Pizza Chains Are Secretly Packing Their Food with MSG
LatestLast night on my walk home, I noticed a huge neon sign in the window of my local pizzeria that read, “NO MSG.” Huh, I thought. Is that a thing? I’d never known I was supposed to worry about MSG in my pizza—although, to be fair, I don’t worry about MSG in anything, at all, ever—but apparently it was a big enough issue that it warranted a permanent disclaimer MADE OUT OF MAGIC GLOWING GLASS. Huh. A thing, I guess.
And then this morning I opened up my feeds to find this headline yelling at me: “If You’ve Ever Eaten Pizza Before, This Will Blow Your Mind (Maybe Literally).” A weight loss blogger named the “Food Babe” (BUT HOW CAN A BABE EAT FOOD!?!? IT DEFIES ALL LOGIC) got curious about what was in her pizza-chain pizza and started poking around. To her surprise, most of Big Pizza—including Little Caesars, California Pizza Kitchen, Mellow Mushroom, and Papa John’s—outright refused to release their ingredient lists. Which is really not something you want to hear about a substance you’re about to put in your mouth, mash up real good with your teeth, swallow, and then transform into a part of your body.
Food Babe reports:
Why are the ingredients so hard to find? Why are they refusing to share their ingredients? What is it that these pizza restaurants don’t want us to know?
Well, I’ll tell you what they’re hiding: Lots and lots of hidden MSG!
Restaurants don’t want to get a bad rap by putting monosodium glutamate (MSG) on their ingredient or allergen statements, so they have found another way to secretly add this potent flavor enhancer to your food, without the average customer realizing it. Instead of letting you know that they are putting MSG in your food, they are using an FDA loophole to sneak processed free glutamic acid into your food, which has the same effect as MSG – all without warning you. They simply use other forms of free glutamic acid (such as Hydrolyzed Soy Protein), which is the main component of MSG. This allows them to have “clean labels” and deceive us into believing their product contains no MSG – when it actually does!
Trickery is shady. Feeding people secrets is shady. Also, deliberately turning food into a cheap, addictive drug is shady. Stop doing that, food industry! You guys are gross jerks!