An innocent question, asked recently at a very popular, very established Chinatown eatery that shall remain nameless: "Do you use MSG?"

The answer? "We always put a little bit," the cheery waiter replies. "If you want more, we can put more."

Say what? To some ears, the helpful-seeming offer would sound much like choosing to endure a more severe beating if the first wasn't painful enough. Indeed, to say that MSG, or monosodium glutamate, far and away the heavyweight champion of flavour "enhancers" the world over, has a checkered history is something of an understatement.

This year, it enjoys the dubious distinction of its centenary as an officialized food additive. Since its intitial isolation in 1908 by a Japanese chemist, Kikunae Ikeda, it's become a food industry staple, and along the way, hailed as both a revolutionary innovation and a despised symbol of callous quasi-food profiteering.

Either way, it's been a prevalent ingredient in the North American diet for 60 years (the brand of MSG called Accent was introduced here in 1947), embraced in the post-war "better living through chemistry" era as a cheap, easy way to boost flavour in any number of packaged or canned foods.

And for almost as long, it's been maligned, fairly or unfairly, as a chemicalized toxin blamed, according to Health Canada, for migraines, hypertension, nausea and chest pain. More extreme – and often unproven – accusations have linked MSG to obesity, diabetes and liver inflammation. The Times of India – and, curiously, nowhere else – reported just this month that the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Cancer Research Institute, an institution without a website, apparently, had concluded in a report that MSG causes cancer.

Careful, though. In the haze of MSG hysteria, dark conspiracies and gruesome consequences are the norm (in the same report, the newspaper claimed that MSG had been declared unsafe by the World Health Organization in 2004, but the report could not be located; meanwhile, a 2005 WHO report says MSG has "no adverse effects.")

Such is the potent mythos of the great villain of all food additives. One thing that's indisputable: MSG's continued – and in some cases, growing – presence in all our diets. Despite the organic food craze blossoming in some circles, MSG is doing quite nicely, thank you. According to the Food Ingredient News, a specialized (to say the least) trade publication, MSG consumption globally was increasing by 2.5 per cent per year.

Granted, more than 80 per cent of the consumption is in Asia, and growth, specifically in China. There, MSG, in its raw form, a powdered, white crystalline substance, is left on restaurant tables like salt or pepper for customers to administer to their liking. And it's more pervasive in the North American diet than ever before. MSG may be additive-non-grata here, but keep your eyes peeled: Hydrolyzed protein, autolyzed yeast extract and dozens of others – all contain MSG.

It was in 1968 when the New Hampshire Journal of Medicine coined the somewhat politically incorrect term "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" for the apparent prevalence of MSG in Asian foods and the apparent symptoms its consumption could cause. You would have expected MSG to wither away. The furor prompted Chinese restaurants all over North America to display an exculpatory sign in their window: "NO MSG." The other day in Chinatown was a different story entirely. "Everyone uses some MSG," the waiter explains, just as cheery. "Every restaurant. Chinese, everyone else. If they say they're not," he pauses, "it's bull---t."

So, is the apparent and ongoing alarm well-founded? With the swirl of contending thought, it's difficult to tell. One thing's certain: MSG, the sodium salt of the protein glutamate, is, naturally, high in sodium. Not as high as salt (as the MSG side of the tracks points out). But it takes no conspiracist to tell you that a high-sodium diet increases the risks of all sorts of heart problems and hyper-tension, however it's consumed. People on a low sodium diet should "Read food labels. Buy products low in sodium, MSG . . ." urges, for instance, McKinley Health Centre at the University of Illinois.

For Keith Mitchell at Calico Foods, the sodium content in MSG and its ilk looked like an opportunity. "It's had a lot of bad press over the years, and people don't want it on their labels," he says.

That's why the company he works for is selling a low-sodium, amino acid-based flavour enhancer as an alternative. The problem: Sticker shock. "When you go to lower sodium, the flavour perception drops dramatically," he says. "It's one of the hardest things to replace – especially when it's practically free."

Indeed, salt – "one of the cheapest things going," Mitchell says – is a tough competitor to fight with pricey, innovative, low-sodium alternatives. "The business is not by any stretch of the imagination where I'd like to see it," he says. "For a company to reformulate everything and take salt out of its products takes time, and money. The industry is well aware of the issue. The question is, is the public willing to pay for it?"

