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Tag: health concerns

  • Being Alive Is Bad for Your Health

    Being Alive Is Bad for Your Health

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    In 2016, I gave up Diet Coke. This was no small adjustment. I was born and raised in suburban Atlanta, home to the Coca-Cola Company’s global headquarters, and I had never lived in a home without Diet Coke stocked in the refrigerator at all times. Every morning in high school, I’d slam one with breakfast, and then I’d make sure to shove some quarters (a simpler time) in my back pocket to use in the school’s vending machines. When I moved into my freshman college dorm, the first thing I did was stock my mini fridge with cans. A few years later, my then-boyfriend swathed two 12-packs in wrapping paper and put them under his Christmas tree. It was a joke, but it wasn’t.

    You’d think quitting would have been agonizing. To my surprise, it was easy. For years, I’d heard anecdotes about people who forsook diet drinks and felt their health improve seemingly overnight—better sleep, better skin, better energy. I’d also heard whispers about the larger suspected dangers of fake sweeteners. Yet I’d loved my DCs too much to be swayed. Then I tried my first can of unsweetened seltzer at a friend’s apartment. After years of turning my nose up at the thought of LaCroix, I realized that much of what I enjoyed about Diet Coke was its frigidity and fizz. That was enough. I switched to seltzer on the spot, prepared to join the smug converted and receive whatever health benefits were sure to accrue to me for my good behavior.

    Except they never came. Seven years later, I feel no better than I ever did drinking four or five cans of the stuff a day. I still stick to seltzer anyway—because, you know, who knows?—and I’ve mostly forgotten that Diet Coke exists. But the diet sodas had not, as it turns out, been preventing me from getting great sleep or calming my rosacea or feeling, I don’t know, zesty. Besides the caffeine, they appeared to make no difference in how good or bad I felt at all.

    Yesterday, Reuters reported that the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer will soon declare aspartame, the sweetener used in Diet Coke and many other no-calorie sodas, as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” I probably should have felt vindicated. I may not feel better now, but many years down the road (knock on wood), I’ll be better off. I’d bet on the right horse! Instead, I felt nothing so much as irritation. Over the past few decades, a growing number of foods and behaviors have become the regular subject of vague, ever-changing health warnings—fake sweeteners, real sugar, wine, butter, milk (dairy and non), carbohydrates, coffee, fat, chocolate, eggs, meat, veganism, vegetarianism, weightlifting, drinking a lot of water, and scores of others. The more warnings there are, the less actionable any particular one of them feels. What, exactly, is anyone supposed to do with any of this information, except feel bad about the things they enjoy?

    It’s worth reviewing what is actually known or suspected about diet sodas and health. The lion’s share of research on this topic happens in what are known as observational studies—scientists track consumption and record health outcomes, looking for commonalities and trends linking behavior and effects. These studies can’t tell you if the behavior caused the outcome, but they can establish an association that’s worth investigating further. Regular, sustained diet-soda consumption has been linked to weight gain, Type 2 diabetes, and increased risk of stroke, among other things—understandably troublesome correlations for people worried about their health. But there’s a huge complicating factor in understanding what that means: For decades, advertisements recommended that people who were already worried about—or already had—some of those same health concerns substitute diet drinks for those with real sugar, and many such people still make those substitutions in order to adhere to low-carb diets or even out their blood sugar. As a result, little evidence suggests that diet soda is solely responsible for any of those issues—health is a highly complicated, multifactorial phenomenon in almost every aspect—but many experts still recommend limiting your consumption of diet soda as a reasonable precaution.

    A representative for the IARC would neither confirm nor deny the nature of the WHO’s pending announcement on aspartame, which will be released on July 14. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Reuters’s reporting is correct: In two weeks, the organization will update the sweetener’s designation to indicate that it’s “possibly carcinogenic.” To regular people, those words—especially in the context of a health organization’s public bulletins—would seem to imply significant suspicion of real danger. The evidence may not yet all be in place, but surely there’s enough reason to believe that the threat is real, that there’s cause to spook the general public.

    Except, as my colleague Ed Yong wrote in 2015, when the IARC made a similar announcement about the carcinogenic potential of meat, that’s not what the classification means at all. The IARC chops risk up into four categories: carcinogenic (Group 1), probably carcinogenic (Group 2A), possibly carcinogenic (Group 2B), and unclassified (Group 3). Those categories do one very specific thing: They describe how definitive the agency believes the evidence is for any level of increased risk, even a very tiny one. The category in which aspartame may soon find itself, 2B, makes no grand claims about carcinogenicity. “In practice, 2B becomes a giant dumping ground for all the risk factors that IARC has considered, and could neither confirm nor fully discount as carcinogens. Which is to say: most things,” Yong wrote. “It’s a bloated category, essentially one big epidemiological shruggie.”

