The Food and Drug Administration has not ignored safety questions of monosodium glutamate, but at the present time considers it safe.
There is no need to limit the amount that occurs in processed foods, says George Pauli, director of the FDA’s product policy office in the division of food safety and applied nutrition.
“The FDA recognizes there may be some people who are particularly sensitive to MSG and may react to very large amounts, but those are reversible reactions,” Pauli says. Tests showed some people, who knew they were ingesting MSG, had temporary reactions when it was given in capsules in high doses, he says. But in order to get the reactions when the MSG was eaten with food, four times the dose was required. Those kind of results were not repeatable, however, in a double blind test, in which the neither the person being tested nor the person administering it knew what was being given, Paul says.
Labeling regulations require that MSG be listed when it is an ingredient. Labeling questions that have come up concern other additives, such as hydrolized animal or vegetable proteins (HAP or HVP), which will release free glutamate when eaten.
The FDA proposed several years ago that when hydrolized protein is added to food, the label must state parenthetically that it contains glutamates. But the issue still has not been decided. One reason for the hesitation is that hydrolized protein can be used as a flavoring agent. Flavoring agents are not required to list their components, which could amount to 15 or 25 substances and may be considered secret according to legal decisions, Pauli says.
However, hydrolized protein also can be thought of primarily as a flavor enhancer (rather than a flavor itself) and therefore not be eligible for the labeling exemption, or at least not the glutamate portion.
So far the most serious reaction to MSG in tests has been with a few asthmatic people who experienced problems breathing after ingesting capsules of MSG, Pauli says. “We are not prepared to say MSG has no effect, but it seems to be reversible.”
Nevertheless the FDA has asked the Federation of Societies for Experimental Biology to pull together an expert panel to do a literature search on MSG to bring the FDA up to date, says Pauli. Originally scheduled to be completed in March, that project should be finished in September.
