MSG makes food taste good, but you probably think it will make you sick.
MSG, the base of umami, faced decades of false stigma and shunning on the part of Americans due to one 1968 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine about numbness-inducing "Chinese restaurant syndrome."
The "syndrome" article, written by a Chinese-American doctor, actually fingered high sodium levels in American Chinese restaurant food as the culprit, but a side mention of MSG set the rest of the media, and the country, on an anti-MSG rampage that has only just begun to subside.