Glutamate - Tasty and Healthy?

Would you describe the ingredient glutamate? Hardly, glutamate is not long negatively afflicted in the general Volkermund. Rightly? This article does away with the prejudices and errors surrounding glutamate.

Glutamate in food

Tasty and healthy - these are the two demands that most of our people make on their daily bread. Daily bread refers to the approximately 1.3 kg of food that migrates an average of one day out into the stomach of a healthy, adult human. If the purse is not overburdened with the purchase of this tasty and healthy food and thus no bad feeling in the epigastrium, the man and his stomach are usually satisfied. But when is our food tasty and healthy?

Since tastes are known to be different, we will not even deal with the first aspect. We would much rather deal with the question: When is our food healthy? Or better: when is our food actually unhealthy? A question that can be answered very quickly according to today's opinion. Have you dealt extensively with this topic in recent years.


Flavor enhancers and glutamates, these are the ingredients that we like to miss in a good kitchen these days. We have progressed from a time in which the magic magical Maggi-Fondor and Maggi-spice landed almost in every saucepan and was also vigorously spiced with it again to table. Today, the two charms remain due to their flavor enhancers monosodium glutamate and disodium often sad and abandoned on the supermarket shelf. But there are also other foods, where we have encountered after critical examination of the list of ingredients on one of these flavor enhancers.

? Umami?

The opposite is found in Japanese cuisine, where glutamate, lovingly called? Umami? (savory) is a commonly used ingredient. In the western kitchen, however, glutamate has long been in the general sense of the word or, in this case, it is more likely to affect the palate negatively. Rightly? Not necessarily, considering that humans themselves carry free and protein-bound glutamate in themselves or that we often unconsciously take glutamate as a natural flavor enhancer! For example, only last Sunday in Muttis hearty Sunday roast or in a, at this time of year usual chicken soup. Here, when stewing the roast or cooking the chicken bones, we release the glutamate bound in the food proteins.

Natural occurrence

But there are also foods in their original form naturally present glutamic acid (amino acid, protein component) in the form of glutamates, especially the Parmesan. Followed by other foods such as Tomato, fish and soybean. Recognizing the advantage, these foods are used neat or in concentrated form for seasoning and refining, for example as tomato paste, fish or soy sauce. Because it is just this ingredient of natural glutamate that leaves the spicy and strong taste.

So we can and should not avoid the tasty glutamate in our kitchen according to this knowledge. Rather, we have to ask ourselves today if we have not wrongfully demonized glutamate in the past. Maybe we want it more lovingly in the future than? Umami? describe!

The Truth About MSG and Your Health | March 2024