| With salt, pepper, oil.. glutamate forms
part of the tools of the chef. It is a common and cheap food additive
which is used to enhance flavour (sapidity agent). It is most notably
present in tinned vegetables and fish, hamburgers, Coca-Cola or other fizzy
drinks, soy sauce, and non sweetened Asiatic dishes....
But, for a long time, glutamate has been linked with the famous “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome”, selectively affecting individuals (women are notable more subject to these troubles). Glutamate is more worrying when one considers its correlation with sugar diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease... |
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| Supermarkets:
full of glutamate
Products containing glutamate: tinned fish soups, frozen meals, Viandox, Bouillon Kub, freeze dried soups, tinned mushrooms, Buitoni bolognese sauce, Chinese noodles, condiments. Not forbidden by law, not controlled by the suppression of frauds... Glutamate without labels There is no obligation to detail the type of salt used: glutamate works well in the form of its salt : monosodium glutamate. The Chef’s “Pithiviers - Glutamate” The renowned french chef Michel Guérard, sells the Findus frozen meals (“pithiviers de poisson sauce cremeuse”). Alerted by the presence (it is sufficient to read the label), he found that it is not enough there to get excited about. Glutamate is also in the pancrease The similarities between the beta cells of the pancreas and the neurones of the brain (same enzymes, GABA, and identical microvesicles) has allowed us to demonstrate with certainty, not only the presence of glutamate in the pancreas, but also its action on diabetes. Glutamate transmits and amplifies, within the brain, the signals of the neurones, if one constructs a possible treatment for Alzheimer’s disease from the analogues of glutamate. Is there not thus a risk of setting off diabetes ? Time bomb One hears it said, and the rest moreover, that glutamate is not harmful because Thai children, who regularly eat glutamate are not ill more frequently. In fact, individuals do not react in the same way, nor at the same time: one thinks of a delayed effect on the brain of the order of 30 to 40 years... Chick peas which make you ill In Africa, during food shortages, they eat Lathym sativus (a type of chick pea) which contains a natural toxin, beta-oxalomino-alanine. This latter derives from an amino acid which is an exciter of the neurones of the brain , like glutamate, and finishes by setting off irreversible brain lesions. It’s the same problem on the island of Guam, in Micronesia, where an encephalopathy (Guam dementia) is rampant due to beta-methylamino-alanine, contained in a grain much eaten during the famine during the second world war. Glutamate makes you made The neurones of an Alzheimer’s sufferer are overloaded with abnormal filaments. This overproduction of proteins is the result of the alteration of some genes by glutamate..... |
| Glutamate or glutamic acid is an amino acid (1) a neurotransmitter omnipresent in the brain, which plays a major role in the transmission / amplification of messages (hormonal or nervous input) between neurones. It is essential in the memory and learning processes, it could be implicated in numerous degenerative brain diseases (Alzheimer’s) as well as in cell death... |
| Joel Bockart and Gyslaine Bertrand,
researchers at the CNRS-INSERM at Montpellier /France, rely on the obvious
resemblance between the cells of the pancreas and neurones in the brain
(same enzymes, analogous micro vesicles - synapses), brought to the fore,
in the British Journal of Pharmacology, the action of glutamate on the
pancreas, the organ responsible for the secretion of insulin.
Some diabetes are due to an insufficiency of this hormone.
Thus in sugar diabetes, the immune system of sufferers produces auto antibodies,
programmed, notably, to destroy, in the cells of the pancreas, an indispensable
enzyme constituted from glutamate.
This leaves us to think if there is, in the pancreas and in the brain, the same glutamate receptor. This discovery has challenged future medications (analogues of glutamate) which allow the slowing of the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. But, effective in the brain, they could have secondary effects on peripheral organs (risk of starting diabetes in sufferers). |
| Based on the sizeable concentrations
of glutamate in the brain and the positive effect which they have in cases
of epilepsy, they gave, at the start of the 1940’s, high doses of glutamate
to mentally retarded children to improve their intellectual performance
and behaviour.
At the end of the war, they saw the first side effects of glutamate in the body. Thus undernourished patients, treated with oral or intravenous solutions, were subject to violent nausea and vomiting. The Journal of Laboratory Clinical Medicine, in 2 articles in 1947 and 1949, reflected on the levels of glutamate used in the mixtures of amino acids used to treat burns and chronic malnutrition. In 1972, Humar and Ghami, saw the first real description of “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome”, defined clinically in 1968 under the name of post sino-cabal syndrome, by Doctors H Man Kwok and Henry Schaumburg. A diner generally including black mushroom soup and soy sauce, such as they serve in Thai or Vietnamese restaurants, caused in some sensitive people, a sudden migraine, violent nausea, or even an intense rash, flash, even a weakness bordering on pseudo paralysis. The few patients who consulted a doctor presented a slowed heart rate, vomiting or salivation, the doctors did not observe much and did not recognise any objective neurological signs. Recovery apparently without further effects or consequences, except some possible nightmares the night after the meal... |
| In the same way that glucose is the poison
of diabetics, and salt the enemy of those with kidney failure,
etc...
