dangers of instant noodles

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we all die eventually, but if something will kill me and I do not want to die what is the point of doing it? If people want to die from eating these go ahead. I would not. Yes people die by accident from food, but this is known to the person consuming said product.

The biggest problem with instant noodles is that they're loaded with the poisonous flavour enhancer MSG (monosodium glutamate) - a very highly neurotoxic excitotoxin. It's very allergenic, very dangerous, and yes it can cause big problems with your brain and neurological system. You should avoid it at all costs! Be aware too that it can be labelled under about 30 different names to get around it - yeast extract, hydrolyzed or autolyzed anything,

This is a link to some stories about it:
http://www.naturalnews.com/GoogleSearch ... q=MSG#1096

And this site has a list of all the hidden names for it:
http://www.msgmyth.com/

As a nutritionist, I can assure you that there is absolutely no nutritional value to ramen noodles, apart from empty calories which do provide some form of energy. You can understand that crap with artificial flavors would contain toxic chemicals that add up over time. Very young people can sort of get away with it, but the minute you hit 22 or 25, time to change eating habits!

I've been cutting down on salty instant noodles since I started college just to avoid getting high blood pressure. I never knew it could contain any lethal substances that can harm the brain.

MSG wont kill you

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamic_a ... h_concerns

It isn ot guaranteed the instant noodles will kill you, but I am not taking the risk and the companies makign these noodles have put no effort into lowering the risk. Frozen instant noodles are fine and will not kill you and eating ramen at a restraunt will not kill you.

Michel: I have no problem eating food that is not healthy for me. Food that will kill me instantly is another story. That being said I do try to eat healthy at time and do not eat fast food, but that will not stop me from eating fried foods which I even do not eat alot of. If it shortens my life span a little I am fine with that. I would rather live my life happy than eat healthy just to live longer. That is my life preference, if people woould prefer to eat healthy just to live longer that is fine iwth me. Food being bad for your health does not neccessarily mean it will kill. Some chemicals in food are used as a preservative and actually need to be in the food so people do not die from eating the product. Even the healthiest person can enjoy crap food once in a while without dying.

I didn't say it would kill you. I said it will poison your brain and your body slowly but surely, killing off those cells and connections until you can't function, slowly and painfully watching your health decline over a number of years until suddenly you've got cancer or parkinsons or alzheimers or dementia, degenerating until you don't even know who you are anymore.

....or you can cut the crap like that, eat healthy, fast, yummy food, have bundles of energy, think clearer, be happier, be stronger, feel better in yourself and actually enjoy the life you're living.

MSG has no connection to Alzheimer's or Parkinsons. I work on both. Now, transient childhood exposure to lead (Pb), on the other hand, could be risky. Likewise, anything that keeps the inflammatory/immune system activated for a long time could pose problems.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true though that glutamic acid - particularly free glutamic acid - has a negative effect on the brain by overstimulating cells to death (beyond natural levels, i.e. when ingested as MSG)? And that the drug Namenda is a NMDA receptor blocker, and that NMDA receptors are 'activated' by glutamate/glutamic acid (an excitotoxin/excitotory amino acid), the drug being designed to stop that effect in people with Alzheimers? That indicates a pretty strong link to me, given that MSG = free glutamatic acid...

Note also that the other leading excitotoxic candidate for playing a part in neurodegenerative diseases is aspartic acid, which is 40% of what makes up aspartame. Yummy.

your talking absolute rubbish... brain death from noodles.. you really think the food standards agency would let people sell these when there are like food scares over the fact there maybe a tiny chance of a contaminent in something and they withdraw the products on the off chance that something bad might happen.

Stop spreading meaningless rumours unless you can back it up with a scientific study which proves your point. Preferabley one with a double blind test that showed that those who ate noodles dropped dead.

There are millions of ppl round the world that eat these things you dont hear millions of ppl dying of unexplained brain death.

Ramen has been a mainstay of my diet since I was a teenager. I'm in my forties now. I guess that means I'm senile and almost dead...

Moriath, dude, the Food Standards Agency and FDA approved aspartame, they approved carcinogenic food colourants, they allow sodium benzoate in a drink alongside ascorbic acid... they're pretty bloody useless.