Especially when, for all the consumer can see, MSG is perfectly safe. Nearly every regulatory agency, including the FDA in the U.S., has few issues with MSG. In 2005, the World Health Organization acknowledged that "neurotoxic effects have been seen in animal studies, but only at very high doses," often administered by injection; it concluded that "there is a substantial body of work investigating MSG at lower doses with no indication of any adverse effects."

Health Canada allows that "some individuals who consume MSG may exhibit an allergic-type reaction or hypersensitivity," but "(t)he safety of MSG has been studied worldwide.

"The Joint Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations / World Health Organization expert Committee on Food Additives (1987) and Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (1995) conducted thorough evaluations and concluded that use of MSG does not constitute a health hazard to consumers. Health Canada scientists concur with these views. In addition," it goes on, "contrary to some allegations found on certain websites, there is no scientific evidence linking obesity in humans with the consumption of foods containing this flavour enhancer."

That's what they want you to think, says Jack Samuels. Depending on whom you believe, Samuels and his wife, Adrienne, are either tireless champions of food safety, or obsessive conspiracy theorists with too much time on their hands (their self-directed anti-MSG lobby, "Truth in Labeling," has been described as both across the painfully vast swath of MSG opinion found in cyberspace).

Since 1971, when, Samuels says, he starting collapsing in certain restaurants after a meal – he concluded he was hypersensitive to MSG – the pair have campaigned endlessly against the additive. Samuels allows that he's a "very, very rare" type, to have these kinds of extreme reactions. "Most people would go through life and not have any kind of problem at all," he says. But, he says, speaking as someone "who can die" from eating MSG, he's pretty devoted to the cause.

Whether you choose to believe Truth in Labeling campaign information or not, Samuels makes a salient point. MSG is, at its base, a naturally occurring substance in all sorts of foods – tomatoes, Parmesan cheese, mushrooms, and, way back in 1908, kombu.

That was the seaweed Ikeda correctly suspected to be the source of a mysterious "fifth taste" in his soup, complementary but different from the basics – hot, sour, salty, sweet.

Distilling it to its base elements, he called the results umami – or "deliciousness" in Japanese. More than 35 years of research have told the Samuels that naturally occurring MSG – that is, the stuff Ikeda found – produces no reaction even in MSG-sensitive people.

When it's processed, as it most typically is, using fermentation or other chemical reactions, it frees the glutamatic acid from its protein compound, provoking some of the reactions its detractors claim.

For Frederick Oh, director of the Richmond Hill Culinary Arts Centre, therein lies the problem. "Over the years, the demand exceeded the supply and they started to make it chemically," he says. "That's where the problems started."

Whether they're as dire as the worst detractors suggest is nearly impossible to divine. Free glutamic acid – processed and unlinked from its base protein – is, like any chemically-created compound, hard for the body to absorb.

But for Oh, MSG's constant presence is more a symptom of a convenience-driven society that has neither the time nor the inclination to create authentic flavour.

"Making real stock – boiling down bones, doing it the right way – takes time, and it takes labour. Why bother if you can buy an enhancer for 10 bucks and you're done?" he says.

Oh says the issue is more than one of convenience. "We've developed a taste for it," he says. "Fat, salt, sugar – these are all the things we like to eat. MSG mimics those flavours. Nobody wants to eat plain-Jane food. If you open a restaurant advertising blandness, how long do you think you'll last?"

Ever-mindful of the MSG stigma the glutamate industry – a powerful lobby worth billions – has found a way to repackage itself, drawn from Ikeda's original soup test of a century ago.

Umami, they call it – a flavour increasingly finding its way into culinary lexicons and onto the pages of such magazines and newspapers as Gourmet and The Wall Street Journal, which said in an article in December that "(umami) was changing the way everyone from top chefs to Frito-Lay executives thinks about food."

So everything old is new again. "Give it a sexy name, re-package it and re-market it and you're on your way," Oh says. He sees us caught in a familiar catch-22.

"Everyone talks about the environment, but look at all the SUVs that are being produced," he says. "The whole world is in a predicament right now. We've become accustomed to living a certain way, at a certain cost. Will anyone have the guts to put on the brakes?"

         ************************************************

Nancy J. White
Living Reporter
The Star

First off, Devra Davis won't do the interview on her cellphone.

Call me back on the land line, she instructs. It's not the money she's concerned about. It's the microwaves.

She's also concerned about drinking diet pop, wearing a lot of cosmetics and eating non-organic red meat.