It is only now we have discovered that each amino acid has a family of derived analogous molecules, of which some are toxic to a greater or lesser extent. Immediately after Kwok, 2 teams (4) studied, independently,
the pharmacology and responsibility of glutamate in Chinese Restaurant
Syndrome by preparing soups or tomato juice with and without glutamate.
Each time the group having consumed glutamate
was subject to clinical symptoms, while the other showed none.
|
From 1969, John Olney, neurophysiologist
at Washington University, noticed that glutamate can pass into the
blood (contrary to what had been believed until then), it causes damaging
waste in the hypothalamus, a small gland
in the brain which controls the neuro-hormonal
system.
1) When glutamate in the blood in the brain attacks the neurones, they suddenly let in massive amounts of calcium, sodium and water beyond their physiological needs, causing a brutal depolarisation of the neurone, which dies.With this observation, John Olney had invented the concept of toxic excitation : the property of certain amino acids (among them glutamate) to activate this electric response by nerve cells which leads to their suicide. |
Convinced of the dangers which glutamate represents
as a food additive, Olney is going to defy the all powerful Food and Drug
Administration (FDA):
“The doses of glutamate which you find in pots of baby food or prepared soups are sufficient [...], to destroy neurones in the brain [...].”You could recently have read in the French magazine Le Panorama medical that “the doses of glutamate ingested by children are sometimes so high, that when given orally to a young animal they purely and simply cause the destruction of the central nervous system. A child of 10 kg ingests in a sachet of instant soup between 1000 and 1300 mg of glutamate, namely a quantity well above that which one finds naturally in the brain and equal to that which kills the brain stem of guinea pigs”. This means that, if all individuals are sensitive to glutamate, the 20,000 tonnes of glutamate manufactured and used each year in the United States by consumers is roughly enough to destroy the brains of 225 million Americans. In 1970 the FDA and the manufacturers gave
in ... over baby foods...!!
In addition to the pure and simple banning of glutamate as a food additive, Olney wages a war against the artificial sweetener aspartame, because this contains aspartic acid, another amino acid which toxically excites neurones. |
| (5) In France, an order in 1975 defined the maximum acceptable doses in drinks and foodstuffs. It is no longer the case : today, the quantity is left to the initiative of the manufacturer. The service for the suppression of fraud confirms it can no longer control the amount of glutamate in food. |
6.The grave
cerebal effects due to glutamate
6.1 Troubling cases
| Serving as the basis of
all the medical arsenal against brain diseases, glutamate
and some of its much more powerful analogues, which fix to the same receptors,
have shown themselves to be neurotoxic.
The controversy about toxic exciting amino acids has come to light in the following cases: MUSSELS December 1987: 150 Canadians consumed mussels which had become toxic, 4 died, but in particular, 12 of those affected suffered permanent amnesia, of the same type of that in Alzheimer’s disease. The autopsies revealed that the neurones were severely damaged. The mussels analysed by the hygiene service had a high concentration of domoic acid, a much more toxic analogue of glutamate.CHICK PEAS Eaten by people in Asia and Africa in times of famine, a certain type of chick pea has induced, in some individuals, uncontrolled muscular spasms, caused by cerebral lesions. Now these chick peas also contain a natural toxin, beta-oxalomino-alanine, which excites the neurones in the same way as glutamate. Alanine, from which this molecule is derived, is another brain exciting amino acid, such as glutamate and aspartate.GRAIN OF DEMENTIA The natives of Guam, an island in the Pacific, are affected by progressive paralysing dementia presenting the following symptoms: |
| Dr. Denis Choi, of Stanford University, California,
brought a molecular time bomb to light
in this last case, which expressed itself,
in some individuals, in a morbid fashion several
dozens of years later.
These late developing consequences, probably resulting from the consumption of the toxic exciters contained in these foods, could explain the appearance of other degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or lateral amyotrophic sclerosis. Huntingdon’s chorea,
an inherited brain disease, is characterised
by mental problems,
character problems,
mental deficiency
and involuntary muscular movements.
Compared to control subjects the encephalopathic fluid of patients suffering from light dementia, a form of Alzheimer’s, analysed by the Psychiatric Research Institute of Orangeburg, New York (7) have been revealed, at the onset of the disease, to have a higher concentration of glutamate (excitor) and a lower concentration of taurine (a derivative of another amino acid, cysteine, a brain inhibitor). |
| At the same time an essential
amino acid, cerebral transmitter and exciter, common food additive, glutamate
is today suspected of being highly neuro toxic...
Between the quarrels of scientists, arguments of the all powerful agro-alimentary industry and the Real Danger to Public Health, |