The Safety of Monosodium Glutamate

Monosodium glutamate (MSG) has been used safely for more than 100 years to season food. During this period, extensive studies were conducted to elucidate the role, benefits and safety of MSG. At this point, international and national bodies for the safety of food additives consider MSG safe for human consumption as a flavor enhancer. The "MSG symptom complex" was originally termed as the "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" when anecdotally Robert Ho Man Kwok reported the symptoms he felt after an American-Chinese meal. Kwok suggested multiple reasons behind the symptoms, including alcohol from cooking with wine, the sodium content, or the MSG seasoning. But MSG became the focus and the symptoms have been associated with MSG ever since. The effect of wine or salt content was never studied. With the years, the list of non-specific symptoms has grown on anecdotal grounds. In normal conditions, humans have the ability to metabolize glutamate that has a very low acute toxicity. The Oral lethal dose to 50% of subjects (LD50) is between 15 to 18 g/kg body weight in rat and mice respectively, 5 times greater than the LD50 of Salt (3 g/kg in rats). Therefore, the intake of MSG as a food additive and the natural level of glutamic acid in foods do not represent a toxicological concern in humans. A report from the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) compiled in 1995 on behalf of the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concluded that MSG is safe when "eaten at customary levels" and although there seems to be a subgroup of apparently healthy individuals that respond with the MSG symptom complex when exposed to 3 g of MSG in the absence of food, causality by MSG has not been established because the list of MSG Symptom complex was based on testimonial reports. This report also indicates that there is no data to support the role of glutamate in chronic and debilitating illnesses. A controlled double-blind multicenter clinical trial failed to demonstrate the relationship between MSG Symptom complex and the consumption of MSG in individuals that believed to react adversely against MSG. No statistical association has been demonstrated, there were few responses and they were inconsistent. Symptoms were not observed when MSG was given with food.

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