Can You Spot Neurotoxins On Your Food Labels?

Can You Spot Neurotoxins On Your Food Labels?

A few years ago, I was taking my turn running the snack bar at the baseball field, during one of my son’s high school games.

(It’s not a task I relish, selling poison to children, but it’s a requirement, of the baseball parents.)

A father at the game thought GreenSmoothieGirl selling Snickers bars and soda was a riot. He showed me his bag of caramel rice cakes and asked me if they qualified to hit my nutritional standards.

I told him, “If you look at this table, I bet you can’t guess what my pick for WORST snack is.”

Here, I’ll tell you the options and you can guess. Laffy Taffy, Snickers, Hershey’s Chocolate, 3 Musketeers, Red Vines, Roasted Peanuts, Salted Nut Bar, Spitz Sunflower Seeds, Fruit Snacks.

He said, “Well, it’s not the peanuts.”


He guessed Laffy Taffy. Nope. (It’s awful, of course, but there’s even worse.)

MSG, deadly neurotoxinsIt’s the Spitz Sunflower Seeds (Dill or Barbecue flavor). They’re full of MSG, a deadly neurotoxin.

I’d take sugar, over that substance, any day. (And you know what I think of sugar.) And I’ll tell you why–related to a painful learning experience in college.

MSG (monosodium glutamate, a flavor enhancer) is the worst neurotoxin in our food supply, it belongs nowhere in the diet of children, or anyone who cares about their brain and nervous system.

MSG is in cream-of-whatever soups, Doritos, ramen noodles, commercial salad dressings and dressing mixes, and thousands of packaged foods.

What do MSG and other neurotoxins do?

I ate Top Ramen and bananas, as my staples, throughout my sophomore year of college.

MSG, deadly neurotoxinsNot only were these foods cheap, but I was without a car until the following year, and I could carry a bag of groceries from the store to my apartment.

I’ve never been sicker, than that year that I ate Top Ramen every night for dinner. I found myself falling off the sidewalk as I’d walk to school, with terrible vertigo. And I kept getting viral and bacterial infections. I was also having chronic, debilitating headaches.

It took the whole year to connect my bizarre and worsening symptoms to the MSG in the Top Ramen seasoning packets. Ramen noodles, made of white flour, refined salt, and MSG aren’t something I would ever eat now. Or feed my family.

Sure, Top Ramen costs $0.25 each ($0.10 back then), but the savings weren’t worth the lost days spent in bed, ill or with headaches, unable to catch up from the classes I was missing, not to mention the money I spent at the Student Health Center trying to figure out what was wrong with me.

These neurological symptoms are common in people who eat MSG or other neurotoxins in the processed food supply.

Studies on MSG eaten during pregnancy showed that it crosses the placental barrier. The resulting offspring had neuron death and damages typical of adults eating MSG–damage that affects the ability to learn, remember, balance, and process information coming from other nerves in the body. (1, 2)

Neurotoxins have a wide range of effects, depending on what area of the brain they damage, and how many brain cells they kill.

Headaches and dizziness like I had are common, but so are mood disorders, sleep issues, behavioral problems, cognitive impairment, reduced motor skills, and even seizures.

deadly neurotoxinsAnd there are a lot of different neurotoxins in our food supply, usually as flavorings or preservatives.  Besides MSG, there are nitrites in cured meats, artificial sweeteners like sucralose, aspartame, and saccharine, and Bisphenol A (BPA) in plastic containers and lining the inside of canned goods.

Aspartame, a chemical sweetener with a brand name of Nutrasweet, and MSG, are probably the most well documented, and ubiquitous, food additives that cause neurological damage.

(Don’t worry about remembering all the names of these chemicals–I’ve got a great gift for you that you can print out and stick in your wallet, for when you shop. This way, you can remember what to look for, and avoid it!)

Why are neurotoxins allowed in our food?

I do not subscribe to the idea that the FDA acts in the interests of public health and protects us. That’s another topic entirely, but for instance, it’s the FDA that approved and continues to allow MSG on the market, which can now be called by several other names to hide it in food labeling.

(Again, don’t worry–I’ve got a wallet card for you, to educate you about all the ingredients to avoid.)

The U.S. government’s FDA also approved aspartame and refuses to remove its endorsement, despite hundreds of thousands of health-related complaints.

(This is just one example of thousands of chemical drugs or food additives that were well known, for many years, to cause major health problems, with our government refusing to protect us, with labeling laws or outright bans.)

A number of former FDA executives are on record saying that what you THINK the FDA does, and what it actually does, may be two very different things.

My point is, whether or not the FDA approved something is close to irrelevant. Even if you ignore the egregious conflicts of interest the head of the FDA and her minions have, even if you believe it to be a clean organization operating only in the interests of public health rather than Big Pharma’s and Big Food’s interests, it’s a massively overworked workforce that cannot keep up with requests and approvals.

