I've seen some conflicting reports. My boyfriend claims he is slightly "allergic" to MSG and have always wondered if it was a myth. As far as I can tell, it is.
This website cites 3 different published scientific journals/studies which say that MSG allergies are a myth. My question is, are there any recent scientific studies that claim it isn't a myth?
I guess I could do my own study, and use a slight amount in some in his food and see if he complains, but that'd be evil.
Anyone have any more info on this?
I haven't read the rest of this thread so I apologize in advance if I'm repeating anything else someone else has stated....
Sometimes science gets it wrong. If your boyfriend says he is allergic to MSG it's probably because he has had a reaction to it on multiple occasions and was able to narrow it down as the culprit. Sometimes the science needs to catch up with actual human experiences, and sometimes doctors don't know what makes a person sick.
I for one have a pretty significant zinc allergy. Now if you looked it up you'd find a lot of scientific publications that claim there is no such thing as a zinc allergy. But here is what I know....
I found out I was allergic to zinc about 11 years ago when I came down with a terrible sinus infection and my doctor recommended I buy some of the new cough drops on the market that have zinc in them. He also prescribed a zinc supplement (I was quite sick, and zinc is supposed to aid swift recovery). Whenever I took the supplement, I would vomit violently within minutes. When I used the cough drops, I felt severely nauseous and sometimes also threw up then. It took me a week to make the connection that it was the zinc tablets that were making me sick. I stopped them immediately and the vomiting/nausea stopped right away as well. I thought that's all there was to it.
About a year ago I was taking a multivitamin which I had ignored contained a zinc. Over the weeks that I took the daily pill I became sicker and sicker and sicker. My respiratory allergies were horrendous, worst they'd been in years, I was irritable, fuzzy-headed, couldn't focus. I had a general sense of malaise and feeling of being unwell. One morning while eating breakfast and laying out our vitamin supplements, I picked up the multivitamin bottle and read it....there it was at the bottom....150% dosage of the daily recommended allotment of zinc. And suddenly my mind raced back to that first week with the zinc supplements 10 years before. I stopped the vitamin tablets immediately.
Just by stopping my multivitamin my general well-being improved about 60% overnight. Then I started doing research to determine which foods may contain high levels of zinc (respective to our daily recommended dose).
The list I've found through various websites includes:
* Most beef cuts
* Lean Ground beef
* Beef liver
* Oysters
* Most pork cuts
* Baked beans
* Lentils
* Kidney beans
* Mussels
* Shrimp
* Chicken (dark meat)
* Cheddar cheese
* Yogurt
* White rice
* Chickpeas
* Almonds
* Walnuts
Unfortunately this list made up a rather significant portion of my diet. After my research into the symptoms experienced by zinc allergy sufferers I decided I should experiment with monitoring my intake of certain foods and even trying some meat replacement by subbing in tofu with some of my favorite recipes.
I even started keeping a food diary to monitor what I was having a reaction to. I started discovering some foods make me break out in a rash, some aggravate my respiratory allergies, some cause me to be irritable, unable to focus, etc.
The conclusion is clear: All these years when I've been miserably sick with allergies, at least part of the blame lies with my zinc intake. Since I started monitoring and reducing the zinc in my diet, I have experienced about a 90% improvement in the frequency and severity of my allergy symptoms. And of all the foods I react to, I have the most severe reaction to red meat.
This seems to be a relatively new development (at least our understanding of it) as zinc is still widely considered to be an immune system booster and a healthy thing. For most people it seems that it is a healthy thing to intake. But for those of us allergic to it, we may not realize how sick it is making us.
I am thankful that the Internet makes it easier for regular people to find this kind of information and share it with one another. When my sister was first diagnosed with her yeast allergy, Candida was not a word most doctors had even heard of and most of them rejected it as a "false illness"....just a fancy name for some nondescript symptoms. Those are the same physicians that think allergies means stuffy noses and itchy eyes, and don't understand that allergies truly affect your entire being. I have another friend who has a rather particular dairy allergy. She's not lactose intolerant, she's allergic to a specific protein that occurs in every form of dairy. She cannot have any form of it without being violently ill....so no cake, no cheese, no milk, nothing cooked with any kind of butter (butter seems to affect her the worst). She looks like a million bucks and she's probably the healthiest person I know, but everywhere she goes is a battle to convince people that she really can't eat the things they're putting in front of her.
To make a long story short (too late), do not ever, ever, ever, ever experiment with someone's food allergies. Even if the science hasn't caught up and acknowledged yet that someone's allergy is real, trust that someone knows their own body and how it reacts to different things. Some allergies get worse with time, so small exposures over a long period of time can lead to a very bad attack. And small exposures can have huge repercussions for someone's health in ways neither you nor the person with the allergy may realize.