I am staying in a nice hotel near Shanghai. Last night I dreamed that my stuff (suitcase, etc.) had been put in the hallway outside my room. As — in the dream — I was walking to the front desk to complain, I realized I must be dreaming. This couldn’t possibly have happened, I thought. It was that realistic. Later that night I had another mild realistic nightmare — about missing the bus.
I rarely have dreams like that. During the day I’d had a lot more Chinese food than usual. Two big meals. (Lunch, at a restaurant, had included yogurt, incidentally.) Without my friend’s experience I would have never connected the Chinese food and the nightmares.
In your previous post, you mentioned “cooked tomatoes and garlic” as also being possible problems.
I eat a very large quantity of fresh tomatoes in salads. Should that be safe?
Do they use vegetable oils in China in Chinese restaurants? Cuz I think it may be the overheated veggie oils, not MSG…
Jason, yes, I will see if I get the same thing by adding MSG to food I have cooked myself.
Jim, I’m not sure but I think the glutamate in tomatoes isn’t much available unless they are cooked.
Thanks, Andrew. I agree with your overall point, but I don’t see any 5% intervals in this post. I don’t say, “wow, the food caused the dreams”; I say essentially that my observations support my friend’s earlier claim. While her claim may sound speculative to you, 1. It was based on plenty of observations. 2. Other people found the same thing. 3. Glutamate is a neurotransmitter. 4. Actions based on her theory produced a benefit (her nightmares ceased).
When experts (at Scripps) write a paper saying that, as far as they know, MSG is safe (discounting evidence they don’t like that says otherwise), and I blog about evidence that MSG causes nightmares and given that evidence is dangerous, I wouldn’t say they are the cautious ones.
The “experts” have careers to protect. That biases what they say, I’m sure. And not in a good way. It makes them less likely to say or do something that would be perceived as unusual or that could damage their career. You say they “are afraid of making a mistake.” It’s not that simple. Their (understandable) careerism makes them less likely to make an “active” mistake (such as saying something wrong) but more likely to make a “passive” mistake (failing to point out that something is wrong).
But maybe you are talking about my posts in general. My claims about animal fat and fermented food, for example. My comment is: Let’s wait and see. You think I’m at a different point on the same ROC curve whereas I think I’m on a different ROC curve.
I think this depends on the field. In nutrition, Michael Eades and Stephan Guyanet have blogged extensively on how researchers actively twist their abstracts to give the impression that the standard low-fat/dietary cholesterol dogma has been reinforced by a study (while the underlying data shows it to have been refuted.)
Whoops, not sure why that post turned out so weird. It was referring to the idea that careerist researchers are likely to make passive — rather than active — errors.
Andrew, thanks for the thought-provoking comment.
There must be too much MSG in your meals so that u made nightmares, according to the experiment in your previous post.
those problems turn largely on how much money is at stake. Telescopes and colliders don’t Energy.” Physics is second-oldest, and they’re off chasing Strings. Probably