The glutamate that is added to food as a flavor enhancer is exactly the same as the glutamate that is found naturally in cheese, meat, seafood, and vegetables. Your body treats glutamate from these different sources in exactly the same way. If your wife gets headaches from foods with added MSG, then she should also get them from eating tomatoes, mushrooms, Parmesan cheese, and any other food high in glutamate.
...and any of its re-named compounds like Autolyzed yeast, and Yeast extract.
Renamed compounds? That makes no sense whatsoever. Autolyzed yeast is autolyzed yeast, and yeast extract is yeast extract. Hydrolyzed vegetable protein is hydrolyzed vegetable protein.
We take more than an hour to shop, reading every label.
How do you manage to avoid the foods where glutamate occurs naturally? What in the world do you eat? It's a fact that the average diet delivers 10 times more glutamate from naturally occurring sources than is derived from added sources. That being the case, and glutamate being responsible for your wife's migraines, she should be spending her entire life in a dark room pounding down triptans. She does have a blood brain barrier, right?
Just like any other food, such as peanuts, some people are allergic or have almost no tolerance.
Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but this is also unmitigated BS, just like the other poster was offering. Allergic reactions are normally caused by large molecules, like proteins. MSG is a small molecule that has never been shown to cause an IgE response.
Again, if MSG causes all the things you say it does, these same reactions would also come from consuming foods where glutamate occurs naturally. Since they don't, I'd say your correlations are all wrong. But since your conclusions are based on emotion rather than science, I'll place you in the same category as the other guy in this thread who doesn't know what he's talking about. Not to worry, though, you have lots of company.
“Again, if MSG causes all the things you say it does, these same reactions would also come from consuming foods where glutamate occurs naturally. “
No, that does not follow. The bad reaction has a lot to do with quantity. And whether it occurs naturally.
jps098
“My wife gets 3 day migraines if she eats foods with MSG”
Me, too, don’t let anyone tell you MSG is not the problem. Other additives are bad as well.