Chinese food to blame?

[Doyle Phillips]

Chinese food to blame?

Because take-home Chinese food is to my liking and because it is handy I
eat more of it than the average person. Today, it was a month ago that began
an inexplicable pain in the ribcage and difficulty in breathing. EIGHT doctors
could not diagnose the problem and three days ago i had to have two hours
of I V Morphine for the pain. The dope was very effective and i felt better--until
after a Chinese lunch today: the pain in the ribs is back, breathing still shallow and
so far not changed.

Just letting you know that Chinese food has several side effects including chest pain
and breathing difficulty among others.

Throughout the past month of illness i have had several Chinese lunches and now
believe that they halted the efficacy of tpain-killers i was taking.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322303.php

[Mikel1]

Good old MSG. Effects different folks in different ways. I doubt there are any MSG free places here in town and I wouldn’t chance it anyway. If the stuff messes you up enough for a morphine drip to fix it, I’d be passing on it.

[DonJuane]

In today's world everyone seems a target to be made fun of and certainly no one is making fun of you here, Doyle but traditionally people who suffer from "Chinese Food Syndrome" historically serve as targets for a lot of ridicule. In fact one of my most admired "foodies" and the best TV producer I've known, the late, great Anthony Bourdain was an absolute ass in his writings and carrying's on regarding the suffering of people from this syndrome. I even admit in the past I cast a few laughs toward people who I thought were a little mentally tipsy and must be dwelling too much on the imagination side of life. But all that changed for me around 8 years ago.

You see personally I have lived and loved MSG all my life. We as kids started off with Adolph's meat tenderizer and butchering our own meet on the farm, it needed all the help it could get being as tough as it was. So I am someone who has loaded every piece of meat that has gone on the grill with a MSG derivative of some sorts in the past and in earlier days I even put it in salads on occasion with no ill effects. I have also added derivatives of it to my multi-spiced double throw-down Bloody Mary Mix and just about every dish you can think of some time in the past. I even have a bad habit of after I season my steaks, shaking a little pile on the top of my left hand and licking it off. It just tastes so good to me I can't resist or explain it. So you might really be confused when in my "past life" (time spent in US suburbia in the normal 9-8 corporate job) that I developed an addiction to Pho (Vietnamese beef noodle soup) and experienced what I did.

I was happily eating the "large bowl" at my favorite local Pho shop and then one day after eating there for over two years, I walked out to the car and it hit me. It had never happened before then but like you say, a very tight band developed across my chest, my breathing was impaired and I though I was having a heart attack. I pulled over and was stunned to the point I nearly dialed an ambulance but yet I just held on to the wheel there, waiting for the pain to hopefully subside before I went full 911. After 15 minutes (in my case) the pain began to slowly subside. Still I kept eating the Pho and kept having the exact same scenario occur and yet I couldn't mentally tie the two together for several weeks or maybe it was I just didn't want to accept the reality. I always took me about the same amount of time to finish my soup and I began always having the pain and having to stop the car exactly 15 minutes after I left the restaurant and I was usually a bit down the road before it hit me. For quite a while I still didn't put 2 and 2 together until I decided to try another restaurant other than my favorite one but it was coincidentally owned by the same owner I found after some research and in fact created the same scenario when I tried it as well. After several calls I finally got in touch with the restaurant owner and explained how I had been eating at his restaurant for a couple of years and that something he must have changed recently was making me have these attacks. He laughed at me and then I asked if he would at least be courteous enough to check and let me know if he had changed distributors recently for his Pho ingredients. He nicely said he would check but the next phone call I made to him he gave me the name of his lawyer and closing with "quit your complaining and just go eat somewhere else if you don't like it (aha, another native Texan I thought).

So I did some further research on it and reached the same conclusion. No one had ever established a clear connection to MSG and heart pain and difficulty breathing in any study and basically if you reported such an issue you were portrayed to be some sort of a quack. So with no where to go, I dropped it and that's even after searching out and phoning some organizations who had claimed to have once done a study on the topic in the past.

Missing my Pho, I did more research on Trip Advisor and found a very popular restaurant claiming to use traditional recipes and I phoned and explained to the owner what had happened to me in the past and she said yes she had indeed heard of that before and I should understand that the reason she was in the top 5 Vietnamese restaurants was that they used used fresh and proper ingredients and no MSG at all. So I drove the 24 miles across town to get away from the locally unscrupulous area restaurant owner and stuck my neck out to try again. And boy did I enjoy the Pho! It was truly the best I had ever had. After finishing it I walked back out to the car and waited but nothing happened, nothing at all except the comfortable feeling I had just enjoyed a real treat in the world of true artisan cooks and restaurant owners. So the good news is there is at least one restaurant that is sticking with the old tradition of flavor, freshness and labor in contrast to those plagued with so much greed they are willing to pawn off any newer and cheaper chemical concoction that comes on the market which allows them to skip out on quality, toss in a couple of teaspoon fulls of "who knows what" and rake in another windfall.

So I don't know what the real story is, if pure MSG got too expensive and the Chinese have come up with a cheaper chemical substitute they are pawning off on greedy restaurants or if I simply got older or what the hell the issue is. And today while I still pile my steaks and sometimes salads with MSG name bearing ingredients or have frequently in the past, I have never, never had a reaction like that after walking away from those local restaurants. So I agree with what has already been suggested, walk away and never look back. Unfortunately we don't always have alternatives here. So from that perspective I feel your pain and not only the one of now doing without, but one who has had the experience to know exactly what you are talking about.

