[gilrain]

Yes, and we've repeatedly researched MSG on the basis of experiences like yours. It turns out there is no evidence that people who self-report as sensitive actually are. Yes, even if they're really, really sure.

Maybe you are some sort of undiscovered outlier? That may be compelling to you, but it seems unlikely to me... the research indicates you're far more likely to be among those who have misidentified a cause for their symptoms, one conveniently pointed out to them by urban legend. It's completely unsurprising, and I've done the same many times before.

[pc2g4d]

My recollection from looking into the research myself was that though a large proportion of those who claimed MSG intolerance ended up having none, some proportion _did_ have the intolerance. The conclusion that MSG intolerance isn't real on that basis was overstated. Similarly, though many people who claim gluten intolerance have no such thing, some in fact do.

Given the nigh-infinite space of possibilities that is the human genome and the various environments and experiences of seven billion human beings, in my mind it's almost guaranteed that every human being will experience at least one medical condition that is insufficiently frequent in the population that it is "unknown to science". When your personal experience deviates from the common interpretation of scientific findings, what do you do?

I could be wrong. Maybe it's all in my head somehow? But that's a sort of real effect, too.

What I do know is that by avoiding MSG the quality of my diet has improved immeasurably, and my intestines aren't in agony. It's just an anecdote. An anecdote that happens to be my own life.

[kazinator]

> we've

Who is this "we", and in what way does it involve yourself?

[pharrington]

Scientists who have performed controlled measurements on peoples reactions to MSG.

As usual in human experience, without having specialized knowledge obtained via controlled, repeatable measurements, it is wildly difficult to accurately observe an informational correlation between two out of the literally millions of influential events on your body. Your conviction that MSG causes headaches and nausea is directly analogous to people who are convinced that proximity to arbitrary electromagnetic fields causes acute physical distress. This is standard confirmation bias. We all do it, it's a natural consequence of our brains' imprecise pattern matching combined with the extremely limited perspective any individual human has. The reliable way to mitigate this human flaw is to perform good science.

[gilrain]

The parts of humanity involved in figuring it out, and those laymen which have bothered to follow along. I'm in the latter group, so yes, feel free to ignore me. (Just don't ignore the actual research, eh?)

LeVar Burton: you don't have to take my word for it!