ONE WILD WORLD — NEWSLETTER

ISSUE 060 · FUN FACTS · USELESS BUT FASCINATING

The whole panic traces to a single event: a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1968, in which a doctor described feeling odd after Chinese meals and floated a few guesses, MSG among them. That one letter grew into decades of health scare and a name — “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” — that stuck.

The trouble is that it has never survived a proper test. In double-blind trials, where people don't know whether they're eating MSG or not, the reliable, reproducible reaction simply fails to appear at normal dietary amounts. Tell someone they've had MSG and some report symptoms; don't tell them, and the symptoms go with the telling. It is the expectation doing the work, not the additive.

And here's the part that should end the argument. MSG is just the sodium salt of glutamate — an amino acid that occurs naturally in tomatoes, mushrooms, breast milk and parmesan. It is the thing that makes those foods taste savoury. The compound people feared for half a century is chemically the same as the one that makes a good aged cheese delicious. Curiously, the identical glutamate in Italian or Western cooking never got a “syndrome” named after the cuisine.

In 1964 the New York Times reported that 38 respectable citizens had watched Kitty Genovese be stabbed to death in Queens over half an hour, and that not one had called the police. It became one of the most famous stories in psychology — the founding case of the “bystander effect,” the idea that the more people witness an emergency, the less likely any of them is to help.

Almost every specific in the original story was wrong. The “38 witnesses” figure came from the paper's own editor and was never substantiated. Most of the handful who noticed anything caught only fragments, in the dark, with no idea a murder was happening. Several people did call the police. And a neighbour, Sophia Farrar, ran out and held Genovese as she died.

The bystander effect is a real and replicated phenomenon in the laboratory. But the lurid case that launched it — the one in every textbook — was largely a newspaper's invention.

The experiment is famous: sit a small child in front of a marshmallow, promise a second one if they can wait fifteen minutes, and the ones who hold out supposedly grow into more successful adults. It became a parable about self-control as destiny.

Then, in 2018, researchers ran it again with a sample roughly ten times larger and far more representative. Once they accounted for the child's family background — income, the mother's education — the magic mostly evaporated. Waiting predicted very little on its own.

The likeliest explanation is quietly devastating. A child from a chaotic, resource-poor home who grabs the treat immediately isn't showing weak character; they're being rational. In their experience, a promised future reward often doesn't arrive, so you take what is in front of you. The test was reading their circumstances and calling it willpower.

The warning label made sulfites the usual suspect, but the case against them barely holds together. White wine generally contains more sulfites than red — yet nobody complains of “white wine headaches.” Dried apricots carry several times more than a glass of wine, with no such reputation at all. And the roughly 20mg of sulfite in a glass is trivial next to the couple of thousand milligrams of sulfate your own body processes every day.

Genuine sulfite sensitivity is real but rare — around 1 per cent of people, concentrated among asthmatics — and it shows up as a respiratory reaction, wheezing and chest tightness, not a headache. The likelier culprits behind a wine headache are histamine, tannins, tyramine and plain dehydration.

The twist: because sulfite suppresses the bacteria that produce histamine, low-sulfite “natural” wine can end up with more of it. The cleaner-sounding glass people reach for to dodge a headache may be the one more likely to give them one.

The 1918 pandemic that killed tens of millions picked up its name for a reason that has nothing to do with where it began. The First World War was still on, and the combatant nations censored their newspapers to protect morale — no reporting on a devastating epidemic sweeping the trenches and cities. Spain was neutral. Its press was free, and it covered the outbreak openly.

So to the rest of the world, the disease appeared to be raging in Spain and nowhere else — simply because Spain was the one country admitting it had a problem. The name was a quirk of censorship. The true origin is still debated, with an army camp in Kansas among the leading suspects.

MSG: Kwok, R. H. M. (1968), letter to the New England Journal of Medicine; FASEB and FDA safety reviews; controlled double-blind studies finding no consistent “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” response (e.g. Geha et al., 2000, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology).

Kitty Genovese: Manning, R., Levine, M. & Collins, A. (2007), “The Kitty Genovese Murder and the Social Psychology of Helping,” American Psychologist; Cook, K. (2014), Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America.

Marshmallow test: Watts, T. W., Duncan, G. J. & Quan, H. (2018), “Revisiting the Marshmallow Test,” Psychological Science; original work: Mischel, Shoda & Rodriguez (1989).

Sulfites: World of Fine Wine, “Red Wine Headaches: the truth” (2025); INTEGRIS Health and Medical News Today explainers; FDA sulfite-sensitivity estimate (~1% of the population, higher among asthmatics).

Spanish flu: Barry, J. M. (2004), The Great Influenza; CDC and historical consensus on the naming and the Camp Funston (Kansas) hypothesis.

ONE MORE THING

You can read our MANY newsletters for free at our website:

Read our archive for free at OneWildWorld.com →