MSG has had a hard time of it in the West since 1968 when the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter – not an article or study but simply a letter – from a doctor noting that he sometimes felt vaguely unwell after eating in Chinese restaurants and wondered if it was the MSG added to the food that was responsible. The headline on the letter was ‘Chinese-Restaurant Syndrome’ and from this small beginning it became fixed in many people’s minds that MSG was a kind of toxin. In fact, it isn’t. It appears naturally in lots of foods, like tomatoes, and has never been found to have
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