A study done by scientists at the University of North Carolina's Chapel Hill School of Public Health found that people who consumed foods containing MSG were more likely than people who didn't use it to be overweight, even if the two groups exercised the same amount of time and consumed the same number of calories.
The study was published this month in the journal Obesity.
"Animal studies have indicated for years that MSG might be associated with weight gain," said Ka He, M.D., assistant professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the UNC School of Public Health. "Ours is the first study to show a link between MSG use and weight in humans."
Because MSG is most commonly used in processed foods in America, but not by home cooks, researchers at UNC and in China studied 750 men and women in China where MSG is commonly added to food by people when they cook at home, to avoid having results skewed by processed foods.
Researchers studied participants living in three rural villages. Because 82 percent of the people used MSG in cooking their food, researchers divided the 750 participants into three groups based on how much MSG they used.
They found that the individuals who consumed the most MSG were the three times more likely than individuals in the other two groups to be obese. Researchers say that as more people become obese.
