Glutamates Are Potent Nerve Toxins
Glutamates are generally defined as salts of glutamic acids, and have been shown to be potent nerve toxins in laboratory cell cultures. Glutamates can cause a nerve to swell 90 seconds after contact. The mechanism for this is not entirely clear, but it is generally thought that exposure to glutamates causes a calcium influx in the nerve cell. The most common glutamate used in food is monosodium glutamate (MSG), one of the world’s most widely used food additives. According to Dr. John Olney, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St.Louis, “over twenty years ago glutamate was show to cause brain damage to infant animals. Since then, it has become increasingly evident that glutamate and closely related substances are neurotoxins that can cause human neurodegenerative diseases.” [1] As mentioned previously, MSG in combination with aspartame can be especially damaging. Not only may glutamates and aspartates cause degenerative nerve damage in adults, but there is growing evidence that the immature brain in children is more vulnerable than the brain of an adult since nerve myelination has not progressed very far. See web site data on vaccines and vaccination.
Development of MSG
Monosodium glutamate was developed in 1908 by a Japanese chemist. In 1925 James E. Larrowe, who owned a milling company in the United States, contacted Suzuki Spice Company in Japan for help in disposing of glutamate-containing waste water from sugar beet processing. Prior to 1918, glutamate waste water had been a source of industrial potash, but by 1925 it was beginning to pile up in waste tanks. Larrowe got no firm advice from Suzuki, so he went to Carnegie Mellon Institute of Industrial Research and also to Johns Hopkins University, where Dr. Elmer McCollum advised him to use the waste water to manufacture monosodium glutamate (MSG). Larrowe changed the name of his company to Amino Products Corporation, which was eventually sold to the International Minerals and Chemicals Company.
By 1930, production of MSG in China reached 400,000 pounds per year. In 1933, Japanese production reached 10 million pounds per year. In 1948, the processed foods industry was introduced to MSG at a conference in Chicago as a solution to the problem of poor-tasting food containing other additives. Both the canned and frozen food industries eventually became the largest users of MSG.
First Indications That Something Was Wrong
One of the first major indications that something was seriously wrong with MSG occurred in 1957, when Dr.D.Newhouse and Dr.J.P.Lucas did rat studies which revealed that ingested glutamates result in rapid irreversible destruction of retinal cells. After the observation was validated, Dr. John Olney of Washington University did further studies with rodents that revealed that MSG damages dendrites in the brain, causes damage to the hypothalamus, causes obesity, behavioral disturbances, endocrine changes, stunted bodies, seizures and infertility. If MSG could “solve” the rodent population problem, it could also help “solve the population problem for humans” - in theory, that is. Damage to the hypothalamus, a part of the brain critical for both memory and learning , is unquestionable.[2]
[1] Society for Neuroscience, 19th Annual Meeting, Phoenix, Arizona, October 1989.
[2] Science Service report 1993. Ref: Studies by James Golomb of New York University, using MRI on patients 55 to 87, on the results of atrophy of the hypothalamus, memory and learning.
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