TENAFLY — Carol Hoernlein says she "feels like Chicken Little sometimes."

But for her, it’s not the sky that’s falling. She has reason to believe that instead, it’s consumer food health standards that are threatening people worldwide.

The Tenafly councilwoman, a former food engineer, has had a litany of health problems that have plagued her since the early 1990s. She traces their origins back to working firsthand with food additives called excitotoxins — most notably monosodium glutamate, or MSG, and aspartame, which is found in NutraSweet.

Since having a spiraling ride of tumors, high blood pressure, weight gain, allergies and multiple surgeries after working with the substances firsthand, Hoernlein began her MSGTruth.org Web site in conjunction with other MSG watchers. In it, she has collected the research and data that has become a personal quest for her.

"I’ve been trying to tell this story for 16 years," she said.

Now, she is getting some help telling her story. She’s one of the featured interviews in a forthcoming documentary entitled "The Beautiful Truth" — a film about nutrition, a "lost" cure for cancer, and food additives which is set to debut at film festivals worldwide in 2008, and which is being compared favorably to the 2004 documentary "Super Size Me."

As Hoernlein describes in her segment of the movie, she actually shoveled MSG and aspartame as a food engineer intern at Thomas J. Lipton Co. and also worked taste tasting at that and other food-engineering jobs.

MSG was "discovered" and isolated from seaweed in 1908 by Japanese nutritionists. It wasn’t actually introduced to the United States until 1947, when it was brought back by returning GIs who raved about the compound’s flavor-enhancing qualities. Since then, it has come to be found in almost any prepared food — whether it’s fast-food hamburger restaurants, Asian cuisine or even canned soups.

For Hoernlein, MSG was never a main ingredient in her diet of Italian and Polish foods growing up in Bergenfield. However, in the years after her extensive work with the excitotoxins, she had major health problems she attributes to working with the ingredients. They started with elevating blood pressure — to the point that her doctors believed she was using illegal drugs. She wasn’t, and the difficulties multiplied. An ovarian cyst was followed by hormone imbalances, a pituitary tumor and inexplicable food allergies. Eventually, she gained 80 pounds fighting her various health battles, which continue to the present.

Steve Kroschel, the Alaskan naturalist and filmmaker behind "The Beautiful Truth," said Hoernlein’s first-hand insight on MSG and aspartame were integral to the movie’s narrative — but so was her spirit.

"She really is insightful," Kroschel said. "She continues to be afflicted, and that is tragic. But she has great optimism… she has a heart as big as Kansas."

Hoernlein appears in Kroschel’s movie, which just secured a distribution deal with Cinema Libré and which will eventually be at the Cannes and Tribeca film festivals. Hoernlein’s segment centers upon a radio interview by nurse and on-air personality Joyce Riley on the independent, Missouri-based radio show called "The Power Hour."

Hoernlein’s interview is only part of Kroschel’s son Garrett’s "home school lesson" in search of information on Dr. Max Gerson’s alternative cancer treatments and other little-known health information — such as information on the link between disease and mercury-based amalgam tooth fillings, and fluoridation of public water supplies.

But one of the integral moments of the movie comes during Hoernlein’s segment. Just prior to the interview she observes that the MSG, aspartame and general excitotoxin situation is even more dangerous than the cigarette and tobacco industry — because there is at least the choice to smoke or not to smoke. With food additives becoming more and more widespread in bought foods and menu choices at restaurants, that choice is not always so clear in the food that we eat, she says.

Riley, the host of the Power Hour show, even goes so far as to introduce Hoernlein to listeners as "our committee of one."

But Hoernlein still says she feels like "Chicken Little," with burgeoning amounts of glutamates invading food labels under different names — with the innocuous-sounding "hydrolized" and "isolated" proteins and other terms masking the glutamates that can touch off serious reactions in people over time. There has even been a link to it affecting rates of autism and the behavior of autistic children (in fact, Hoernlein herself has identified common effects between autism and side effects of MSG). However, the Food and Drug Administration’s ruling on MSG has deemed it "generally recognized as safe," even as studies show links between health problems and MSG.

Hoernlein herself is ahead of the game. While many consumers at large are only recently realizing the possible side effects of excitotoxins like MSG, she is spreading the news on her Web site. She routinely gets e-mails from people who have learned about their mysterious health problems from her site.

"I think if I had gone to a doctor we would still be going round and about what was wrong… Thank you so much," wrote one thankful person.

Soon, people will get her message from the big screen, via Kroschel’s movie and one of its most-prominent participants, who learned some health lessons the hard way, but wants to pass them along.

"If it tastes too good to be true, it probably is," Hoernlein said.