Sometimes I get a McBreakfast of the sausage breakfast burrito thing that they have. By itself, it’s pretty meh – nothing special (scrambled eggs, American cheese, ground sausage, green pepper, and tomato). Add their “Mexican style hot sauce” (which is actually pretty spicy with Jalapeno as the second ingredient after water) and it becomes a party in my mouth. It’s very specifically the combination of those two things that seems to create this amazing umami flavor and mouth feel. I’ve tried to recreate that magic by using different hot sauce on the burrito, or using the hot sauce on something else and it’s just not the same.
Although MSG is found in foods like Shitake and other mushrooms, seaweed, shellfish, some meats and cheeses, and so on, that is not the same thing as an extract, or synthesized product. Mankind has a history of extracting pure chemicals, and its not gone that well. Coca leaves have been used forever with no major problems, while crack cocaine seems to cause problems. Same with mead (at what 3 or 4% alcohol)…no big deal compared to 151 proof liquor. Same with a lot of things. You can smoke opium all day long and still function (and not die!) while heroin can easily kill you.
This is my problem with 10 pound jars of 99% pure anything…its easy to overdo it, and also the human body didn’t evolve eating pure stuff, but did evolve to process mushrooms and oysters, which contain all kinds of compounds that, together, are delicious…not just the MSG but the whole package.
I know that I do occasionally get headaches from overly seasoned (likely with MSG) Chinese foods, snack foods like Doritos and all that, Instant ramen, etc. but I’m not sure its from the MSG…i think it might be involved though. Lots of people have noted that.
So, I’d say if you want to add that kind of flavor, get some seaweed powder, use the real mushrooms or oyster sauce, etc.
Of course, I believe in freedom and certainly no substance (other than radioactive ones, maybe) should be illegal or taboo. Cocaine, opium, hashish, and such, were legal until recently and weren’t causing any big problems…since they became illegal, hundreds of thousands of people have died from related violence, and more people OD too, and steal, and so forth.
If MSG was outlawed, I suppose the black market in that would cause some problems too. At least the author here is getting the pure stuff with no worries about people (or himself) getting killed over it! Hey, that’s something!
Um. The food elimination diet was just to find out and test which foods I was eating might be causing me to have chronic problems.
And oddly… its the sort of thing you do not knowing what problems will or won’t disappear.
For the period where I didn’t eat the most common food allergens, I got most my carbs and carby goodness from rice. It was boring. But tolerable.
Proteins are all fine. As are most fruits and vegetables.
Sauces and prepared foods were a challenge. Eating out was impossible.
Eventually I found the three things that make me feel clearly worse are cheap breads (but I’m not gluten sensitive) Its something with enriched bleached wheat for me, or something else in there. Soy was the second one, I haven’t found something I don’t react to except soy lecithin. Third was junk food. Seriously just makes me feel sick now. Not sure if that’s because it ALWAYS did and I had to eat healthy for two weeks, or because of some other allergen thing… but mostly, spending three weeks reading every label and looking up the ingredients I didn’t understand led me some different conclusions… about food and whats actually dangerous in our society.
I had been on some other diets, like a more Paleo diet, etc… and had good effects. The same exact effects that removing just Soy had for me.
See I think you might be looking at it backwards. Dietary restrictions are real as are diseases, conditions and medical issues with dietary connections or causes. But these are not “sensitivities”, and sensitivity does not appear to be a thing.
The way dietary sensitivities are discussed, predicated in research, and how the term is generally used is as reactions to something in diet that lack a well established mechanism, connection to existing disorders etc. So the minute they’re clearly defined as allergies, genetic conditions, etc. They cease to be “sensitivity” and start to be whatever it is the real effect is better described as.
Celiac is the classic example. Celiac is not a food sensitivity. It’s a genetic autoimmune disease. Where in in the presence of gluten the immune system attacks and damages the lining of the intestines. Leading to poor absorption of nutrients, chronic diarrhea and consequently various sorts of malnutrition. We know exactly what celiac is, how it works and what the (unfortunately limited) treatments are. it was first recorded in the 2nd century, established as a distinct disease in the 19th, and it’s features and mechanism were established by the 40’s.