People with anxiety and epilepsy seem to be more susceptible to NMDA/glutamate. Glutamate is sorta the opposite of GABA (benzodiazepine), and glutamate messes up serotonin.

Here's an article showing that glutamate increases stress, and blocking glutamate is useful for treating post-traumatic stress disorder. There are thousands of other studies showing that glutamate excitotoxicity is generally not a good thing.

No, some people start smoking in their teens and live to be 90... in spite of the odds. One person's experience does not disprove a general effect. Some people may be quite resistant, while others have real problems.



Go to pubmed and do a search of the medical literature using the phrase "glutamate death" - I got 4859 results. Obviously, some of these were only tangentially about the topic, but it a few minutes of browsing makes it pretty apparent that excess glutamate can cause nerve cell death.

Yes, there are millions of people dosing themselves on this neurotransmitter/drug that is added to food to makes it "tastier" - and in the short run, it does not make people fall over from brain death. On the other hand, there are a large number of scientists who study the NMDA/glutamate system that do believe that excess glutamate activity may feed into chronic degenerative nerve diseases (alzheimers/parkinsons/ALS, etc.)

Thats interesting, my mom has always tried to avoid MSG. When we go to asian resturants she always tells the person no MSG. As for instant noodles, I love certain brands of instant noodles tho I dont eat them that frequently. Yeah there very unhealthy, mostly consisting of simple crabs and fat which equals empty calories. There just something tasty that'll fill you up.

this whole thread is very silly, and what's sad is that some people will fall for the crazy lies that are being thrown around in it.

unrefrigerated fat turns rancid? bad news for my peanuts, peanut butter, vegetable oil, sesame oil, olive oil, muffin mix, cookies, canned beans, gnocchi, kasha, canned soup, corn muffin mix... have you ever tasted rancid fat? have you ever tasted peanuts that weren't grown, harvested, prepared, packaged, transported, sold, and stored in a refrigerated environment? 'cause there' s a difference.




i think you're not very good with pubmed. here's the first 10 results for "glutamate death":
Nerve growth factor inhibits Gd(3+)-sensitive calcium influx and reduces chemical anoxic neuronal death.
Beneficial effects of ceftriaxone against pentylenetetrazole-evoked convulsions.
A Novel Approach to Enhancing Cellular Glutathione Levels.
Peroxiredoxin 6 delivery attenuates TNF-alpha-and glutamate-induced retinal ganglion cell death by limiting ROS levels and maintaining Ca(2+) homeostasis.
Reduced retinal function in amyloid precursor protein-overexpressing transgenic mice via attenuating glutamate-N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor signaling.
Antisense oligodeoxynucleotides of glial glutamate transporter-1 inhibits the neuro-protection of cerebral ischemic preconditioning in rats.
Differential Roles of NMDA Receptor Subtypes in Ischemic Neuronal Cell Death and Ischemic Tolerance.
Opposing roles for caspase and calpain death proteases in l-glutamate-induced oxidative neurotoxicity.
Profiling of astrocyte properties in the hyperammonaemic brain: Shedding new light on the pathophysiology of the brain damage in hyperammonaemia.
Therapy against organophosphate poisoning: The importance of anticholinergic drugs with antiglutamatergic properties.

do any of those have anything to do with ramen noodles? i think they illustrate that the topic is more complicated than you make it out to be, and involves a lot of concepts that you couldn't even start to comprehend, unless you can enlighten us about caspase and calpain death proteases, or the astrocyte properties of the hyperammonaemic brain.

your quoted study says "The role of glutamate and CRF in PTSD and other anxiety disorders are still being elucidated." - what does that mean to you? if you'd bothered to read the whole thing, it's basically saying that lamictal is good for ptsd, and it seems to have something to do with the glutamatergic systems, but what to which systems and how much that has to do with it's helpfulness in PTSD and some other anxiety disorders is unknown. not really much to do with msg, eh?

and i'm eating ramen noodles right now - there's no msg in them. there's msg in the flavor packet, but that stuff's nasty.



name 3.



not an english major or a psychopharmacokinetics major, were ya? what does 'activated' mean in this context? what about the AMPA receptors?



cite authoritative references or it didn't happen.

it makes me sad to see a bunch of ill-informed people spreading their pseudoscience conspiracy theories here. big words are impressive, but just because people use them on a webpage doesn't make their ridiculous beliefs true.

