We’ve all been told this before by our parents, right? Well, for a start, instant noodles are unhealthy.
We even did a video on this topic, which you can watch here.
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Well, the second thing: If you eat too much MSG, your hair is going to fall off and you’ll end up bald.
If you truly believe that as well, we don’t blame you, because everyone in the office thought so too.
Well, for those of us who loves food that tends to be on the savoury side, or as the Chinese put it, 重口味, we’ve got some great news for you!
MSG is perfectly safe for makan and won’t make you look like this.
Contrary to popular myth, MSG does not cause hair loss.
Many people around the world have been attributing hair loss to MSG consumption, and it was so widely accepted that it became a truth on the internet.
Well, it wasn’t the first time that the internet was wrong. It got so bad that Ajinomoto, the Japanese company that manufactures MSG has to put up an FAQ on their website that attempts to clarify the myths behind MSG.
It’s Actually Not That Bad
For such an ‘unhealthy’ ingredient, MSG actually comes equipped with impressive credentials – classified by the US FDA as a General Recognized as Safe (GRAS) ingredient (safest food ingredient classification in the US), given a “not specified” label for daily intake by the Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA)1.
The ingredient was agreed upon as safe by The Council on Scientific Affairs of the American Medical Association, The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) and The Scientific Committee for Food of the commission of the European Communities.
But, other than knowing that MSG might not be as harmful as it seemed, you’ll be shocked to know that having MSG in your food might just be healthier than without.
When one of the writers in the office joined the Health Promotion Board’s (HPB) “Lose To Win™” programme, he was pretty shocked to hear a nutritionist that was brought in by HPB say that MSG is better than salt, and in moderation, MSG is healthier to use in food than salt.
So he went to do a little digging, and this was what he found: People add more salt when cooking in order to make the food more savoury and palatable.
What MSG does is that it can enhance the flavour of the food without adding as much sodium content into the food.
This simply means that for every bite we take, we’ll be taking in less sodium. Hence, healthier.
So, the next time someone tells you that MSG is bad for your health and make you go botak, show them this article and tell them it’s not true.
But remember, you have to eat in moderation too, because too much of something, even if it’s good, is not good for you.
