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What started my own personal journey into brain science and nutrition was a single phone call from a person I have never met. I had left work early one day with an utterly brutal migraine and arrived home to a ringing phone. I picked it up more to stop the noise than anything else and blurted out that I needed to get back to him later as I was experiencing a really bad migraine at the moment. I don't know why I mentioned the migraine that day, as I tend not to talk about them. (People who get them often don't enjoy thinking about migraines and people who don't assume you are a whiner complaining about a headache.)

The unknown caller ended up sharing a story of his own struggles with migraines and offered up what he had learned through twenty years of working with the Mayo clinic. He was talking about MSG and brain toxic food additives, when I interjected that I never eat Chinese food, to which he replied:

"MSG is in everything".

Well, I didn't know that. I didn't know that we consume millions of tons of a neurotoxin which human beings react to more severely to than mercury and arsenic. A neurotoxin which causes death of our neurons and eventual disease in every single human being once they have enough of it. This one statement, "MSG is in everything" started my journey down a rabbit hole into universes where the existence of brain poisons in our food supply was common knowledge. I had tried strict elimination diets and diaries for years and could never isolate an offending substance, because this one singularly offensive substance was hidden in the lot of them. http://curezone.com/foods/msg.asp

The first and most astonishing book I read was Dr. Blaylock's Excitotoxins, the taste that kills. The Biofeedback book has the best compilation of prevention and treatment options. I found out that there was a class of food additives (along with asparateme/nutrasweet, and cystoic/cysteine) which are designed to give a burst-of flavor on the tongue that makes food appealing to the eater and thus makes more $ for the food conglomerates. However these additives are neurotoxic and literally excite brain neurons to death.

"Within as little as 15 minutes after being exposed to high doses of MSG, neurons suspended in tissue culture are seen to 'swell' like balloons. Within 3 hrs. those neurons are dead, and the little neuron dead bodies are being hauled away the "debris" by the immune system." (see Blaylock's book)

Doesn't sound good, wondering how you could avoid it if you wanted to? Well, MSG is not labeled for the most part, so you can't tell by reading labels. If you value your brain, you would need to either need to educate yourself on the practices of the food industry, or select all non processed organic food in your diet to be certain. Since 1972 we have gone from 262,000 metric tons of MSG consumed a year to 1.5 million tons/year. It has doubled every decade even though as early as 1969 it was proven that over 30% of the population was reacting to the quantities in the food supply back then. Imagine how many of us are sensitive at the quantity levels we have today. MSG is truly everywhere.

Shouldn't this massive public health risk merit a spot on the news? Isn't there enough evidence? Nope, there is plenty of evidence. There is over 50 years of research documenting relationships between MSG and neuron death(not only receptor cells, but any neuron connected to them), visual receptor cell death, hypothalamus cell death, brain lesions, hormone disorders, ADHD, autism, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, obesity, early onset of puberty, asthmas attacks, cardiac arrest, Huntington disease, infertility, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS),migraines, strokes, hypoxic brain injury, hypoglycemic brain damage, seizures, hypoxic brain damage, and dementia.

Yet in 1994 the FDA rejected a mass consumer petition to require labeling of free-glutamic acid in food, so now it can be unlabelled if less that 99% pure or included within another additive. The FDA still claims the blood brain barrier is protecting us from ingested MSG, when it was clearly proven that the hypothalamus and other routes allow entry into the brain decades ago. http://www.truthinlabeling.org/l-manuscript.htm

http://www.newstarget.com/020550.html

Here's one cheat sheet for just one neurotoxin(MSG) in food, remember there are just as many neurotoxins in cosmetics, shampoos, lotions and soaps and these are absorbed through the skin. As a person who gets migraines when I encounter a neurotoxin, I can tell you after years of food daily diaries, that cosmetics/soaps/shampoos /conditioners set off a similar neurotoxic reaction even when there is no accompanying food or stress trigger.