    The categories are not at all intended to communicate the degree of the risk involved—just how sure or unsure the organization is that there’s a risk associated with a thing or substance at all. And association can mean a lot of things. Hypothetically, regular consumption of food that may quadruple your risk of a highly deadly cancer would fall in the same category as something that may increase your risk of a cancer with a 95 percent survival rate by just a few percentage points, as long as the IARC felt similarly confident in the evidence for both of those effects.

    These designations about carcinogenicity are just one example of how health information can arrive to the general public in ways that are functionally useless, even if well intentioned. Earlier this year, the WHO advised against all use of artificial sweeteners. At first, that might sound dire. But the actual substance of the warning was about the limited evidence that those sweeteners aid in weight loss, not any new evidence about their unique ability to harm your health in some way. (The warning did nod to the links between long-term use of artificial sweeteners and increased risks of cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and premature death, but as the WHO noted at the time, these are understood as murky correlations, not part of an alarming breakthrough discovery.)

    The same release quotes the WHO’s director for nutrition and food safety advising that, for long-term weight control, people need to find ways beyond artificial sweeteners to reduce their consumption of real sugar—in essence, it’s not a health alert about any particular chemical, but about dessert as a concept. How much of any sweetener would you need to cut out of your diet in order to limit any risks it may pose? The release, on its own, doesn’t specify. Consider a birthday crudités platter instead of a cake, just to be sure. (Is that celery non-GMO? Organic? Just checking.)

    The media, surely, deserve our fair share of blame for how quickly and how far these oversimplified ideas spread. Many people are very worried about the food they eat—perhaps because they have received so many conflicting indicators over the years about how that food affects their bodies—and flock to news that something has been deemed beneficial or dangerous. At best, the research that many such stories cite is rarely definitive, and at worst, it’s so poorly designed or otherwise flawed that it’s flatly incapable of producing useful information.

    Taken in aggregate, this morass of poor communication and confusing information has the very real potential to exhaust people’s ability to identify and respond to actual risk, or to confuse them into nihilism. The solution-free finger-wagging, so often about the exact things that many people experience as the little joys in everyday life, doesn’t help. When everything is an ambiguously urgent health risk, it very quickly begins to feel like nothing is. I still drink a few Diet Cokes a year, and I maintain that there’s no better beverage to pair with pizza. We’re all going to die someday.

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    Amanda Mull

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  • MSG Is Finally Getting Its Revenge

    MSG Is Finally Getting Its Revenge

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    Updated at 1:45 p.m. ET on May 17, 2023

    In March, the World Health Organization issued a dire warning that was also completely obvious: Nearly everyone on the planet consumes too much salt. And not just a sprinkle too much; on average, people consume more than double what is advisable every single day, raising the risk of common diseases such as heart attack and stroke. If governments intervene in such profligate salt intake, the WHO urged, they could save the lives of 7 million people by 2030.

    Such warnings about salt are so ubiquitous that they are easy to tune out. In the United States, salt intake has been a public-health issue for more than half a century; since then, the initiatives launched to combat it have been deemed by health officials as “too numerous to describe,” but little has changed in terms of policy or appetite. The main reason salt has remained a problem is that it’s a major part of all processed food—and, well, it makes everything delicious. Persuading Americans to reduce their consumption would require a convincing dupe—something that would cut down on unhealthy sodium without making food any less tasty.

    No perfect dupe exists. But the next best thing could be … MSG. Seriously. Last month, the FDA proposed reducing sodium in certain foods using salt substitutes. One candidate that has research behind it is monosodium glutamate, the white crystalline powder that has long been maligned in the West as an unhealthy food additive. A common seasoning in some Asian cuisines, MSG was linked in the late 1960s to ailments—headaches, numbness, dizziness, heart palpitations—that became known as Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. The health concerns around MSG have since been debunked, and the FDA considers it safe to eat. But it still has a bad rap: Many products are still proudly advertised as MSG free. Now the chemical may soon get its revenge. Given the chance to replace salt in some of our food, it could eventually come to represent something wholesome—perhaps even something close to healthy.

    The concerns with MSG originated in 1968, when a Chinese American physician, writing in The New England Journal of Medicine, described feeling generally ill after eating Chinese food, which he suggested could be because of MSG. Other researchers quickly produced studies that seemed to substantiate this claim, and MSG became a public-health villain. In the ’70s, the Chicago Tribune ran the headline “Chinese Food Make You Crazy? MSG Is No. 1 Suspect.” All the attention “renewed medical legitimacy [for] a number of long-held assumptions about the strangely ‘exotic’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘excessive’ practices associated with Chinese culture,” the historian Ian Mosby wrote in 2009. That’s not to say that all symptoms associated with MSG are bunk; people can be sensitive to MSG—like any food—and may experience broad symptoms such as headaches after eating it, Amanda Li, a dietary nutritionist at the University of Washington, told me. But “research has shown no clear evidence linking MSG consumption to any serious potential adverse reactions,” she said.

