Excitotoxins, the Taste that Kills, a book review

What would you do?

If you found out that your daily meals contain a chemical additive that could cause brain damage in your children?

If evidence indicates that this chemical could affect how your child’s brain forms and develops.

If the damage caused by this chemical might not show itself until your child was older, manifesting as learning or emotional difficulties.

If this chemical damaged the part of the brain that controls hormones, resulting in hormonal imbalances later in life.

If this chemical might aggravate or even precipitate degenerative diseases of the nervous system and brain such as Parkinson’s Disease, Huntington’s disease, ALS, and Alzheimer’s disease.

So begins the book Excitotoxins, the Taste That Kills, by Dr. Russell L. Blaylock, MD a practicing board-certified neurosurgeon with a profound understanding of the structure and function of the brain and nervous system.

What Dr. Blaylock discovered is too important to your health and the health of future generations for it to lie hidden. That’s why I feel you must know about it.

This article emphasizes the Excitotoxin MSG. But keep in mind that the very popular artificial sweetener aspartame (also known as Nutrasweet, Equal, and the new form Neotame) also acts in a similar manner to over-stimulate brain cells to death.

Why do food manufacturers add MSG to our processed food?

For the taste of it!,

You see, Japanese cooks discovered a sea weed, “sea tangle” or kombu that made their dishes of food taste delectable. Eventually the Japanese isolated this flavor enhancing ingredient as MSG – Mono Sodium Glutamate – and turned it into a worldwide multimillion dollar empire.

After World War II American food manufacturers discovered MSG and started adding it to processed food (which is often rather bland tasting without additives). Now it’s a huge lucrative industry in the United States. In 1972 262,000 metric tons of MSG was produced in America.

Until the 1960’s few people suspected that MSG could be harmful to our health. Most scientists assumed that glutamate supplied energy to the brain.

So MSG continued to be added to food in huge amounts and also to baby food. Then Dr. Olney, MD a neuroscientist at The Department of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis in 1967 discovered that specialized cells in a very critical area of the brain, the hypothalamus, were destroyed after a single dose of MSG. Despite a long fight with the FDA and food manufacturers Dr. Olney and others finally succeeded in banning MSG from infant food.

However, other food additives can have similar effects as MSG and still be found in infant and toddler’s food. These foods have been called excitotoxins by neuroscientists. Neurons (nerve cells) in the brain exposed to these substances initially become very excited, firing rapidly until they become completely exhausted. “Several hours later these neurons suddenly die, as if the cells were excited to death.” The name excitotoxins seems appropriate.

What is the basic composition of excitotoxins?

Excitotoxins found in nature are all amino acids including glutamate, aspartate and cysteine. Add a sodium molecule to the glutamate and you have mono sodium glutamate. But the toxic part is the glutamate, not the sodium.

You also ingest these amino acids when you eat a natural whole food protein source. However, in natural whole food these amino acids come in balanced proportions, so that none of them induce high blood levels of any individual amino acid. When MSG is added to processed food, glutamate is concentrated and induces high blood levels which can allow higher levels of glutamate to enter the brain.

Be wise – become familiar with the other names for MSG:

Hidden Sources of MSG

For more of this cover-up info read on:

Excitotoxins – Neurotransmitters in Overdrive

Neurotransmitters Abundant in Processed Food

Is the Taste Worth the Risk?

Blessings,

Dr. Jo