According to the FDA, the average American eats 3,400 mg of sodium per day, despite dietary guidelines for Americans recommending less than 2,300 mg per day. Going to roughly a teaspoon of table salt a day might make your taste buds cry with dullness, but what if you could get less salty satisfaction from your salt shaker and more from your utensil?
Japanese food, beverage and pharmaceutical company Kirin recently announced that it and a team of researchers have developed a “chopstick” that uses electrical stimulation to make food taste up to 50 percent saltier than it otherwise would.
The “device” qualifier here is probably because these aren’t your typical chopsticks. They have a cable that plugs into a power supply, making them bulkier than typical chopsticks and not the kind of utensil you’d expect on a free delivery job.
The chopstick, made by Meiji University researchers Dr. Homei Miyashita Laboratory at the Department of Frontier Media Science, School of Interdisciplinary Mathematical Sciences in collaboration with Kirin, uses what the team calls “electrical taste sensation,” which uses electricity so weak it “will not affect the human body.” , claimed Kirin’s April 11 announcement.
An earlier prototype.
Per Kirin, the electricity is “customize”[s] the function of ions such as sodium chloride (which is the basis of salty taste) and sodium glutamate (which is the basis of sweet taste), to alter the perception of taste by making food appear stronger or weaker.”
Image of the electrical stimulation waveform used.
The study included 36 people between the ages of 40 and 65. The researchers used the chopstick to compare observed saltiness of a food-imitating gel with 0.80 percent salt and another gel with 0.56 percent salt to represent a low-sodium food. Researchers then looked at the “perceived saltiness” of each.
“When tasting samples imitating low-sodium foods, the observed saltiness was increased 1.5-fold when the developed electrical stimulation waveform … was applied to the chopstick, compared to without electrical stimulation,” Kirin’s announcement said.
“In addition, the study confirmed that the intensity of the salty taste of the sample imitating low-sodium foods was the same as that of the sample imitating regular foods when electrical stimulation was applied… This suggests that when foods with 30 percent less salt are consumed , a device equipped with this technology can impart a salty taste similar to that of a regular meal.”
Bar chart of perceived salinity.
The researchers also used the device with “sodium-reduced miso soup,” but yielded no results. Kirin’s announcement also failed to note whether the researchers were examining how the chopstick affected subjects’ perception of the saltiness of foods without sodium.
According to Kirin, the technology could make its way to other types of tableware, such as spoons and tea bowls. Given the need for a power supply, they would need some extra storage space. But if there was one utensil that could make every bite of low-sodium food even more delicious, it might be worth clearing some room for it in your cupboard (how often do you actually use that blender?).
No plans have been shared to sell the chopstick or any other utensil using the technology. Instead, Kirin’s announcement vaguely indicated that she and Miyashita Laboratory plan to use the research “to provide both mental satisfaction through a richer perceived taste, as well as health benefits arising from nutritional aspects to those following a low-sodium diet.”
