The MSG mystery

"It enhances the flavor of your food, all foods".

"No, it causes heart palpitations and should be avoided at all costs".

Therein lies the mystery of MSG, the little know white powder that causes such divergent opinions. I went in search for answers after my recent trip to Vietnam where it was clear that the food we had enjoyed for so long during our stay of eight years was no longer innocent of causing various strange effects on the body. What was the truth? Can this flavoring really cause damage?

By 1901 scientists had drawn a map of the tongue, showing crudely the whereabouts of the different nerve endings that identify the four accepted primary tastes- sweet, sour, bitter and salty. But Professor Kidunae Ikeda of the Tokyo Imperial University was convinced that there was something missing in these definitions.' There is,' he said, 'a taste which is common to asparagus, tomatoes, cheese and meat but which is not one of the four well-known tastes.' He decided to call the fifth taste 'umami' - a common Japanese word that is usually translated as 'savoury' - or, with more magic, as 'deliciousness'. But it took him eight long years to prove its existence.

It started innocuously enough – one day he asked his wife why her soup was so delicious. She pointed to strips of dried seaweed, called kombu, a heavy kelp which when soaked in hot water provided the essence of dashi, the stock base of Japanese soups. Ikeda worked on kombu and by 1901 was able to announce that he had isolated a chemical whose properties were exactly the same as those of glutamic acid, which when broken down during cooking, fermentation or ripening- became glutamate. And glutamate is contained in the broth of seaweed and is what causes the taste sensation “unami”. It was easily stabilized with ordinary salt and water and made into mono sodium glutamate- a white crystal soluble in water. This was the birth of the ubiquitous MSG marketed initially as Aji-no-moto or “ essence of taste”. Later on they found a simpler and cheaper process using fermented molasses or wheat and the product took off all over Asia.

It spread to the US as the aftermath of the end of the world war two. As mass production of processed food was booming, MSG provided a cheap and simple additive that made everything taste better. Pretty soon it went into tinned soups, salad dressings, processed meats, carbohydrate-based snacks, ice cream, bread, canned tuna, chewing gum, baby food and soft drinks. As the industry progressed, it was used in frozen, chilled and dehydrated ready meals as well. Ajinimoto started manufacturing in the US in 1956, joining up with Kellog in 1962 and was soon selling everywhere under the brand Accent.

But in 1968, came the Chinese Restaurant Syndrome (CRS), which claimed that MSG was the cause of various ailments like numbness, general weakness and palpitations. Thus began a extended period of debate about MSG and its ill effects. Much research was done but no one could correlate these ailments with the intake of MSG. Indeed no official body was willing to warn humans against consuming MSG.

But popular opinion travelled spectacularly to this science. MSG's name soon became utter mud. It was blamed for causing asthma attacks, migraines, hypertension and heart disease, dehydration, chest pains, depression, attention deficit disorder, anaphylactic shock, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and a host of diverse allergies. Chinese restaurants started placing placards in their windows stating “ No MSG used “ and there were lines in many menus of even other restaurants claiming that there taste did not come from the use of MSG.

The food processing industry by then had a huge stake since almost all its products used MSG. Their response was to bury it by giving MSG new names- starting with the innocuous sounding “natural flavoring” to the more esoteric E 621.

The problem of MSG becomes even more complicated when we learn that glutamate is present in almost every food stuff and that the protein is so vital to our functioning that our own bodies produce 40 grams of it a day. Human milk contains large amounts of glutamate, ripe cheese is full of glutamate as are tomatoes. Almost all foods have some naturally occurring glutamate in them but the ones with most are obvious: ripe tomatoes, cured meats, dried mushrooms, soy sauce, Bovril and of course Worcester sauce, nam pla (with 950mg per 100g) and the other fermented fish sauces of Asia. Marmite, with 1750mg per 100g, has more glutamate in it than any other manufactured product on the planet!

So what is the truth about this little white powder that provides taste and “unami” but may also cause various ailments?

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has classified MSG as a food ingredient that's "generally recognized as safe," but the use of MSG remains controversial. Over the years, however, the FDA has received many anecdotal reports of adverse reactions to foods containing MSG. These reactions — known as MSG symptom complex — include: headache, flushing, sweating, facial pressure or tightness, numbness, tingling or burning in face, neck and other areas, rapid, fluttering heartbeats (heart palpitations), chest pain, nausea, weakness, etc. For this reason, when MSG is added to food, the FDA requires that it be listed on the label. However, researchers have found no definitive evidence of a link between MSG and these symptoms.