But make no mistake: she's not some trendy health-scare type. She's a blue-chip cancer epidemiologist, director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute with a Grade A scientific pedigree: a PhD from the University of Chicago, a decade at the National Academy of Sciences, an author of more than 170 published articles.

And she's worried about her environmental exposure to cancer.

"Everyone has to start where they're comfortable, taking control of their own homes," says Davis, who will be the keynote speaker at Women's College Hospital's health forum Friday. "Then they have to make sure they vote for politicians who understand the importance of this issue."

This issue is how we've let modern life, from the air we breathe to the products we use, poison our bodies.

"We've made remarkable progress in treating some forms of cancer," says Davis, 61. "But if we only improve our ability to find and treat the disease, without dealing with the underlying causes, we will not have made enough progress."

In her newest book, The Secret History of the War on Cancer, Davis argues that the long march against cancer has been misled too often by corporate interests and sidetracked by missed opportunities.

In 1936, more than 200 of the world's top cancer scientists convened in Brussels, a gathering of the best minds to create a new way forward in understanding and fighting the disease. When Davis unearthed the transcripts of those meetings, she was stunned to read how much those scientists knew about cancer's social and environmental causes.

Many widely used agents of the time, including ionizing and solar radiation, arsenic, benzene, asbestos, synthetic dyes and hormones, were recognized as cancerous in humans, she writes.

This knowledge came from researchers combining autopsies with medical, personal and workplace histories of cancer victims and conducting animal lab studies.

However, she says, these findings didn't seep into the mainstream medical practice of the day, due, in part, to the scant media coverage given scientific meetings back then. But mainly it was the timing, the brink of World War II. "The world had very different priorities," says Davis.

"Cancer is the ultimate long-term disease. To be concerned about cancer implies a certain optimism in the future."

In 1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, reflecting the idea that the type of ingenuity that built the A-bomb and put a man on the moon could wipe out cancer within the decade.

Rocket engineers from NASA held meetings with medical researchers, setting up charts with overlapping diagrams and lots of arrows, mapping out how the war on cancer should be conducted, writes Davis. Most serious researchers viewed the idea of a single cure as preposterous, a political fuss, she says.

The war did not take aim at any of the known or suspected carcinogens. Not even tobacco smoking, which the U.S. surgeon general had declared a cause of cancer in 1964.

"There were very close ties between the tobacco industry and, later the chemical industry, and the development of the war on cancer," she says.

Today, the emphasis is not so much on declaring war against cancer as it is dealing with a chronic condition, says Davis. "We need to make changes in the infrastructures of our lives that will help reduce the risks."

She's most worried about air pollution, such as emissions from coal-fired plants and growing vehicle traffic, that's distributed across the population. "It's important for people to understand that the burning of fossil fuels that's warming the Earth is the same process increasing our health risks, including cancer in the long term."

There are several other issues that concern her, particularly because health officials aren't paying much attention to them:

Cellphones – New data from Sweden, she says, show that people using cellphones for 10 years or more have double the risk of brain cancer. She's worried about kids under 16 glued to their cellphones. "Would you let your child play Russian roulette?" she asks.

Aspartame – The artificial sweetener's negative effects in animal studies occurred in the last third of the creatures' lives, which corresponds to human beings in their 60s to 80s. Again, she is especially concerned about children consuming the product over many decades.

The doses that induced cancer in animals, she says, were not especially high: about two cans of diet pop, two yogurts and a couple of sticks of gum a day.

Diagnostic radiation – The medical community is becoming increasingly concerned about unnecessary Computed Tomography scans of children, she writes. A CT scan of a child's stomach can be equivalent to 600 chest X-rays and one of an infant's head may equal a few thousand.

While a CT scan may well be warranted in a medical emergency, she says, repeated follow-up scans may not be a wise idea.

Ritalin – Several papers have indicated that Ritalin, valuable for treating Attention Deficit Disorder, might pose a risk to the user's genetic makeup, says Davis. In one study, researchers tested the blood of a dozen children before and after they were put on the drug, she writes, and found chromosome damage after three months' use.

Davis cautions that the numbers tested were small, no direct link to Ritalin was found and genetic damage and repair happens all the time. But given the widespread use of the drug in children, she says, governments and the private sector need to further investigate.

Overall, Davis believes the growing awareness of global climate change is sparking more concern about environmental health.

"The connection is obvious," she says.

"We only have one planet."