The Perfect Poison: The Story that Big Food and Its Friends at the FDA Don’t Want You to Know
Written and published by Adrienne Samuels, PhD
Dr. Jack Samuels suffered from serious health problems that included symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s disease. At one point he learned that he was very sensitive to MSG and it helped to avoid it. However, even when he carefully avoided anything with MSG on the label, he still had relapses. This was a mystery until he learned that products containing MSG or MfG (manufactured free glutamate) don’t always show them on the label. He and his wife spent their lives researching this subject and learned how the world really works.
Major food producers like Stouffer’s and Pepperidge Farm would even label products as having no MSG when, in fact, they did. Other products hide the MSG under harmless-sounding names like “natural flavors,” hydrolyzed vegetable or soy protein and sodium caseinate, to name a few.
When Jack first began to testify before Food and Drug Administration (FDA) committees, he was excited, thinking they would do something about this. Soon, he learned that the FDA and other government regulatory agencies were not watchdogs; they were lapdogs of the industries they were supposed to be regulating. “Government regulation” is an oxymoron. Jack and his wife also noticed that everywhere they went to testify, industry trolls were there to undermine their testimony. They were also victims of dirty tricks. For example, when they arrived at a place where they would be testifying, they would find their hotel reservations canceled.
Silly me; I was once under the impression that censorship was a relic of the dark ages and I thought we didn’t do that in these more enlightened times. Then a few years ago, of course, censorship busted out in the open, especially on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. After reading Adrienne Samuels’ book and other sources, I have come to understand that censorship never really went away. It just got a little more clever, staying behind closed doors and out of sight from the general public. Rather than burning books, for example, major publishers would see to it that books containing forbidden information were never published to begin with. In 1991, 60 Minutes did a show on MSG. There was considerable uproar, especially in the glutamate industry. No news media outlet has touched the subject since then. Agencies like the FDA have, at best, pretended to appreciate new information brought to their attention, and then buried it. Freedom of Information Act requests are ignored. Human nature never changes.
The glutamate industry controls which studies are done and which conclusions are reached by donating big dollars to the American Dietetic Association, the Mayo Clinic, University of California Berkeley, AARP and various popular magazines. Industry-backed studies are consistently at odds with independent studies. One of the ways they cheat in their studies is by using aspartame in the placebo, which has similar side effects to MSG.
Jack and Adrienne came in contact with a lab testing company and asked the lab representatives about doing some testing for them. One of the first questions asked was what results they would like. In other words, labs can test anything and come up with any result you want. No problem.
This book is very educational and very relevant to the many people who are sensitive to MSG or who want to understand how the world really works. The thumb is UP.
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Winter 2022
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