Still one thing remains however, and that is this issue is a very serious one to people who are affected by it. And I can't say it is MSG itself, because I still eat my fair share of MSG with absolutely no reaction at all. Yet certainly and without doubt it is something being sold within the Asian food industry that is severely dangerous to a section of the world's population and something I hope someday gets investigated. Little probability of that in today's corporate themed world.

[DonJuane]

It's been reported to me that I may have gotten metaphorically carried away and from that I may be doing things that are very dangerous to my own health. The point here was only that I eat my fair share of MSG and I don't actually dip a scoop of it to taste when salting steaks as I may have previously exaggerated. In fact I just cooked steaks last night and observed that it was about one half of a small shake that I sprinkle on top of my hand to remind me what I am doing to the steak and entice my taste buds for what's to come.

I do cook a lot, and a cook frequently may need to shake out a bit of spice, put a drop of sauce or pepper somewhere to taste it and see how it's going to affect the respective dish. A cook also hates to wash dishes with a passion so the cleanest part of a body that serves as a sampling area over the years I have found is the back of my hand, so a sprinkle of this or that seasoning followed by a lick seems like a very convenient thing to do it and save silverware washing in the process. And since I wash my hands every minute or so, especially after handling steak, the back of the hand remains near perfectly clean.

Otherwise the point here is that I enjoy and continue to enjoy moderate helpings of MSG. I never use the pure stuff as it is overwhelming but the point of this story is a) restaurants have either doubled their dosage recently to substitute for the lack of real ingredients and to simulate more flavor with more chemicals or b) as a profit making incentive gone to some chemical of even more questionable value than MSG. Either way, eating somewhere that uses enough of this mystery ingredient to cause the reaction either Doyle or I have experienced in the past is dangerous and should be avoided.

Still my favorite MSG products remain:

Fiesta Fajita Seasoning - goes on everything in Texas from steaks to pozole to Texas cook-off chili to guacamole
https://www.samsclub.com/p/bolner-s-fies...-oz/158673
(3 short shakes per side of stake)

and
Vegeta Soup Seasoning - very popular in eastern Europe and used in stews or soups of any kind
https://amzn.to/31JZomq
a TBS in a dutch oven full of soup base

Again don't over do it with the MSG products and don't bother with the pure stuff and the flavor enhancement can still be great to enjoy occasionally while staying away from certain Asian restaurants that like to go overboard thinking if a little is good, a lot more is better.

P.S. To anyone offended by the practice of tasting seasonings off the top of the hand, keep in mind that there are also other parts of the body that might do as an alternative. I am reminded one Valentine's day of seeing a very attractive classy looking lady in black stilettos, a black short dress and provocative top. She was in line in front of me at Kroger market in Dallas and had in her large cart only a red rose and a can of Reddy Whip. I did not have to look hard to figure out the recipe she had in mind. I'm still looking in fact for the right opportunity to prepare that dish myself.

[datgnat]

I'll leave this right here. Maybe refrain from injecting it subcutaneously...
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151106...-out-to-be

[DonJuane]

Again, no one can prove what the chemical is that causes this condition. MSG is only a guess. Some may say it is MSG because that is what we are most familiar with and one pack of something from China may say MSG and contain one chemical mix and another box may have another mix. And yet another may contained a little spilled rat poison, or not t - who really knows these days? (Remember all the poison baby toys we've dealt with in the US over the past decades.) And I don't think the FDA spends all that much time these days picking apart what China ships to us, considering the sheer volume. I personally think it is something new that's being used, a new chemical formula that is perhaps even cheaper than MSG or like I say, a new complex enzyme that fools the brain into believing what we are eating is tasty and fresh rather than what it really is, some chemical compound added to over-boiled or near spoiled vegetables. The frequency of consumption could be a factor as well, Doyle with his many times a week Chinese food habit and me with my old 3 times a week Pho habit.

And like I said, I read the same info you posted a link to here and personally have read page after page of the same material that all says exactly the same thing as this post. However, overall I could care less. Reality and experience along with the ability to do a repeated test and get the same results was all I needed to realize something was rotten in Denmark. I should have hired an attorney and gotten to the bottom of what it was my Texas neighbor was serving our neighborhood and offered myself up for the study to demo what the mystery chemical he was using was doing to us, but it was much easier to just go to another Pho place.

Unfortunately there's not always another restaurant like in Doyle's case. I did solve my own problem and find a restaurant that was Vietnamese family owned and that spent the two days it requires to make a good pot of Pho rather that serving some box of chemicals like my Texas money hungry entrepreneur wanted to trade me for my $10 lunch money. I try my best, however not to follow any sort of vindictive nature but every now and then I have to admit it would be a bit comical to see some skeptic come down with a case of this. Of course knowing me, I'll likely break and start to feel sorry for them. Karma's a bitch but still you can't help but sometimes letting just one little chuckle out before you start to feel your normal level of compassion.

Speaking of which - Anyone have any compassionate quotes to add? We could certainly use a few these days. Luckily for those who pay attention, the Mexican people are great teachers in this area.