So the mystery remains. Is MSG bad for you or is it a simple food additive that does you no harm? No one seems to know for sure!

One idea at a time

There is a view that says that most people can only have one top idea in their mind at one time. When I was writing a report which was overdue, I remember trying to focus on the main ideas in my work but other ideas kept hovering around like pesky gnats constantly distracting me. I finally found the way to keep my mind centered on the big idea was to write down the small ones floating around on a piece of paper on my bedside. It was as if I had finally nailed these pesky gnats and I could now work in peace on my magnum opus. The hard fact is that most people have only one top idea in their mind at any given time as Paul , in an interesting article, insists. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that any form of creative thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind. Everyone who’s worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There’s a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I’m increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control your own thoughts only indirectly. Everyone know that you can’t really directly control where your thoughts drift. Therein lies the paradox- if you’re controlling them, they’re not drifting. And if they are not allowed to drift, how will you ever get those great new ideas that light up bulbs. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. You need to try instead to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want think about. You don’t have complete control, of course. An emergency could push other thoughts out of your head. But barring emergencies you have a good deal of indirect control over what becomes the top idea in your mind. And to do that the first thing you have to do is make sure you are not distracted by some kinds of ideas that are peskier than the gnats I mentioned in the begining. There are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding—thoughts which push out more interesting ideas. The most obdurate one is thinking about money. Anything to do with money is almost by definition an attention sink. I have known people who get up from deep sleep to turn on their computers to figure out if they could buy something cheaper or raise their bid in one of those awful internet auctions. Others just worry about money or lack there of. But if you think about money, you can forget thinking about anything else. The other is disputes. All fights are essentially idea destroyers. They may feel like that they get your creative juices flowing but really there is no real substance to them. There is another aspect of disputes worth thinking about. While disputes themselves are indeed a creative thought sink, it is their aftermath that is even more damaging. Think of it this way – once the dispute is over, you rarely turn it off but instead keep brooding about what you could have done differently to have won the argument. It is here that the old adage of “turning the other cheek” may actually turn out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. You can avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to you by telling yourself: this doesn’t deserve space in your head. If you have forgotten the details of old disputes, you are on way to recovery because that means you have not been thinking about them leaving space for creative thinking instead and for new ideas. I suspect a lot of people aren’t sure what is the top idea in their mind at any given time. Or how to get to be in a position to receive them? In short, how do you become creative? How do you get to that top idea in your mind. First don’t think about money, second avoid disputes or if you have them, get over them quickly. But to get the real top idea, go take a shower, for the ideas you have in the shower will really be the top ones!

The Uses of Tragedy

As I look back, I sometimes recall my two heart attacks with some fondness. No, no , not because they were not traumatic for all concerned – they were; but because paradoxically they remind me of the periods when I was in the midst of some of most exciting and productive work of my professional life!

The first occurred some thirty years ago. It was July of 1981 and I had been the director of offshore oil operations of our national oil company, ONGC for about eighteen months and was busy in hectic preparations for doubling our offshore oil output. Some two years prior, I had written a piece about how India could double its offshore production in five years and I had been summoned by aides to Mrs Gandhi ( I had been her science adviser some five years earlier) and grilled on my assertions. In one of those strange twists of fate, six months later the then director of offshore operations was denounced as a US spy and removed from his post forthwith and I was pitchforked into that job – hoist with his own petard, some observers were heard to snicker. Anyway I put together a plan to double the offshore oil output, which our French consultants, CFP asserted was simply not practicable given Indias bureaucracy and red tape. But in the next four years, we installed 48 deepwater offshore platforms at an average of one platform a month and by 1985, offshore oil production had not only doubled but grown four times. I write of these exciting times in my book “ A Passion to build”.

The second heart attack came in March of 2005 as I was in the final stages of my career in Vietnam where one of my major projects was providing electricity to the rural areas in the country. Starting in 1997, we had been able to provide power to over 30 million rural people and by 2010, Vietnam had reached the unprecented level of 98% rural access. Of course, this would have largely remained unknown- as many of World Bank’s most successful projects do- but for a chance visit by the new President of the Bank, Bob Zoellick. He visited some of the rural areas and talked to the policy makers and returned to Washington, deeply impressed by the country’s achievements and enthusiastic about Bank’s role in helping make them possible. On his return he directed his staff to produce a film to document this achievement and to help other poor developing countries. Here is that 20 minute documentary called "The Last Mile".