No, I think that you are the one who is unable to read the scientific literature. Excess glutamate is widely recognized as a neuro-toxin, as demonstrated in a few of the articles in the first 20 results:

Opposing roles for caspase and calpain death proteases in l-glutamate-induced oxidative neurotoxicity.
Salidroside attenuates glutamate-induced apoptotic cell death in primary cultured hippocampal neurons of rats.
Regulation of interleukin-1beta by the interleukin-1 receptor antagonist in the glutamate-injured spinal cord: Endogenous neuroprotection.
Apoptosis and its receptor selective pathways during neurotoxic action of glutamate
Caffeic acid phenethyl ester prevents cerebellar granule neurons (CGNs) against glutamate-induced neurotoxicity

The fact that there are other big words in the articles does make it somewhat complicated, but upon reading and analyzing the research, it is clear that high glutamate levels are widely considered to by neurotoxic. I could talk at some length about the role of caspase, which works against glutamate toxicity, but its obviously over your head. Regardless of the red herrings you raise, glutamate is still recognized as a neurotoxin.





Shaw and Ince wrote that "The "glutamate hypothesis" is one of three major pathophysiological mechanisms of motor neurone injury towards which current research effort into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is directed." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9178165

Van Damme, Dewil, Robberecht, and Van Den Bosch wrote of glutamate and ALS: "Excitotoxicity is not the newest and most spectacular hypothesis in the ALS field, but it is undoubtedly one of the most robust pathogenic mechanisms supported by an impressive amount of evidence." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16909020

Andreadou, Kapaki, Kokotis, Paraskevas, Katsaros, Libitaki, Petropoulou, Zis, Sfagos, and Vassilopoulos studied "Plasma glutamate and glycine levels in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis" and found that patients with ALS had higher levels of glutamate in their blood. Their article started with the sentence "Defective glutamate (Glu) metabolism and glutamate excitotoxicity have been implicated in the pathogenesis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)," which alludes to a larger body of previous work. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18396796

Jerusalem, Pohl, Karitzky, and Ries noted that an "excess of extracellular glutamate in the CNS of patients with ALS resulting from a defect in glutamate reuptake may have excitotoxic effects on motor neurons. Clinical trials suggest the antiglutamate agent riluzole improves survival of patients with the disease." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8959992

Rothstein wrote of ALS and glutamate "... it is not clear if the various abnormalities in glutamate systems represent a primary defect or a secondary response ... Nevertheless, experimental paradigms suggest that, even if secondary, glutamate could contribute to the death of motor neurons. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8787245

Pioro, Majors, Mitsumoto, Nelson, and Ng used proton magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging to study the brains of people with ALS and wrote: "Although this cross-sectional study cannot identify which change occurred first, the higher Glx signal in the medulla of patients with more dysarthria and dysphagia is consistent with the hypothesis of Glu excitotoxicity in ALS pathogenesis." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10408539

Nishino, Hida, Kumazaki, Shimano, Nakajima, Shimizu, Ooiwa, and Baba induced brain lesions with the chemical 3-NPA in a model of ALS, and the results led them to hypothesize "that the striatum-specific lesion by 3-NPA is due to cummulative insults characteristic to the striatum including glutamatergic excitotoxicity, dopaminergic toxicity, vulnerability of the lateral striatal artery ..." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10757330


So that's not 3 researchers, that's more than 30 who that think that glutamate contributes to the development of ALS - just one of of the neurodegenerative diseases I mentioned. I could go on for the other diseases, but why should I? Clearly, you don't know WTF you are talking about.

This human study correlated MSG intake with obesity, and that relationship held true when controlling for calorie intake and activity levels.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18497735

Animal studies on MSG show consistent patterns of weight gain, increased blood pressure, changes in the balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Feeding animals MSG is becoming one standard model for studying obesity.

"The present study for the first time demonstrates, that a widely used nutritional monosubstance--the flavouring agent MSG--at concentrations that only slightly surpass those found in everyday human food, exhibits significant potential for damaging the hypothalamic regulation of appetite..." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16132059

MSG as a teratogen: near complete destruction of the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus in the offspring of pregnant rats given high doses of MSG.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16463577