    On the whole, MSG does seem better than salt itself, considering that excessive salt consumption poses so many chronic health risks. A relatively small amount of MSG could be used to rescue flavor in reduced-salt products without endangering health. This is possible partly because of MSG’s molecular makeup. It satisfies the need for salt to a certain extent because it contains sodium (it’s right there in the name, after all)—but just a third of the amount, by weight, that salt does. The rest of the molecule is made of the amino acid L-glutamate, which registers as the savory, “brothy” flavor known as umami.

    MSG isn’t a one-to-one replacement for salt, but that’s what makes it such a promising alternative. It is a general flavor enhancer, meaning that it can amplify the perception of salt and other flavors that are already in a dish, as well as add an umami element, Soo-Yeun Lee, a sensory scientist and the director of Washington State University’s School of Food Science, told me. One secret to this effect is that unlike salt, which imparts a blast of flavor and then quickly dissipates, MSG stays on the tongue long after food is swallowed, producing a lasting savory sensation, Lee said.  It may amplify saltiness by increasing salivation, letting sodium molecules wash over the tongue more freely, Aubrey Dunteman, a food scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me.

    All of this gives MSG the potential to play into a salt-reduction strategy. A 2019 study in the journal Nutrients found that substituting MSG (or other similar but more obscure chemicals) for some of the salt in certain foods could have major impacts: Adults who eat cured meats could cut 40 percent of their intake; cheese eaters, 45 percent. Another study from researchers in Japan found that incorporating MSG and other umami substances into common Japanese condiments, such as soy sauce, seasoning salt, and miso paste, could cut salt intake by up to 22.3 percent. Doing the same in curry-chicken and chili-chicken soups, Malaysian scientists found, could be used to reduce the recipes’ salt content by 32.5 percent.

    Take those findings with a grain of, uh, MSG. Recent studies have uniformly found that MSG is a safe, promising salt replacement, but many, including both the Nutrients study and the Japanese one, were funded at least in part by Ajinomoto Co.—the company that introduced the first commercial form of the substance—or the International Glutamate Technical Committee, a trade group. Lee and Dunteman have also received funding from Ajinomoto for some of their MSG work, including a study showing that the substance could improve the flavor of reduced-sodium bread. Lee said she aimed to show that MSG substitution for salt is “feasible, so if any food companies want to take that up and try it on their own systems,” they have a basis for doing so. Her goal, she added, “is not to sell bread with MSG.” (The paper, along with the two others mentioned that received industry funding, were independently peer-reviewed.)

    Clearly, more independent research is needed, but food companies have plenty of incentive to help find a better alternative to salt. More than 70 percent of Americans’ salt consumption comes from processed and manufactured food, and if the FDA decides to crack down on salt intake, its policies will largely target the food industry, Lee said. Already, some manufacturers of canned soup and fish are experimenting with salt substitutes.

    Deploying MSG in a sweeping sodium-reduction campaign would not be straightforward. MSG is more expensive than salt, Dunteman noted. More crucially, in many foods, salt provides more than flavor; it can also act as a preservative and regulate texture by, say, adding juiciness to lean meat or stabilizing leavened dough. In their study on bread, Lee and Dunteman found that removing too much salt reduced chewiness and firmness, even when MSG made up for taste. Among common processed foods, bread is a prime target for future MSG research, because it is the biggest contributor to U.S. sodium intake—not only because of its salt content but also because of the sheer amount of it that Americans consume. When MSG is used instead of salt to enhance flavor, “foods can taste just as delicious but without affecting hypertension,” Katherine Burt, a professor of health promotion and nutrition sciences at Lehman College, whose writing on MSG was not industry funded, told me. It’s “a great way to make foods exciting and healthy.”

    MSG can also be used to deliberately reduce salt intake at home. Adding a new ingredient to a home pantry can be daunting, but consider that MSG is already in most kitchens, occurring naturally in umami-rich items such as Parmesan cheese and mushrooms and added to processed foods such as Campbell’s Soup and Doritos. These days, it’s easy enough to find it online or in stores, sold in shakers or packets, much like salt. Li recommends that the MSG-curious start seasoning their food with a 50–50 mixture of MSG and table salt. When eating processed foods, choose low-sodium versions of products (not “reduced sodium” goods, which may not actually have low levels of salt). They’ll likely taste terrible, so add MSG in increments until they taste good, Lee said.

    We still have much to learn about MSG as a salt substitute, but the biggest challenge to it taking off is cultural, not scientific. To a certain degree, tastes are changing: Celebrity chefs such as David Chang champion it, and one highly acclaimed New York restaurant now serves an MSG martini. But the perception that MSG is unhealthy still persists, despite evidence to the contrary. Words such as “sneaky,” “disguised,” and “nasty” are still used to describe it, and grocery stores such as Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s make a point of mentioning that their foods have no MSG. Nevertheless, as long as old misconceptions about MSG persist, they will continue to hamper the potential for a better salt substitute. America’s aversion toward MSG may be intended to promote better health, but at this point, it might just be doing precisely the opposite.

    This story originally stated that the New England Journal of Medicine letter about MSG was a hoax. This was once believed but has since been disproved.

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    Yasmin Tayag

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