Overweight: Food Additives? by Genevieve Fosa

          I found it very interesting. I went to see a Noel Coward play the other night. The theater was fun and informal. Of course the dialogue in the play sparkled - Noel Coward was excellent at writing good dialogue, and the actors knew how to carry it off. However, the women were all fat - zaftig on a grand scale. However, they looked out of place, because women in the 1920s were not so fat, and they ate lots of food that we habitually deny ourselves. We eat like monks who have vowed their lives to poverty, and still we are fat.

 

          Some of our health scientists have stated that by the year 2048, every adult living in the US will be overweight. The article I read did not go so far as to explain how they had come to this conclusion, but it would seem that our food is poisoned. No matter how carefully we pick and choose what we eat, corporate producers make certain that everything we buy at the grocery store is larded with enough artificial sweeteners and MSG to build an elephant.

 

          Evidence would suggest that MSG contributes to the formation of fat cells within our bodies. Now, the problem with this is that once we have them, they don’t go away. We can diet until those cells have lost some volume, but as long as we have those cells, we will feel deprived and hungry until they are again filled. So, our dieting becomes a yo-yo. Certain research scientists are working to find an antidote to MSG. They are looking to find a chemical that when sprinkled on our food will diminish our appetite, so that we do not eat as much. Why can’t we simply get rid of the MSG?

 

          The problem feels ludicrous in the extreme, when I read in articles extolling the virtues of slow food, that our industrial farms are spraying MSG on the crops, so that they will be impregnated with that chemical when they go to market.

 

          Okay, so if you look up MSG on Google, you will be told that it is naturally found in certain seaweeds, that the Japanese have been eating for centuries, and that MSG is simply a chemical that makes food taste like mothers’ milk. There was even an article about this in the Christian Science Monitor a few years ago.

 

          But, a single injection of MSG into a laboratory mouse makes it fat and diabetic for the rest of its life. That is because it goes straight to the hypothalamus where it turns off the mouse’s appetite control center, so the mouse always thinks he is hungry, no matter how much he eats. And we know that MSG encourages the formation of fat cells. Without the help of MSG, mice do not get fat.

 

          Now, our food industry claims that MSG does not cross the blood brain barrier in a human being. However, scientists have known for years that it does. It makes us want to eat more than we need. Remember those ads for Lay’s Potato chips back in the 1960s? Bet you can’t eat just one! That was because the manufacturer was seasoning them with MSG. The secret ingredient in Kentucky Fried Chicken, after the salt and pepper was added, was MSG. Our chronically overweight nation does not need an appetite stimulant in all of its food. But I, along with many other people, have ranted and raved about MSG before, and I believe that the slow food movement really does have it right when they say we need to get back to natural foods produced the old fashioned ways.