When we talk about gluten sensitivity what we’re really talking about is “non-celiac gluten sensitivity”. A proposed disorder mostly defined as definitely not being celiac, an allergy or other known condition but causing nebulously celiac or IBS like symptoms in the presence of gluten. It was proposed by a single reasonably well run, respectible, but small study. No larger, well run, adequately controlled study was ever able to replicate those results. No mechanism was uncovered or proven. And the authors of that first study just disproved their own study with further research, in the process potentially uncovering a non-gluten related mechanism that could explain why they were mistaken. NCGS has all the hallmarks of something that does not exist. While celiac certainly does.
Your friend’s child wasn’t so much endangered by denial of dietary restrictions. The confusion and deliberate misrepresentation of gluten and concepts like gluten sensitivity by quacks, hypochondriacs, people with ideological motivations, and the truely confused has created a dangerous situation. It’s difficult to establish (even for certain doctors ) whether the person your talking to genuinely has (or might have) celiac,
Or if they have an imagined or misdiagnosed sensitivity, or if they avoid gluten because cross fit. Likewise my friends with celiac have been complaining about the gluten free trend for pretty simple reasons. With all your new gluten free products they’ve got a lot more options, and those are more available. But a lot of those new products have gluten levels too high to be safe for many celiac patients. They’re low enough for certain labelling requirements and to satisfy “sensitives” and those who avoid gluten for non medical reasons. But they can make someone with a legit celiac disorder ill in short order.
It’s a simple test to establish celiac diagnosis though. There’s a blood test for the genetic markers. And that’s followed up with an intestinal biopsy. Because you can physically see celiac happening to the intestinal lining. Sensitivities, pretty much by definition, lack those sorts of clear, observable, and replicable effects and mechanics. There’s no spikes in histamine, cell damage from auto immune reactions. Just vague lists of symptoms that could be caused by anything or nothing.
some distillers do pass their spirits through activated charcoal to remove some of the final cogeners, but with a super clean wash, a strip run and a spirit run done slowly at azeotrope, two is more than fine.
i’m convinced that brands that advertise ‘distilled forty times’ are simply counting the number of times the wash, low wines, or spirits pass through a heat exchanger in a continuous still.
And then there is the marketing like this that drives me fucking insane.
I have seen the Gluten Free on fucking labels for CORN (and not processed stuff… fucking corn cobs, just so you know they didn’t get dusted with flour before packaging or something)… and I am umm duh and then I am wait people really need to be told that? Humanity is depressing sometimes.
Mead tends to run slightly higher of an ABV compared to wine, ~14-17% with some outliers, iirc. And this is mead mead, not the stuff consumed in Ethiopia, which I think has an ABV closer to beer. Most beer is >5% ABV. On that note, I’ve read that there’s evidence mead was originally brewed from ash sap, which I would really like to try some day.
Anyway while some Europeans from the distant past were drinking, others were experimenting with fly agaric mushroom which (also iirc) has a much narrower therapeutic index than alcohol!
Also I’ve read that all raw mushrooms contain hydrazine(!) so think about that the next time you toss them cavalier onto your salad.
I haven’t heard forty times, yet, but I’ve heard six. I’d be suspicious of anything beyond that and I’m also convinced that distilleries claim a lot of silly things to get people to buy their products.
I only have three categories of tasting (because I’m not very sophisticated): rough, okay, and pretty smooth. I avoid rough and use the okay stuff as a mixer with juices.
eta: you can never say too much about this subject
I find this very interesting, because I have a friend who appears to have a legitimate gluten sensitivity (probably allergy). I’m usually pretty dubious about people complaining about gluten, but after seeing what it does to him, and how long it took him to track down what the actual issue was, I am convinced you can have issues with gluten even if you aren’t Celiac.
You can tell it’s real because whenever he accidentally eats something with gluten in it he ends up breaking out in a ridiculous rash. He does not, however, have Celiac.
There’s a kid near me who sells organic fire wood at 5 dollars a bundle. His bundles are about 2/3 the size of typical 5 dollar bundles. He sells out weekly. Last summer they were gluten free, non-gmo organic fire wood and had become 7 dollars a bundle. This kid is a frikin genius.