It’s up to you and me to take charge of our own health, to be educated about where the dangers lie and how to avoid them.

How to avoid neurotoxins in food

I’ve written before about the environmental neurotoxins typical in the US and other industrialized countries–they can be tough to avoid.

But we have a lot more control over whether we ingest neurotoxic food additives. It’s not always as simple as looking at a food label, though, because food manufacturers use a lot of different names to sneak these chemicals into an ingredient list.

MSG, for instance, can be known by 12 names other than “monosodium glutamate.”

Watch out for these neurotoxic ingredients on food labels (and get the printable card I made for you, so you have a portable list to put in your wallet):

Neurotoxins chart

I’ve got all this information compiled for you, on a printable wallet card.  I’d love to send it to you–you can print it as many times as you like–make a few and give them to other people you love.

Get it here!

(Don’t want to print?  Let me do it for you!  This wallet card, along with 9 other health shortcuts and cheatsheets, is included in the Genius Guides!)



1. Gao J, Wu J, Zhao XN, Zhang WN, Zhang YY, Zhang ZX. “Transplacental neurotoxic effects of monosodium glutamate on structures and functions of specific brain areas of filial mice.” Acta Physiological Sinica. 1994. 46 pp 44-51

2. Gill S, Barker M, Pulido O.  “Neuroexcitatory Targets in the Female Reproductive System of the Nonhuman Primate.” Toxicologic Pathology. 2008. 36(3) pp 478-484

19 thoughts on “Can You Spot Neurotoxins On Your Food Labels?

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  1. GSG…haven’t gotten your emails/newsletters in quite a while. Glad to see you’ve resumed. You’re a breath or two of fresh air in our toxic world with your common sense approach. Hope you keep pounding the message to people…YOU’RE responsible for your health, not any gov’t organization that is rife with conflicts of interest. Case in point, the current head of the FDA, who just moved over from CEO position with Big Pharma. Talk about the fox being in charge of the henhouse….

  2. hi, regarding toxins…. I was wondering what is wrong with Truvia since Stevia is good and truvia is made by distilling Stevia. Please explain why it is on the bad list for sweeteners.

  3. If I can’t afford organic, I give thanks to the Lord for what’s in my plate. He’s stronger than any MSG…

    1. Yes he’s stronger than MSG however we can’t just sit back and expect God to do everything! He gave us brains to use and expects us to treat our bodies like His temples. If we know something is unhealthy for us, it’s up to us to choose to not ingest it. He won’t magically take away MSG 🙂

    2. fortunatley the msg doesnt grow in food. it has to be put there so even if you don’t eat organic whole food you wont be getting msg. use the list of foods that have the least pesticides.

  4. Years ago when I was renting by myself, used to eat noodles with vegetables. Wondered why I always had headaches and didn’t feel very well. Turns out noodles laden with MSG.


  6. Laffy Taffy is entirely made of sugar-sweetened hydrogenated oil with artificial colors. Decidedly worse for you than a bit of MSG (though that’s bad too). The Institute of Medicine says there is “no safe level” of trans fats to consume… and that is ALL a stick of Laffy Taffy is made of.

  7. Years ago I had horrible, debilitating abdominal pain, and found out it was from adding nutritional yeast to my morning smoothie. A few months later the pain returned but I’d long since given up that yeast. What could it be? It was my whey protein powder used in my smoothie. That didn’t have any of the MSG names on the label, but I gave it up and switched to pea protein powder. A few days later, the same abdominal pain returned, and again, it was the protein powder, even though it didn’t have any of the MSG names on the label. The chemist in me was curious. Turns out that the process used to dry most protein powders involves heat which partially breaks down the protein; glutamate is one of the byproducts of that breakdown. I’ve since tested egg and other protein powders and they all cause that abdominal pain for me. I now use coddled egg or homemade cottage cheese for the protein in my smoothies.

  8. Could you tell me the name of the shower head that filters chlorine, please? Nobody in Madison, WI seems to know of one and I learned about the fact that they exist from you. Thank you GSG!

  9. What is your take on fluoridated water? I live in NYC, the water is fluoridated. I’ve been recently diagnosed with some kind of lymphoma. Charlotte Gerson says you can’t get well if your are drinking or even bathing in fluoridated water. I have switched to bottled water for drinking, but bathing is a whole other story.\

    I don’t have the funds to buy any filtering or water purification gismos.

    1. If you want a water filter for drinking get a Berkey filter system…they are expensive, but we’ll worth it!

    2. any charcoal filter will take fluoride out. they are fairly inexpensive and attach to your kitchen faucet. bottled water has its own problems caused by the plastic.

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