Dear fellow Aspartame sufferers,
I have started this as a post on the Candida Debate Forum #8.
I have had symptoms for years and found out the hard way that both Mono-Sodium-Glutamat (Natrium Glutamat) and Aspartame made them worse. The problem as you most probably know is to detect hidden MSG. As soon as I was feeling better, I got poisoned by an unsuspected source.
I would have done anything to be able to buy strips (like those used for evaluation of PH balance) for testing Mono-Sodium-Glutamat (Natrium Glutamat) presence in restaurants. As Mono-Sodium-Glutamat (Natrium Glutamat) and Aspartame use grew, I reduced my ambitions and would have been grateful just to have a way of testing stuff at home (other than by eating it and being sick afterwards!!). I was even considering sponsoring someone to develop a MSG detecting portable chemical test. I am not a scientist by training so I couldn't do it myself. My project was scheduled for end 2006 when I had decided to take a six-months visit to a country where brains and time were cheaper. I was desperate, so as must be a lot of people at the moment.
Whilst all this was happening, normal life was going on. Every week my brother would come to visit me, and since I cannot eat in a restaurant, I cooked for him the food our mother used to cook for us. My brother is very dependent on MSG and aspartame. So I had to supply some heavily dosed chocolate at the end of the meal otherwise he would go on eating ravenously and he would be nervous.
About eight months ago, it happened that I was very late in my schedule for the day of my brother's visit and so was unable to cook a sweet dish for the end of the meal. So I prepared a plate of sweets and cakes, taking away the wrappings to give it a nice look. Less than one third of the items on the plate contained MSG, the rest were my own choice of MSG free. At home I normally only have MSG free food (so I thought!), except for my brother's chocolate kept for his visits. But some friends had dropped in the day before bearing gifts so I put those on the plate too.
My brother immediately picked an MSG laden item. I watched fascinated as his hand unerringly shot towards the MSG stuff. When he had eaten all of the MSG items, he took an MSG free one, ate it then stopped.
How can this be? I thought. How could he choose the MSG stuff, given that I had never offered him these items before (choice of my friends)? They were a very distinct minority on the plate.
The following weeks, I tried this again with appetizers and so on. I refined the procedure and offered plates with only 10% of the items containing MSG. He always chose the MSG food first.

Now, if an addict can feel the presence of the drug WITHOUT trying it first, it must mean than in thousands of supermarkets all around the world, millions of hands rise towards the MSG laden products! The mind boggles. I thought : this is hopeless, we are never going to win the MSG fight. The MSG poisoners know this, even if only empirically, and this is why they add MSG to their products. It boosts the sales even more than they know!
Well, I am a very determined person and do not take things lying down. Immediately after I thought : If an MSG addict can detect the presence of his drug in that way, why can't I? Instead of waiting for the MSG detector/test, why couldn't I detect the presence of MSG just as my brother has done? It isn't as though my body is not aware of the stuff!
During the following night I was quite agitated by what had happened and I had a very vivid dream. To cut it short I dreamt at one point that I was detecting the presence of MSG with a pendulum. I had never used one before so the following morning I looked around on the Internet to get some directions. Without much hope I tried it on the food in the house.
BINGO! It works. I don't know how, but it works. It is incredibly accurate.

How do I know it is?
- My husband is also an MSG victim and we tested everything independently and found the same results. (We now do not bother to test twice, but one of us tests ALL food, beverages, medicines, toileteries that come into the house (the one that brings stuff in does the testing). There was both aspartame and MSG hidden in stuff I was using, even fresh vegetables!!!!!!!)
- Some of the items that tested positive even though nothing on the label indicated they would (even under these fancy names) were manufactured. I conducted longer enquiries from manufacturers and got results : MSG or aspartame every time I received an answer.
- The proof is in the pudding. We are both feeling better than we have done in YEARS. We have started nicely shedding weight, and our health problems are receding and no more CFS, no more fibromyalgia etc as you can guess.

A bit unorthodox, but so what? I was ready to spend a fortune on this test project and in the end all it costs is a bit of harm to my rational preconceptions. Of course the rational part of me also thinks : it is all very scientific it just "looks" weird. There must be some scientific explanation for this.
AND the good part is, I don't have to prove all this in a court of law. Nobody can refuse me the right NOT to buy something. And there is no money at all involved in my method! In spreading the word I am not identifying a particular product so not harming directly the sales of that product.

I haven't yet graduated to pulling out my pendulum in restaurants though. Partly because I don't want to look crazy, but mainly because I think that there is no hope. ALL restaurant food is full of MSG/aspartame.
My dream was to sponsor the making of an MSG detector/test for myself and had intended to publish the result of my research on the Internet to allow fellow sufferers to lead a normal life. A kind of truth in labelling in reverse where WE could read through the label.

I did not want to inform other people of my discovery before both I and my husband had completely recovered. After ten days of ABSOLUTELY no MSG as you know, there is a marked difference. We could really embark in strategies for healing ourselves that worked, because there was no subsequent poisoning.
I must emphasize than we feel great BUT if we are obliged to eat MSG (because eating at a friend's place - a bit hard to tell them, no thanks, we don't want to eat the food you have prepared!) we start feeling the pain.

Once we have been poisoned, what can we do about it? The problem of detection being solved, and I feeling more energetic than ever and ready to pick up the fight again, this is the next frontier I was dreaming of.
Somehow I do not think it is feasable to find an antidote to MSG poisoning. At one point I was all for it, but I realize, now I have a real choice to take or not take MSG with my special Truth in Label Reading, that an antidote would most probably be worse than the poison. We do not want to tinker with the brain EVEN MORE.
Unless I find a natural way to do this, of course. I haven't given up yet.

That same industry which is spreading the poison around is feverishly looking for the antidote! Then they would only spread more MSG around and make us pay twice.
Wouldn't it be nice to blast their hopes!!! Maybe unrealistic but I am staring to believe in miracles!

I want to thank all at http://www.msgmyth.com,http://www.truthinlabeling.org and at http://www.nomsg.com (which was the site that put me on the track years ago). You have saved my life and my husband's. All the information you have provided has led me to this. Keep up the good fight and feel free to spread my method of detection around. As you must have guessed by now, I am not from the USA and I do not know how proposing my detection test to an American public would sound. At least try it for yourselves. Good luck and health to all and thanks again to all that have posted information on the subject.:) :) :) :)
P.S. : For those who have no idea of how to use a oendulum, I have answered the question at
//www.curezone.org/forums/m.asp?f=460&i=22970