But he also wanted to know how it was done and what lessons it held for other developing countries. Again by the fickle finger of fate, I was asked in March of this year to produce a handbook for bringing power to the people which could be used as a companion piece to the documentary above for politicians, policy makers and practioners in other developing countries. I just finished writing this handbook and here it is: Bringing power to the people: a handbook.

As they say, sometimes tragedy comes attended with some good fortune as well! Perhaps we do not look hard enough. After all were the heart attacks a protest of the body to my overwork and stress or were they telling me “ you have only a little time left on this earth. Use it wisely”.

The Rashomon effect

Two recent events- one professional and the other personal- reminded me of a movie I had seen some fifty years ago. It reminded me once again that oftentimes perspective is relative and that each person can see the same event, but perceive the details of the event completely differently and hence reach a conclusion which, while plausible, is not what the others have seen. Since the facts of the event are rarely in dispute, the fact that different eyewitnesses can reach profoundly different conclusions is one that should give us pause in our certainties of what we seen and know.

Kurosawa's (1950) Rashomon is a movie, which shows how any individual's perception and telling of an event can differ, often radically, from another's version. It tells the story, set in medieval Japan, of two men who have taken refuge from a downpour under the Rasho Gate in Kyoto who relate to a third the events they had earlier witnessed at the trial of a bandit. They tell of how a man and his wife, while travelling through a forest, were met by a highwayman, who murdered the man and raped the woman. Their presentations of the testimony of each of the persons involved in the crime make it apparent, however, that each of the individuals involved saw the events in which he was participating in a different way than had the others, or, at the least, represented those events very differently.

Kurosawa shows how people can perceive the same physical occurrences in radically different ways. Whether the film's characters, and human beings generally, merely interpret what they have seen or done according to their own opinions and assumptions about the world or transform the events themselves, molding them into whatever new narratives are required for their emotional well-being, their differing representations are not overt lies, that is, representations known by the given person telling them to be untrue, but can be, in fact, accurate reflections of that person's understanding of the events he has witnessed.

By so letting the moviegoer see the world from the perspective of each of the individuals around whom Rashomon revolves, Kurosawa not only reminds the viewer just how fluid reality is, but also allows him to engage with each of the film's characters. The viewer is, consequently, not simply affected by the tragic murder of a man, the rape of a woman, and the execution of their attacker, but also by an awareness of how human beings are unable to deal with the universe around them without imposing upon it whatever constructs are needed to make that world an easier place for them to inhabit. For example, in the story told by the murdered man, which is related by a medium, the viewer sees how the man perceives himself as a completely innocent victim, betrayed even by his wife, who is revealed as a faithless creature who callously begs the robber to murder her husband and take her with him. In the wife's tale, by contrast, it is the man who is cruel and heartless, who is ready to abandon a spouse he sees as being tainted by the rape she has suffered. Each person interprets the events occurring to him as colored by his own often selfish perspectives so that whatever wrongs are committed are always done by others and never by himself. It also shows what lengths people will go to protect their own self-image from lies and deceit to a sense of importance belied by facts.

A few weeks ago I was invited by the World Bank, my erstwhile employers, to visit Vietnam and write about the reasons for the success of their rural electrification program which had gone from 3 % to 98 % access in less than two decades. I had first visited Vietnam in 20 years ago, lived there for almost 8 years, written two widely acclaimed energy sector reports besides helping design and implement the rural electrification effort in the late nineties. The government had even bestowed two medals on me for my contribution to this effort. So I went in confident that I would be able to chronicle this effort with a degree of competence and personal knowledge that perhaps other lacked. But even as I completed the report I found two other persons with different perspectives, each profoundly convinced of the accuracy of his assessment. Since the events over the two decades were not in doubt, it was puzzling to find two professionals with such differing views which they held with equal fervour and conviction. How can people perceive the same physical occurrences in radically different ways, and, more importantly, how does one decide which version is the truth?