Science tells us otherwise! No decent studies of any size have indicated a connection between gluten and non-celiac non-allergy based symptoms. The one small decent study that did, was countermanded by its own authors attempting to replicate their original results. Its entirely possible he’s reacting to something else that’s associated with wheat, those authors pegged FODMAPS as potentially causing IBS like symptoms. But they were looking at and only found “digestive” issue (ie poopin’ too much). If he’s getting a rash its likely and allergy of some sort, and there are several sorts of wheat based allergies (though not specifically to gluten), and several which are to things associated with wheat or grain based foods but not in the grain itself. But if its “probably an allergy” its not a “sensitivity”. Remember that term is used for things that supposedly exist, but aren’t allergies or other firmly established situations like celiac. Misdiagnosis is a thing, so its always a good idea to get yourself checked again. For example I’ll tell you a story.
Around this time last year my brother was brother was misdiagnosed with a red meat allergy as caused by the bite of the Lone Star Tick. And this is how it happened: While working a construction site he was bit by somewhere north of 100 chiggers and a single lone star tick. He had a really nasty systemic allergic reaction to the situation. Lots of swelling, itching, joint aches, and fever but no trouble breathing. Ended up visiting his doctor over it (where they identified the tick and extracted them chiggers) and the tick bite got badly infected. Around this same time he started developing some serious cardiac arrhythmias, and was being checked for a series of heart conditions. The chigger incident added a whole bunch of parasites to the list.
Several months later he started breaking out into hives regularly, and ended up in the ER in anaphylactic shock twice after eating some frozen Chinese noodles (which turned out to have beef stock in them), and drinking a beer in a steak house respectively. Both he and the doctor pretty much assumed this mean he’d gotten the red meat allergy after that. And it was really, really clear. 1 to 1 exposure to red meat meant hives. He even ended up with hives all over his feat, and nowhere else, after wearing leather shoes with no socks. Where there was contact with leather there were hives, no leather no hives. You could watch it happen, every day. Apparently when you first develop this allergy after tick exposure you go into a hypersensitive phase where tiny, tiny amounts of red meat proteins cause a reaction. Even down to aerosol fat from cooking (which appears to be what happened at the steak house). He was given a simple allergy test and did in fact respond to beef and a number of other mammal meats (it makes you allergic to pretty much everything with a placenta except primates). But false positives with scratch tests are common, so multiple more complicated tests had to be sent off, with a several month wait for their return. And those tests couldn’t be run while he was still “acute” reacting to everything and anything. So there was a long period of months where he had to to rid his life of all things mammal flesh. Even his dogs couldn’t eat anything but poultry. I had to keep a separate set of cooking utensils on hand for late night, surreptitious lamb cookery.We had to check things like soap for potential animal products. He couldn’t buy meat of any sort unless it was sealed from the meat packing plant. For fear the tools used by the butchers might have been used on both red meat and poultry. He basically lived on Trader Joes frozen fish fillets.
And you know what? All those tests came back negative. As did the retest from a separate lab. As did all the other allergy tests, and the check for a several heart conditions or parasites that can cause really similar looking symptoms that are often mistaken for allergies. All that time, all the ER visits, the bi-weekly standing doctors appointments and the answer came down to: Stress! Best they can tell his heath was already spiraling because of his stress level. And the massive chigger exposure and the resulting reaction and stress increase sent his immune system out of control. He was having allergic reactions to pretty much anything, depending almost exclusively on how stressed or anxious he was. Add to that a bunch of straight up paranoia about beef, and some more typical psychosomatic events and it all looked a hell of a lot like a dangerous new allergy.
Now he had genuine allergic reactions. And some of that was in fact caused directly by beef/red meat (suggestion from the tick connection). He really did go into anaphylaxis and nearly die. But as it turns out he isn’t allergic to anything (apart from poison ivy). His astronomical stress level, exacerbated by his new fear of beef was making him hyper sensitive to common allergens. Causing heart palpitations, dizzyness, sleep problems, and occasional panic attacks that left him short of breath. All of which culminated in the late summer shit show where he was too worn down to do anything but develop rashes and eat boiled turkey. They gave him a few anti-anxiety meds to get through the worst of it. He switched jobs. Demanded a big ass prime rib for Christmas diner. And took his girlfriend on vacation. Now he’s fine most of his symptoms are gone, and he only breaks out in hives after speaking to our mother.
