>>20920328well glutamic acid, glutamate, is the nice tasting stuff found in tomatoes and potatoes. mostly tomatoes. it tastes very good cause it's basically glutamine which your body needs. one of the 9 essential amino acids that you get from food. but also, glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter. people who have anxiety tend to drink alcohol, which inhibits glutamate and promotes GABA in the brain. if you have excessive amounts of glutamate in your system it can, at least in some people (including me), oversaturate the glutamate in your brain causing a 'chemical imbalance' between glutamate and GABA, leading to anxiety. it also got isolated and sold in a salt form as (mono)sodium glutamate, the famous 'MSG', and added excessively to food to make it taste better. doing this of course makes the imbalance of essential acids even more pronounced as the food its added to doesn't always supply any of the other 8 or anything at all for that matter whether vitamins or minerals your body needs for proper functioning. high glutamate diets got introduced to the old world due to the 'columbian exchange'. given potatoes & tomatoes are new world crops it's safe to say old worlders have low or no tolerance for such high levels of the stuff (given it's such a recent change on the evolutionary scale. bread is 10,000+ years old for instance but tomatoes in our diets only about 300. the salt-form 'flavor enhancer' in our diets is about 100 years old).
