Newest Venture

I have an online friend who has been talking about excitotoxins for awhile now, and I finally looked into it for myself. After some serious discussion, Josh and I have decided to begin leaving them out of our diet as well.
What is an excitotoxin? And why do we care? Wikipedia has a long definition: Excitotoxicity is the process by which cell death is produced in neurons by the overactivation of excitatory neurotransmitter receptors such as the NMDA receptor.Excitotoxins like NMDA and kainic acid which bind to these receptors can cause excitotoxicity, as can pathologically high levels of glutamate. Excitotoxicity may be involved in stroke.

Basically, the thing we're attempting to cut out of our diet is MSG and anything else it is called. You can see a list of that here. (click on "hidden names of MSG"). Glutamates are also found in hard cheeses, tomato paste, and some other things, but MSG is the biggest culprit. It's not just in Chinese food, either; almost anything processed has it in it, in some form!

I'm hoping it will eliminate Josh's headaches. I don't think I have anything specific to see an improvement on (because I'm perfect ;) ) but I'm excited that it means we'll be eating more natural, healthy foods from here on out. To do this, we've started eating a lot more foods from scratch, and having a lot more fruits and vegetables.

In case you're at all interested, and for my own sake so I can look back at this later, I'm going to start a list of "normal" foods that we can still enjoy.

Life Cereal (just the normal one, not the variations)
Puffed Wheat, Puffed Rice cereals
Shredded Wheat, Shr. Wheat with Cinnamon
Coffee
Reece's Peanut Butter Cups
Turkey Hill "Natural" Ice Cream (I don't know how local this brand is)
pasta
chicken
turkey
eggs
milk
mozzarella
co-jack cheese
rice
bread (the more natural, healthy ones; I haven't looked at Wonderbread because we don't eat that anyways!)

...

I'll add more as I find them. We've been eating more and more organic and "natural" food anyways; this just pushes us more quickly in that direction.

This isn't intended as a lecture; just thought I'd share what we've been reading/learning about for the past few weeks.