So all soy products (aside from soy beans, possibly) are shit then. Great. WARNING: Do not read if you hate "health-food" threads.

I feel like I get headaches from msg sometimes but it could be psychosomatic - I rarely eat chinese food anyhow.

I doubt it is as seriously bad as all that though, I mean it doesn't seem to be affecting asian countries who use it regularly...

I said "aspirin," but I used different things on different days including aspirin, generic ibuprofin and Advil.

i eat tons of soy but get headaches very rarely.

All of which are NSAIDs and if you are allergic/intolerant, you should avoid. Stick to paracetamol.

At least thats what my allergy specialist told me.

Oh and dont do the food intolerance tests I did. Weeks on end eating nothing but rice cakes with nothing on them, plain mashed potato and pear juice was horrible.

I know, it sucks. Well, what I've basically been doing anyway is eating nuts, seeds, legumes and cereal. I don't wanna be a granolahead, but that seems to be the way it's turning out for me these days.

I find my food intolerances - which for me are more sal acid and the preservatives in wines - give me nasty sinusitis, which I am suffering from right now thanks to a week of booze, smoking and chinese food urgh my head is like concrete :(

http://www.snopes.com/toxins/soya.asp

Here is how Tofu is made in a nutshell:

-- Raw Tofu Grade Soy Beans are soaked in water overnight then drained.
-- The beans are then pulverized as a small quantity of boiling water is being poured over them. The resultant mash will have the consistency of mashed potatoes.
-- The mash is ladled into boiling water, like dumplings, and allowed to boil gently for about 10 minutes. This stage of the process is crucial as a certain enzyme in the bean is broken down during this time. If the enzyme is not destroyed, the Soy protein will not be humanly digestible.
-- The resulting slurry is filtered. The liquid is Soy Milk, and the pulp is called Okara. Okara is good for mixing with flour to make bread or for feeding to the Pigs, or as a last resort, fertilizer.
A small amount of either Calcium Sulfate or Magnesium Chloride is introduced to coagulate the Milk. The Chinese have used the Calcium salt for 2000 years, mined from mountain quarries, the salt is the pure form of gypsum. The Japanese traditionally used Sea Salt to coagulate the Milk, and it is the small quantity of Magnesium Chloride in Sea Salt that does the trick.
-- After the coagulant is introduced, the Milk will separate into Curds and Whey. The Curds will float to the top and the resulting Whey should be clear.
-- The Curds are gently scooped off the top of the Whey and ladled into a forming container lined with cheese cloth. The forming container has many small hole in it to allow leftover whey to drain. --- A lid is placed on the forming container.
-- A small weight is placed on the lid of the container and allowed to sit for several hours. Empty the resulting block of tofu into a tub of cold water and allow to sit for another hour.
-- Feed the Whey to the Pigs.
-- Eat the Tofu!

Is MSG the bugbear people once thought it was? I half recall that there was some kind of rethink on this.

I use it as a substitute for cow's milk. The idea of cow's milk fills me with revulsion. I am not going to suck a cow's nipple, drinking cow drink from a cow. I'm aware this is irrational.

highly processed foods, in general, are pretty bad--soy or otherwise. but there are plenty of soy products out there that aren't so heavily processed.

Plain old glutamate is fine... the above article points out that this is what proponents of MSG like to argue, but it is not.

"MSG is made in a factory from foods like corn, molasses and wheat, where it is hydrolyzed, autolyzed, modified or fermented using chemicals, bacteria or enzymes. These processes "free" the glutamic acid in the food. In its "free" form, processed glutamic acid lacks the links that natural glutamic acid has to other amino acids. Because of this, it is broken down more quickly by the body. The sudden increase in glutamic acid can raise the glutamate level in the blood to 20 times the usual amount.

MSG in Hiding

MSG is often combined with other substances and renamed. If you suspect that you are sensitive to MSG, print out this list, take it with you to the grocery store and check the labels of every food you buy.

These ALWAYS contain MSG These very OFTEN contain MSG
Autolyzed yeast Barley Malt
Calcium caseinate Bouillon
Gelatin Broth
Glutamate Carrageenan
Glutamic acid Enzyme-modified substances
Hydrolyzed protein Flavoring
Monopotassium glutamate Flavors
Monosodium glutamate Malt Extract
Sodium caseinate Malt flavoring
Textured protein Maltodextrin
Yeast extract Natural flavor/flavorings
Yeast food Natural pork/beef/chicken flavoring
Yeast Nutrient Pectin
Protein-fortified substances
Seasonings
Soy protein
Soy protein isolate or concentrate
Soy sauce
Soy sauce extract
Stock
Vegetable gum
Whey protein
Whey protein isolate or concentrate"

My experience:
Soy shakes = headache.
Pero coffee alternative = headache
tofu/tempeh = headache
bragg's = headache

Come to your own conclusions, as I have.

Reading some more (eg. here, commercial hydrolysis will result in much higher free glutamate concentration in solution in part due to the relative speed of the process in comparison to normal digestion. I guess that's where the uniquely "over-the-top" plasma concentration comes in:

"Digestion breaks most proteins into amino acids only at a very slow rate. ... For these reasons, essentially no free amino acids can be found in the intestine during digestion...

When soybeans are processed, the excitotoxic amino acids (glutamate and aspartate) are not only released, they are concentrated. This is especially so in soy protein isolates and soy protein concentrates-which are used in soy milk."

This means that the concentrations of glutamic and aspartic acid is much lower after typical digestion in the stomach by the much slower hydrolysis, and:

"These high blood levels are transferred into the human brain, especially under certain circumstances."

Hope your brain gets better and hope it is nothing serious.

Hope you don't have any problems like this. Good lord, that's awful.

That said, I've eaten a lot of soy products in the last decade or more.. and while I haven't seen any bad side effects since, I'm sure an alternate diet would present other problems just as bad as the anti-soy sites seem to be suggesting. If cutting out soy helps you, by all means, don't eat soy... these things are unfortunately best proven by trail and error.

Basically, you're screwed no matter what you eat, if you spend enough time looking for web sites that specialize in demonizing the foods you eat and enjoy.

bingo

bingo

The un-bingo: Organic produce.

Perhaps there is something about the saltiness that gives you a headache.

Nope, it's MSG, I have discovered since it is not only soy products. For example, Pero drink, which is powdered barley malt as a main ingredient, which often contains MSG.

Besides, I've always been able to enjoy mass quantities of salt now and again And when I was on the Lemonade fast in March, I did the saltwater flush every other day, which is massive amounts of sea salt in 32 oz of water. The tofu/tempeh/soy shake-induced headaches go back to a few years ago, so it is not that I've "ruined myself" with the saltwater flushes or something. It just took me a while to figure it out.

I just googled "organic food dangers" and found this on the first page:

The Hidden Dangers In Organic Food -- Products most people think are purer than other foods are making people seriously ill.

As these lethal new bacteria spread, organic foods have clearly become the deadliest food choice. Put simply, animal manure is too dangerous to use on food crops if there is any alternative whatever. To eat produce grown with animal fertilizer is like playing Russian roulette with your family’s dinner table. It only takes one contaminated food product to bring on a tragedy.

OK, SOMEONE has to use "Harsh Organic Reality" as their new username!

MSGourds!

Give it time.