Allergic to MSG

Hi, I'm hoping to go to Japan as an exchange student, and one thing I'm really looking forward to is the possibility of a homestay. One potential problem, I'm moderately allergic to MSG. I read the old threads on this subject, and they were helpful, but I still have a couple questions. I don't know how prevalent MSG is in ordinary family meals. Is this something I should put on the form of information for my homestay parents? I don't want to be a problem. I can have some MSG (Soy Sauce has MSG in it, and I don't usually have problems with that.) To give you an idea of how much I can take, I can usually have one Cup Noodle with no problem (so long as I don't have one every day,) after two of them I start to get a headache, light and sound sensitivity, and if I get too much I get a migraine. It's been several years since I've pushed it that far, so I might have a greater resistance now, but honestly, I'm afraid to try. Anyway, is there anything I can do to make it less of a problem for them? Thank you very much, and sorry for the trouble.

Do you have problems when you eat pizza? Tomatoes, mushrooms and various cheeses all contain a lot of MSG. Or does your problem only happen when you eat cup ramen? If the latter, I'd suggest that you stop eating cup ramen.

MSG is an essential part of Japanese cuisine, and a vast number of prepared dishes use either kombu-based stock or soy sauce for seasoning. If you're really allergic to it, you might want to stay away from Japan, or else do all your own cooking.

Asking a Japanese homestay family to avoid MSG would be an unreasonable demand, in my opinion.

You should be fine.

For the last decade, most households and many eateries over Japan had phased out MSG as enhancer in their dishes, and substituted dashi (dried fish)crushed or flakes instead.

And dashi, which is made with katsuobushi and kombu, contains a very high concentration of MSG.

I get the reaction from other things, I just used Cup Ramen as an example. Eating at an "Asian" fast food restaurant is usually enough to put me up past the two Cup Ramen level. I usually can't afford to eat out enough to cause me problems with sit down Asian restaurants, but I have had a problem with certain mom-and-pop Chinese diners. I don't usually eat enough pizza that I've noticed anything, but when I was helping out with the youth group, we had enough Little Ceasar's often enough that I started having problems. I'll grin and bear it if I have to, I just want to know beforehand.

If you really are allergic, you don't have to grin and bear it, you can prepare your own food, and avoid glutamate-rich ingredients like kombu, nori, soy sauce, fish sauce, mushrooms, cheese, green tea, etc. as well as highly processed foods like instant ramen.

It just seems unreasonable to expect your host family to avoid using dashi, soy sauce and green tea.

If I'm not mistaken, here are two different things being mixed up:

People tend to be allergic (well, strictly speaking it's an intolerance, not an allergy) against artificial MSG, which especially Chinese restaurants are known for. Natural MSG, as part of tomatoes, kombu, and so on, is generally not a problem.

If that's the case for you, too, then you probably won't have any problem in most Japanese restaurants, I guess.

Thanks, umi2jp.
Yes, the stuff I have trouble with is the artificial stuff. The more artificial it is the less I can have before I have problems. For example; I can usually only have 1 cup noodle, but I can have 2 or 3 top ramen, and the nicer more authentic restaurants I can have a lot more than the fast food places. I've never yet had a problem with soy sauce. My family has stir fry a lot.

Make sure your host family knows. I agree that asking them to not use it at all would be unreasonable, but they'll likely want to cook for you to show you Japanese cuisine - if they know it can makes you sick, they can take it into consideration when they prepare for you. Offering to cook your own food might also help lighten then burden, as Umami said, but definitely tell them! It's no use to make yourself ill.

I also have food allergies, but mine are strawberries and cherries, which are much easier to avoid. I'm also mildly lactose intolerant, which is common in Asian societies, so I probably won't have a problem with that either.

Here are a couple pages from the Surviving in Japan blog:

http://www.survivingnjapan.com/2012/07/allergy-friendly-food-in-japan....

http://www.survivingnjapan.com/2012/06/japanese-phrase-cards-for-vegan...

If I'm not mistaken, here are two different things being mixed up...

What might be confusing is the difference between free glutamates and glutamates bound in protein. Protein-bound glutamates are found in meat and eggs, tomatoes, peas and many other foods. Free glutamates, on the other hand, are found in kombu, nori, green tea, soy sauce, parmesan cheese, Doritos, and commercially bottled MSG. The glutamic acid in commercially bottled MSG is chemically identical to the glutamic acid found naturally in kombu, etc., and originally Ajinomoto MSG was produced from kombu. The manufacturing process was since changed to use other protein sources, but the resulting product is chemically identical to what was produced from kombu.

So if OP is one of the small minority of people with a glutamate sensitivity, then commercially bottled MSG, processed foods like Doritos, and glutamate-rich ingredients like kombu and green tea will have the exact same physical effects.

Here's an article in the Times that talks a bit further about MSG, glutamates and umami. It mentions that Japanese mayonnaise contains a lot of glutamates, something I didn't know. (It also alludes to the fact that several large-scale scientific studies have proven that there's no connection between MSG and so-called "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome".)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/dining/05glute.html?_r=1

Yes, the stuff I have trouble with is the artificial stuff. The more artificial it is the less I can have before I have problems. For example; I can usually only have 1 cup noodle...

Since "natural" and "artificial" glutamates are chemically identical, and since instant ramen probably has dozens of other artificial ingredients besides MSG, this might indicate that you're sensitive to some ingredients other than MSG. I can assure you that the "authentic" Chinese restaurants where you have less of a problem also use MSG.

For a completely unscientific comment, I'd say that my family and I will get headaches from MSG (usually the nicer that the yum cha is, the more likely we will suffer later, it also dries you out) and I have had it from udon soup in Oz. I have never had a msg type reaction in Japan, nor have any of my family as far as I know. And I would have eaten some prime candidates for high msg, eg curry (that curry roux used in japan is full of things that you wouldnt want in your body), yakitori, ramen. In chinese restaurants they tend to throw scoops of msg (magic salt!) into the food, I dont think that happens so much in japan, rather the ingredients have got it in them.

If you have a bad reaction to certain foods that happen to contain MSG, and no reaction at all to other foods that have MSG or other glutamates, the logical conclusion would be that you're sensitive to something other than the MSG.

...or an equally logical conclusion is that your reaction is dictated by the amount of msg in the food. And no doubt other factors might have an influence, eg, how much fluids one has taken etc.

The double-blind, placebo-controlled studies on MSG would seem to indicate the first option.

I'm interested in this almost despite myself. I see that there was a study in 1998 which concluded as you suggest (and I was surprised), but then another in 2010 I think which suggested the opposite. In any event, I have no idea, and I wont argue things that I have no idea about. But I did see that chinese food can give histamine toxicity with almost identical symptoms to what was seen to be an msg reaction, and that has been my experience - blocked snout and headaches, so if anything I've learned something new. Soooo...back to the OP, maybe he/she has a histamine issue not an msg one? So should we be talking about the histamine content in Japanese food? Google tells me that tofu is quite high in histamine.

Ah, that is interesting about histamines - thanks for following up. I'm always ready to learn something new.