Death By Supermarket (7 page)

As far as the general public is concerned, there are two major misconceptions about MSG. First, when most people think of MSG, they think of
fragile individuals who suffer from MSG sensitivity, known as “Chinese restaurant syndrome.” But MSG affects everyone to a lesser or greater degree, and as Dr. Blaylock said, the effects of MSG may not be apparent for decades.

Equally important is that people believe they have a choice whether or not to ingest MSG. But this is a delusion brought to us by the FDA, which bent to the Glutamate Association, making it possible for factory-food manufacturers to add monosodium glutamate to products in concentrations less than 100 percent without having to notify the consumer on the label. (The Glutamate Association was formed to provide communication among its members, industry, and the government about the “use and safety” of glutamates.) This means that you could be regularly ingesting a product that contains an ingredient that is 99 percent MSG. To give you an example of how you unwittingly and regularly ingest MSG, just think back to your last Chinese restaurant experience. Many people understand that MSG isn’t healthy—though they could not tell you why exactly—and they know enough to ask the waiter in Chinese restaurants if there is MSG in the food. Although the waiter will tell you no, they do not add MSG to the food, that isn’t necessarily true. If the restaurant used, say, ready-made chicken broth, you are likely going to get MSG in your food as MSG is added to most chicken broths today. At home, if you make tuna salad with Bumble Bee Tuna, you may be ingesting MSG as this product contains vegetable broth, which often contains MSG. If you ate the celebrity doctor’s nutritional weight-loss bars I talked about in
chapter 3
, you ingested glutamate, as they contained soy protein isolate, which is an ingredient that contains naturally occurring glutamate.

According to Blaylock, additives are often euphemisms for MSG. Additives that always contain MSG are hydrolyzed vegetable protein, hydrolyzed protein, hydrolyzed plant protein, plant protein extract, sodium caseinate, calcium caseinate, yeast extract, textured protein, autolyzed yeast, and hydrolyzed oat flour. Additives that frequently contain MSG are malt extract, malt flavoring, bouillon, broth, stock, flavoring,
natural flavoring, natural beef or chicken flavoring, seasoning, and spices. Additives that may contain MSG or that can be high in naturally occurring glutamate are carrageenan, enzymes, soy protein concentrate, soy protein isolate, and whey protein concentrate.
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To understand how MSG and aspartame affect your brain, you must first understand the basics of brain chemistry. As we saw in our discussion of brain chemistry balance in
chapter 2
, your body’s chemical communication system controls bodily functions. It has been said that a butterfly flapping its wings in Shanghai affects weather patterns in Los Angeles. That’s what neurological activity is like, as one neuron firing impacts countless other neurons in the exquisitely complex, interconnected circuitry of your nervous system.

However, once a synapse has fired and accomplished its task, your brain has mechanisms to deactivate neurotransmitters to prevent the synapse from firing over and over uncontrollably and burning itself out.

Amino acids are the chemical building blocks the human body uses to make protein. When they’re slightly altered by metabolic processes, they are classified into different categories or groups. One such group is the acidic neurotransmitters, to which glutamate and aspartate belong. Your brain naturally contains low concentrations of both. In fact, glutamate is the most common neurotransmitter in your brain. Glutamate and aspartate are excitatory neurotransmitters that stimulate your brain. Other neurotransmitters act as inhibitors. A combination of excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters results in balanced brain chemistry.

All cells and neurons in the human body are guarded in a lock and key fashion. This lock and key system enables the trillions of actions within the human metabolism to operate in an orderly fashion. In other words, everything goes where it is supposed to go. Hormones go where they are supposed to go, sugar goes where it is supposed to go, neurotransmitters go where they are supposed to go, and so on. In your brain, neurotransmitters are the keys that activate receptors (the locks), which allows entry into the neurons so that the neurotransmitters can fire synapses.

