, people often eat MSG-infused food more than they should. My wife once said that MSG "makes me think this tastes better than it really does".
So, MSG may or may not be bad by itself, but the highly processed empty calories that it hangs out with, definitely bad. Bet you can't eat just one? I don't take that bet anymore, I lose too often.
I think that's exactly what I mean by "paranoia". It's certainly true that MSG makes food taste better than it "really does", and makes you want to eat more-- as do added salt, sugar, or any seasoning for that matter.
For some reason only in MSG does this quality inspire distrust.
I think it's a distinction of scale. It's like the difference between chewing on a cocoa leaf and smoking crack cocaine. They both have an effect, just one is so much more refined in a way that our bodies haven't co-evolved with for thousands of years.
The same holds true for the difference between eating fruit and drinking HCFS soda or the difference between drinking beer and distilled spirits.
One might even liken it the difference between gnawing on a stick of sugar cane and eating ice cream, or licking a rock and eating a salty potato chip :) I still haven't seen the thing that makes MSG especially sinister.
I've got some foggy memories about this from talking to a nutritionist a few years ago. A quick google search brought up an abstract to a study from some time ago.
Indeed, the most important finding concerning MSG showed that motivation to eat recovered more rapidly following a lunchtime meal in which MSG-supplemented soup was served as the first course (compared both with the effect of unsupplemented soup and no preload)
Regardless, MSG is exactly the sort of "industrial edible food-like product" that I'm avoiding for aesthetic reasons, if nothing else.
Even those of my friends who know that the health concerns are bogus have a weird paranoia of MSG. I think it's a general suspicion of any chemical which makes food taste better (which somehow doesn't apply to salt and sugar).