Ramen Anyone? ^_^

[Andromeda18_]

Health isn't the government's problem. That's like blaming McDonald's for making people fat. If you don't want MSG, avoid it.

I have to disagree with you on this one.

It really isn't McDonald's fault or the government's business if people get fat because of their food. It's widely known fast food makes people fat and when it comes to hyper-caloric food no one's to blame except the person who chooses to eat it. But the main thing here is that hyper-caloric food doesn't really kill anyone, it's eating it too much that does the trick. A person could eat McDonald's once or even twice a week without any nasty effects. If that person were to get fat it wouldn't be because of eating McDonald's, it would be because of an overall unhealthy lifestyle. I spent most of 2003 eating all sorts of fast food about 4 times a week, yet because I ate healthily the rest of the time I didn't put on a single pound. The ones who get fat because of McDonald's are the ones who eat it non-stop. I once watched a show about children's obesity and a girl there ate McDonald's every single day, many times more than once a day. What with all the unhealthy stuff she was eating, and eating too much, no wonder she was obese.

Now when it comes to substances such as MSG the case is different. It's the responsability of each country's government to insure no toxic, cancer-inducing, etc, substances are used in food products. Why? Because such substances are bad for a person's health in a way hyper-caloric food isn't. Calories, whether too much or too little, are natural in food, toxic substances aren't. If you get fat you can lose weight therefore greatly reducing the negative effects of obesity. But when it comes to such toxic substances, many times consuming them once or twice is enough to harm you and there's no going back. No unhealthy, unnatural substances should be added to food and the government must make sure it doesn't happen. The FDA exists for a reason.
The government is responsible for it's citizens and is perhaps the only organism with enough power to supervise companies and stop them from adding such substances to food. It's also the only organism with the power to legislate the use of those substances.
When you say that people should just avoid it you truly show you don't know how hard that would be. Unfortunately, in our day and age, just about every food product has some sort of unnatural substance. It starts in the chemicals used in agriculture and goes all the way to food processing. Perhaps the only way of eating natural, unaltered food is eating only products of biological agriculture and cooking all of your food but unfortunately the production of biological agriculture isn't enough for everyone.