Excess glutamate and aspartame in your brain will facilitate a cascade of chemical reactions that result in the rapid and uncontrollable firing of synapses—culminating in brain cell death. Your brain has regulation systems to rid itself of the excess, but this system requires high levels of energy. Lack of energy is the outcome of dieting, extreme exercise, and hypoglycemia (which occurs when blood sugar levels dip too fast and too low because of eating too much sugar or as a result of going hungry).

Let’s say you eat a diet heavily weighted in factory food containing MSG. You drink diet drinks as well as coffee and iced tea laced with NutraSweet. You eat very few fruits or vegetables (antioxidants). You either don’t take supplements or you take an inferior drugstore, supermarket, or big box brand. Since blood levels of glutamate remain high for three hours after ingestion, if you eat three meals plus snacks containing aspartame and MSG, you will have high glutamate blood levels all day long, resulting in the above-mentioned cascade of chemical reactions that end in neural death.

“Once this cascade of destruction is triggered … the whole process proceeds with the explosiveness of a nuclear chain reaction,” Dr. Blaylock writes.
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Specifically, in addition to neurons firing to death, free radicals also reproduce like crazy, bouncing around and further damaging brain cells and destroying neural connections.

Free radicals have been written about extensively in recent years, but let’s review. Molecules consist of a positively charged nucleus and negatively charged electrons that orbit the nucleus in pairs. Free radicals are molecules with a missing electron. When an electron is lost, the molecule becomes extremely reactive and is referred to as a “free radical” because it frantically seeks electrons to pair up with its unpaired electrons. Free radicals ravage the molecules in your body, stealing electrons from complete molecules. This process, called oxidation, is essentially a domino effect of molecules becoming free radicals and further rampaging to obtain paired electrons, causing more free radicals. Free radicals kill cells, damage DNA, cause chromosomal damage, create arterial plaque, accelerate aging, and
are the key factor in almost every degenerative disease, including brain diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Free radicals are produced in your body through normal, healthy metabolic processes and are regularly eliminated by antioxidants (also known as free radical scavengers). Antioxidant vitamins A, C, D, E, and K are allowed through your blood-brain barrier and can be obtained by eating food or by taking quality supplements.

Your brain is a chemical laboratory where all actions are tightly scripted. Because your brain’s life or death depends on tight controls, your body has a blood-brain barrier that allows desirable substances in and bars toxic substances from entering. But, said Dr. Blaylock, “The blood-brain barrier is not fail-safe. It can be weakened by numerous factors including excessive physical stress, elevated core body temperatures, infection, trauma, head injuries, and certain drugs and metals, as well as the conditions of aging, such as hardening of the arteries, diabetes, hypertension, poor blood oxygenation, and tumors. When the blood-brain barrier is weakened it can be breached.”
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According to Blaylock, because of the many factors that weaken the blood-brain barrier, people have, at one time or another, a porous blood-brain barrier. When your blood-brain barrier is porous and you ingest MSG or aspartame, they pass readily through to brain. Also, said Blaylock, even if your blood-brain barrier is not weakened, if there is chronic prolonged exposure to a flooding of MSG or aspartame, excitotoxins will ultimately seep past the blood-brain barrier to the brain. If excitotoxins are in even a minute overconcentration in the brain, they cause brain cells to become excited to death.

Consider the fact that if a pregnant woman ingests MSG or aspartate her blood levels can reach high enough concentrations to cross the placenta barrier—or the placenta barrier can be breached if there is a defect. Dr. Blaylock said, “MSG does most of its damage during the last trimester of pregnancy and the first two years after birth in humans. This is when the infant brain is undergoing its normal fluctuations in concentration.
An excess of glutamate during critical neuronal migrations can cause significant developmental dysfunction—many of which are delayed until later in life.” Exposure in the womb and in the first few years of life may affect brain development, resulting in autism, learning disorders, hyperactive behavior, or even schizophrenia. Moreover, as Dr. Blaylock said, these effects may not be evident until puberty or early adulthood.

