07.25.08
More Hidden MSG
Last week I spent some time at the hospital with my mom. Since I’m pretty picky with my foods, I decided I was going to pack all my own food. But what’s the easiest thing to pack? I figured I’d take some sandwich ingredients and make my own organic sandwiches. I tried to select everything carefully and decided I was going to treat myself a bit and buy some organic mustard. I don’t have the bottle anymore, so can’t quote the exact ingredients, but suffice it to say that all the ingredients looked natural with normal food ingredients labeled as “organic,” except there was “one” ingredient that stopped me for a second. . . “organic spices.” Hmm. I knew that “spices” is one of the ingredients which is known to be a “possible” red flag to MSG. So whenever I see spices as an ingredient, I just don’t buy it. But gee, since it was “organic” spice, I thought maybe it’s okay. I don’t buy many pre-parepared, so I don’t think I recalled ever seeing organic spices before as an ingredient. So I bought it, and boy was it tasty! When I got home, and after three days of eating the organic mustard with it’s “organic spice,” Brian tells me, “I don’t think you should be eating that stuff. Don’t you know that spice can still have MSG even if it’s organic?” Ack! I suppose it makes sense, but I tell you, reading labels gets me wacky, and that’s why I generally don’t buy many pre-prepared foods. Even when you read the fine print, they still sneak in those unwanted ingredients. So I tossed the rest of the mustard out, but now I was spoiled. It just tasted so good. But, a quick internet search revealed that making your own mustard is rather easy! So today I tried it, and it was tasty, too!
Apparently, there are a lot of ways to make homemade mustard, but I picked the easiest one I could find for starters. I can get fancier later, if I decide to. The ingredients I used is organic powdered mustard, organic apple cider vinegar, and maple syrup. All you do is take some powdered mustard (you can use seeds and grind them yourself, if you like) and add a bit of apple cider vinegar and mix until you get a consistency of ketchup. Then add whatever spices you like and a bit of something sweet like maple syrup or honey or sugar. Mix, mix and let sit for a while (I did for about an hour, but it can be shorter or longer), and viola! Mustard spread! Minus the MSG or other hidden ingredients.
Okay, so another revelation I had today was that “citric acid,” which is so common in so many pre-prepared products is also a source of MSG. Oye! I have been trying to stay away from citric acid “additives” anyway because of my skin issues, but I have not been avoiding it with the foods for the rest of my family. And now today I saw this article “The Difficulty of Keeping MSG free” by Jack Samuels. Here’s a little excerpt from the article.
“The food ingredient “citric acid” provides us with a good example of why MSG-sensitive people with little tolerance are having difficulty staying well. Many people believe that “citric acid” comes from citrus fruits, and since most people can tolerate citrus fruits, “citric acid” should not be a problem. However, most of the “citric acid” used today is made from corn rather than from citrus fruits. The Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) is a major producer of “citric acid.”
“Citric acid” is produced by fermentation of crude sugars. When “citric acid” is produced from corn, manufacturers do not take the time or undertake the expense to remove all corn protein. During processing, the remaining protein is hydrolyzed, resulting in some processed free glutamic acid (MSG). “Citric acid” may also interacts with any protein in the food to which it is added, freeing up more glutamic acid.”
The thing which bothers me even more is that some of the supplements I have taken on occasion in the past for both my family and myself have been citric acid chelated. We tended to avoid the amino acid chelates because of another article Brian and I read on amino acid chelates that appeared to damage the livers of some cows. We figured if it was damaging cow livers, then it may also damage human livers, so we opted to avoid supplements chelated with amino acids for the citric acid chelates. Now, after reading Jack Samuels’ article, it may very well be that we’ve been taking in MSG all this time with our supplements, oye! This is very frustrating, and very annoying, and just another reason why I really try to avoid bottled supplements. I hope I don’t start finding problems with herbal supplements, too. But for cost effectiveness and my own quality control, I’ve been buying my herbs in bulk anyway and preparing most of them at home. But still, the tinctures are convenient to buy ready-made.
Okay, so now that I got that off my chest, better get back to working on dinner.
Marlakins