The personal story has a similar puzzling but somewhat more familiar event at its center. It is the age old conflict of a doting mother and an aggressive daughter in law fighting ever so gently, and sometimes not so gently, over the life of the son. Mild criticisms become slights not to be forgotten, little events balloon into full blown conflicts till it leads to an open confrontation with each one giving his or her own version of how it led to this. The same events once again are seen in completely different light – a version of where you stand depends upon where you sit. Tragically, sometimes these events tend not to get resolved as one's ego and bruised feelings make reconciliation impossible as no one outside can decipher the real truth of the matter to offer help and counsel.

And tragically, as in Rashomon, at the end, it still remains unclear which of the stories told is true. No one is willing to take that extra step of walking in the other persons shoes even for a while, which could lead to a happy conclusion for all.

Books vs the internet

The advent of the internet has sparked a new debate between those who are unrestrained welcomers of new technology and those who cling to the old ways of doing things. But sometimes the new is not necessarily the best.

Internet has over the past few years turned people away from reading to skimming, from reflection to quick judgements based on limited knowledge. Worse they have bred a feeling that like American food more is better. You need to be constantly in the know of what is going on through the internet, twitter facebook and if you miss even a moment of this incessant chatter, you are doomed to ignorance and social inadequacy. 114 letters are supposed to lead you to knowledge nirvana and breakthrough insights!

It is only recently that book publishers have started to mount a rearguard action on this insidious invasion. Recent research shows that having books and reading them improves the mind. In an experiment, researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.

This study along with many others, illustrates the tremendous power of books, asserts David Brooks in his new column. We already knew that kids who grow up in a home with 500 books stay in school longer and do better. This new study suggests that introducing books into homes that may not have them also produces significant educational gains.

And how does the internet compare? Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd of Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy examined computer use among a half-million 5th through 8th graders in North Carolina and found that the spread of home computers and high-speed Internet access was associated with significant declines in math and reading scores.Nicholas Carr’s book,in his new book “The Shallows" argues that the Internet is leading to a short-attention-span culture and cites a pile of research showing that the multidistraction, hyperlink world degrades people’s abilities to engage in deep thought or serious contemplation.

But there is an upside to the internet revolution that we must not forget. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation. The Internet can help you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends.

But the book world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher. It’s better at distinguishing the important from the unimportant, and making the important more prestigious.

Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic — a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is the ethic of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption — and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.

Feeling grumpy may be good for you but not pessimism

An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly.

In contrast to those annoying happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed.

While cheerfulness fosters creativity, gloominess breeds attentiveness and careful thinking. The University of New South Wales researcher says a grumpy person can cope with more demanding situations than a happy one because of the way the brain "promotes information processing strategies".

And how did he come to these resounding conclusions?

He asked volunteers to watch different films and dwell on positive or negative events in their life, designed to put them in either a good or bad mood. Next he asked them to take part in a series of tasks, including judging the truth of urban myths and providing eyewitness accounts of events. Those in a bad mood outperformed those who were jolly - they made fewer mistakes and were better communicators.

Professor Forgas said: "Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world."

The study also found that sad people were better at stating their case through written arguments, which showed that a "mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style".

"I work on the premise that misery is the thinking man's happiness" one reader said. "With misery come a distinctive humor and a more realistic outlook on life that actually makes one a more rounded and "real" person than those who move around with a painted smile on their faces."

“Of course, it’s easy being pessimistic when you are a grumpy old man like me” says another, “with nothing but endless conflict, the continuing economic crisis, and .. predictions of something terrible to come This awareness of my own mortality brings with it cynicism, as I cast envious eyes over the world that I will soon no doubt leave.”

But surely there is more to life than just existing, and there must be a chance for a brighter future despite whatever these pessimists may think?

A philosopher provides us with some sound advice on overcoming pessimism and general grumpiness: Always live in the present and have no fear with what the future brings. Embracing the hope of a positive future can make you feel at ease with whatever difficulty you may be presently experiencing, not to mention opening avenues for you to find greater meaning and purpose in your own lives. Always keep in mind that you are growing wise, and not old. Remain young at heart and find joy and laughter in everything you do. Create, learn or discover something of positive value and worth living for in the time you have left. But above all remember that ‘To grow old is no evil, just learn to cultivate your mind into becoming like fine wine”

Or as Marcus Aurelius said” Live each day as if it were your last.”