I asked Dr. Blaylock if MSG has been used for thousands of years in Japan, why they are not having the same neurological problems as Americans? Dr. Blaylock explained: “For several reasons. One, the Japanese consume a diluted form of MSG and less volume. Unlike Americans, they also eat a diet that is known to reduce excitotoxic injury—such as a diet high in flavonoids [compounds with therapeutic effects found in fruits and vegetables], foods that are high in omega-3 fats, which directly block excitotoxicity, as well as magnesium, which blocks the glutamate receptor, among other factors. Yet they are suffering from excitotoxic disorders, including Alzheimer’s dementia, in increasing numbers.”
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It’s important to note that excitotoxins have a compounding effect on your brain. A fast-food meal adulterated with MSG from McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, or the like that’s washed down with a Diet Coke containing aspartame will do compounded damage to your brain. For many it’s hard to imagine eating a hamburger without drinking a diet soda.

FUZZY THINKING MEMORY LOSS,
ringing in the ears, numbness and tingling of the extremities, blindness, multiple sclerosis, brain tumors, and, perhaps the most alarming, grand mal seizures suffered by commercial airline pilots—these and other serious neurological disorders were formerly nothing more than aspartame urban legend. Public attitudes have changed a lot in the past several years, and many people have an inkling that there is something amiss with aspartame. Still, even many of those who claim that aspartame is unhealthy couldn’t really tell you why. I was one of those people until I started researching this book. When I did probe into the aspartame world, it was a short-click journey to innumerable, rather nutty Internet pages on aspartame that took me back to the good old days of trying to decipher the fine print on a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap. Since then those sites have gone away, and numerous sites have sprung up to disclose the dangers of aspartame in a more reasoned manner.

Not everyone is buying in. For example, if you Google “aspartame controversy,” Wikipedia will tell you, “The artificial sweetener aspartame has been the subject of several controversies and hoaxes since its initial approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1974. Critics allege that conflicts of interest marred the FDA’s approval of aspartame, question the quality of the initial research supporting its safety, and postulate that numerous health risks may be associated with aspartame. The
validity of these claims has been examined and dismissed. In 1987, the U.S. Government Accountability Office concluded that the food additive approval process had been followed properly for aspartame. Aspartame has been found to be safe for human consumption by more than ninety countries worldwide, with FDA officials describing aspartame as ‘one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved’ and its safety as ‘clear cut’. The weight of existing scientific evidence indicates that aspartame is safe at current levels of consumption as a non-nutritive sweetener.”
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Mainstream publishers aren’t very interested in the subject of so-called aspartame poisoning either. The books that have been published on aspartame by small presses don’t reach the masses, and the alleged problems with aspartame don’t appear newsworthy to the media. In fact, doctors advocate the use of aspartame and use it themselves—for example, that box of free samples of sugar-free Metamucil in your doctor’s office. Many bestselling diet books urge the use of aspartame, including the mega bestseller
The South Beach Diet: The Delicious, Doctor Designed, Foolproof Plan for Fast and Healthy Weight Loss
, by Arthur Agatston, M.D. What’s more, aspartame has the endorsement of the FDA, the CDC, the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the American Dietetic Association (ADA) and the majority of the medical establishment. (The two associations are, respectively, the nation’s leading nonprofit health organization that provides diabetes research, information, and advocacy, and the nation’s largest organization of food and nutritional professionals).

Yet despite these endorsements and the assertions by the aspartame industry and the FDA that we have nothing to worry about, reputable medical doctors and research scientists, hundreds of peer-reviewed research papers, mountains of empirical (anecdotal) evidence, and clinical experience tell a different story.

When aspartame first came on the scene, I asked a doctor friend of mine what he thought of it. He replied,” It’s just a couple of amino acids, so it’s probably OK.” This was partly true, but as it turns out, not that simple.

Dr. Blaylock told me, “Aspartame is a compound made from three components: phenylalanine (an amino acid), aspartic acid (an excitotoxic amino acid), and joined chemically by methanol, a toxic alcohol. When consumed, aspartame is metabolically broken down into its three component parts—all three of which are toxic to the nervous system as well as to all cells. In addition, further metabolism occurs, producing dozens of other potentially toxic compounds and even carcinogenic compounds.