Some food to buy, some to avoid

In my usual fashion I guess I should say the foods I found to avoid this week. 

    One is the new kraft mac and cheese with the noodles already cooked, it's in a box.  Amazingly it has monosodium glutinate as an ingredient as well as a couple other names for it.  

   Another is the Muir Glenn Spaghetti Sauce, this is an organic sauce but it has citric acid and sea salt (sadly a new company has added msg to sea salt so you need to call the manufacturer to be sure that their sea salt is not from senomyx)  I am not sure if the sea salt is a problem but I know the sauce effected me.

   On the happy note the thing I found this week Organic Ville Pasta Sauce, no msg that I could find, hurrah.

    If you are looking for more info and input check out truth in labeling on facebook or their website.

Until next week

Happy Shopping

Pame

MSG-Four good rules of thumb for finding MSG in your food

Four good rules of thumb are:

• The more salty a processed food is, the more likely it is to contain MSG or free glutamate. 
• The more processed a food is, the more likely it is to contain MSG or free glutamate:  powdered stuff that used to be food is likely to have added MSG because the original flavor has been degraded, AND processing concentrates and frees glutamate already bound and present.
• The more ingredients in a packaged food, the more likely MSG is present.  Read labels carefully . Time is money.  If a food has more than five ingredients and you don't have half an hour to read one ingredient label - put it back on the shelf - you'll be better off.
• Do not trust something simply because it is in a health food store and the label states it is natural or even organic. The US allows "natural flavors" to include protein hydrolysates which can contain up to 20% MSG by weight.  A distinction without a difference.

   Sadly I just read a post about teas with MSG so I went to my pantry and found several Celestial Seasonings with natural flavors that did not specify what they were.  I sent an email to them but so far have not heard anything.  Is it MSG?  I don't know but if you can't state what your ingredient is and feel it necessary to use obscure ingredients like spices and flavoring etc. I will simply avoid them.  

   On an actions note I sent an email and letter to President Obama asking that labels on our food be made clear for the consumers benefit not the benefit of food producers.  I am challenging anyone who is interested in knowing what is really in their foods to do the same.  Truth in labeling also put forth that challenge for me on their facebook page, thanks.

Until next time

Happy shopping

Pame

MSG -Surprise!!!

Twice this past week I have been duped.
   First I went to a new vietnamese restaurant.  The food was really tasty, then when I got home I was sick.  Oh yeah forgot to worry about MSG, too busy worrying about Gluten (my other food worry)  I had had some of their food at meetings I have attended so I wasn't really worrying about it but guess I had just been lucky before.  Not this time.  I had even told my husband that maybe we should switch to this restaurant because the food was so good, that should have been my first clue. If it's soooo yummy it's probably MSG.
   Then tonight I used my hot stir fry oil I had in the cupboard to stir fry some mushrooms and onions.  Hadn't checked the label on that.  Who would think.  Anyway,  natural flavoring was the culprit.  I had many of the usual symptoms, so I threw that one away.
   Just another lesson in how vigilant we have to be in paying attention to our food ingredients.
On the upside my niece told me of a place in St Louis Park that has good food and no MSG so I am looking forward to trying it out soon.
Happy shopping and eating
Pame

Snacks with MSG

   You've probably thought maybe some MSG is in the chips you love, for instance Dorito's, one of the big offenders.  But you can find it in almost any of the flavored chips you buy.  Flavors such as, cheese, taco, spicy, onion etc. almost always have MSG under another name of cours.  Check yours and see.  It's safer buying the regular unflavored chips, but not always.  Recently I purchased Glutino's Gluten Free pretzels and discovered they have autolyzed yeast, one of those other names for MSG.  Not a spicy flavor just a little salty but I suppose they needed something to make them a bit more tasty.  Sadly you can't assume that an organic brand will be safer.  It isn't.  Red hot blues have spices, natural flavoring and torula yeast, these are all suspect ingredients and of course why they taste soooooo yummy.
    Crackers are the same thing.  If it's spicy, cheesie, ranchy or oniony it will most likely have MSG.  Even annies bunny crackers, at least some of them.  Several of the gluten free crackers have MSG in them so since I am gluten free it makes finding something to snack on even harder.
   You may say it's simply too hard to avoid these things and they don't make me sick so why not.  But if you read elsewhere on MSG you will see that when we start having MSG in so many different foods we buy and restaurant food we eat we are really overloading our brains with this excitotoxin.
   Check out the website below that describes how excitotoxins work
http://www.avoidamigraine.com/
   On a happier note there are a few chips and crackers that don't contain any of the obvious MSG names that I have eaten and been fine with so you can do it.  It's just a bit of a treasure hunt.
   So on that happier thought  I'll talk to you next week
Happy Shopping
Pame