And then, after all of that, you have to obsessively read labels ... and are still often left with uncertainty as to whether or not a food item contains some form of the substance that makes you so sick. I don't blame anyone for free glutamic acid doing nasty things to me, but food manufacturers' persistence in playing games with my health (and sanity!) is inexcusable.
Yes, It's a nightmare! So many different names for the same thing. Do many people even know what "hydrogenated vegetable oil" is, for example? Someone did explain it to be once, but I've learnt to avoid it anyway because it triggers a migraine in me.
I'd like them to specify
which vegetable they're talking about when they put "vegetable oil" on a label. I might be wrong (and being human, I often am!) but isn't Rapeseed counted as a "vegetable" in food labelling? I was having a very enlightening chat with a baker at one of our local big supermarkets about Tiger bread just under 2 weeks ago. I thought Tiger bread had cheese in the crust, but he said that no, it doesn't, what makes it Tiger bread is the stuff they put on top of the bread before it's baked. I asked what was in "the stuff". He said "vegetable oils, stuff like that. It makes it go very crusty, it's what gives it that crust distinctive to Tiger bread."
He brought out a big blue tub of "stuff" to show me. It didn't have an ingredients label. He then fetched a data sheet. It listed several vegetable oils, and one of them was indeed rapeseed oil. I reluctantly put my bargain reduced-to-10p loaf of Tiger bread back on the shelf.
Back to reading labels. This is why I largely stick to fresh foods, or fresh-frozen. I try to get organic where I can, because of depleted full-spectrum minerals in non-organic growing soils, antibiotics and hormones in fresh/ frozen non-organic animal meats, etc., etc.,
ad nauseam, pun intended.
Almost anything with an ingredients label (aside from bottled mineral water), with more than one or possibly two listed ingredients, is problematic for me. And I'm SO bored of having to read labels to check for rapeseed oil, BVO, aspartame, saccharin, yeast extract, glutamic acid, glutamate, MSG, nuts, soy, reduced fat, 0% fat, skimmed milk, semi-skimmed milk, etc., etc., as above.
I'm sorry to hear that glutamic acid causes you such horrible problems, and until reading your posts, I hadn't realised the extent of the labelling issue. Thanks for explaining it. All good information is useful. I hadn't, for instance, realised "yeast extract" is glutamic acid under another name.
What's the difference between glutamic acid and free glutamic acid and glutamate?