> I'm certainly not discounting personal experience here. Because the body is complicated, I think that's worth more than science. But you've got to be careful

> I'm certainly not discounting personal experience here. Because the body is complicated, I think that's worth more than science. But you've got to be careful about your biases. An interesting personal anecdote about this: I used to eat that instant Ramen stuff all the time when I was in my 20s. At some point I started getting migraines and I was able to correlate the triggering of them with eating the Ramen (lots of other things triggered them, too). That led me to investigate MSG and become a little paranoid about eating things with it—I figured I might actually have some sensitivity to it. Later I got diagnosed with hypertension and started taking pills to control that. And once I was on the medication I noticed that I wasn't getting migraines any more. At this point I'm reasonably sure that all my migraines were caused by high blood pressure. In fact, the one or two times I've gotten migraine-ish headaches (nothing ever as bad as I used to get) I've taken my blood pressure and it was high. So now I'm thinking that the MSG wasn't causing the headaches directly, but it was raising my blood pressure. Or maybe it wasn't actually the MSG doing that, since that Ramen stuff also has a ton of salt in it. Anyway, our bodies are complicated machines and they're all tuned a little different.