Now we should have known something was up in hind sight. Between his symptoms initially looking like a congenital heart defect and some of the stuff that he reacted too there was enough to go on. At one point he was given fresh frozen plasma to treat one of the dangerous reactions. Its something they use to treat dangerous allergic reactions in people who are allergic to epinephrine (rare but a thing, and they were concerned about it because of his hypersensitivity). You literally can not be allergic to fresh frozen plasma. You’re veins are full of it, it is the liquid part of your blood. He went into a second bout of anaphylaxis about thirty seconds after being hooked up to the IV bag. And noone had a good explanation of how that was possible. Some one suggested the donor might have consumed a large amount of beef before donating, as there’s some indication in the literature that the substance responsible for this allergy can linger in trace amounts in bodily fluids after a person eats enough red meat. Seemed plausible at the time, but in hindsight it was probably the clearest clue to what was going on. Tell a guy we have to give you this IV instead of a shot because you might be allergic to the shot. And then he promptly has an allergic reaction to the hypoallergenic IV?
Point being it can be really, really, hard to establish firmly what these things are. Both in studies and in individual patients. Its doubly hard when the very real, specific symptoms are caused by something as nebulous as stress and psychological factors. Sometimes those symptoms and reactions look real. Because they are real. Real deal allergic reactions that hit all the chemical and symptom markers and look absolutely identical to any other, except that lack the typical cause. Or genuine intestinal distress (ie pooping) or IBS like symptoms that are likewise indistinguishable from disorders with legit causes, but likewise are coincidental or triggered by something unrelated to the suspected cause. The “symptom of life” sort of things that often get rolled in with these things just further obscure it. Things like depression, fatigue, general sense of well being, vague claims of pain, headaches, etc. are cause by or can be caused by pretty much anything or nothing at all.
Yup, went to the store yesterday to restock and couldn’t find the cornmeal until finally I realized it was shelved about 1/3 of the aisle down from the rest of the ground “grain” stuff, in the special section marked “gluten free”. Ingredient list: ground corn. And yes, it even proclaimed itself gluten free on the label.
Wow. That’s an amazing story. I’m glad he’s much better.
I went to an allergist for hives I started to get several months after a reaction to a prescription. I remember the allergist told me that the majority of cases are indeterminate. We all think doctors can solve such a common problem, but it’s a mystery for them, too.
Not a mystery per se, but with allergies especially its a lot of very careful steps to sus-out what exactly caused a reaction. And you may never determine what exactly it is. A lot of it can be transient. Not just because your exposure to the allergen might change, but because the allergy itself may be temporary, new or transiently severe enough to notice. And they can fade over time.
I mentioned my own allergies up thread. Truth is I haven’t risked a scallop in so long I can’t be sure I’m still allergic. From what I understand mild allergies like that can tend to fade with time, I’m just sort of disinterested in finding a practical way to try it out again. I don’t need to risk the poopening in a public restaurant again. And buying enough scallops for a meal to cook at home seems wasteful and frustrating if it turns out I can’t eat them. So I’m good for now knowing cross contamination’s not gonna bone me. The alleged beef allergy my brother had supposedly worked rather similarly. Because its caused by exposure to the tick there’s a 4ish month acute phase where its a severe and highly reactive allergy. Afterwards it fades a bit to more standard food allergy. Hives and or anaphylaxis, cross contamination is a concern, but you won’t be reacting to beef stink and leather. On a 1-5 year time line the allergy continues to fade. With cross contamination not being a problem in 6 months to 2 years, meats besides beef causing no or lo reaction in 1-3 years. And some percentage (i think it was 30%, but can’t remember precisely) being no longer allergic to any red meat in a 3-5 year time line. Apparently my bee sting allergy is not something that generally happens with, and you wouldn’t want to risk it to find out. But my last 3 bee stings didn’t give me the sort of frightening reaction I usually get (I’ve become very good at removing the stinger before much if any venom makes it in). Supposedly reactions with bee stings ratchet up with exposure, each sting making the next worse and more dangerous. So I’m absolutely not sure where I stand right now vis a vis insect death. Its just a complex shifting target, and pegging down dietary factors and exposure is next to impossible because people are forgetful liars.
But yes it was frightening and weird with the brother. I thought I had nearly killed him when he accidentally used my late night lamb and bacon pan to cook eggs. None of us believed the doctors had pegged it right till we watched him eat 5 solid pounds of prime rib at Christmas. No reaction and we were all allowed to have bacon again.
