Electric Chopsticks Stimulate Tastebuds So The Food Doesn't Have To

Why is it that the tastiest foods are often the least healthy, and the healthiest foods the least delectable? The fact of the matter is that unhealthy foods typically contain something that, in limited quantities (limited being the key word here), our bodies need to survive. Salt is a perfect example. As the Harvard School of Public Health reveals, we are biologically programmed to crave sodium because we need it to conduct nerve impulses, regulate muscle movements, and balance water and mineral levels. Salt even causes our brains to release dopamine, which is why, according to Healthline, we often crave salty foods when we're stressed. In the right quantities, salt is good for you, but it's easy to overdo it.

Eating too much salt can wreak havoc on your body. Harvard explains that excess sodium levels lead the body to retain more water, increasing the volume of our bloodstream and placing great strain on our blood vessels. This can cause high blood pressure, heart problems, and strokes. WebMD adds that eating too much salt can cause dehydration, weight gain, and nausea, which is why we need to carefully regulate our sodium intake. The problem is that salt tastes so darn good. Not only that, but salt also enhances other flavors such as sweet, sour, and umami (via BBC Science Focus). Cutting more salt from your diet has inevitably come at the expense of flavor, but a Japanese research team has devised a way around this problem: electric chopsticks.

Homei Miyashita, a professor at Meiji University, grew concerned with Japan's sodium intake. According to VICE, the average Japanese consumes twice the recommended amount of salt daily, and high blood pressure affects more than a quarter of the country's population. Miyashita, backed by beverage maker Kirin, searched for a way to create low-sodium foods that do not sacrifice flavor, and ultimately devised a method that has nothing to do with the food itself. In April 2022, he unveiled a pair of chopsticks that electrically stimulate diners' tastebuds in order to trick them into tasting more salt than the dish really contains.

According to The Guardian, the chopsticks use a weak electrical current (too weak to have a discernible effect on the body) to transmit sodium ions from food directly to the tongue, ensuring that every molecule of sodium can be tasted. Clinical trials indicated that the chopsticks enhance salty flavors by around 1.5 times, and improve the "richness, sweetness, and overall tastiness" of low-sodium foods. Functionally, they are no different than a regular pair of chopsticks, except that one of the sticks has a metal tip, and is attached to a tiny computer worn around the diner's wrist. Reuters reports that, pending a few refinements, Miyashita hopes to release his electric chopsticks to the public sometime in 2023.

Using a clever analogy for the electric chopsticks, Gizmodo likens them to a set of VR goggles that can trick your eyes into seeing things that aren't there. As it turns out, Homei Miyashita is no stranger to this world of 'tastebud VR,' and his electric chopsticks aren't even the wildest thing he's invented in the last few years. In December 2021, Reuters reported that Miyashita created a device called "Taste the TV (TTTV) — a lickable television screen that allows viewers to become tasters. It uses a carousel of canisters filled with different flavoring agents which are then sprayed in various combinations onto a hygienic film that sits over a flat TV screen. Miyashita wants to use it in virtual training for chefs and sommeliers. He also believes the technology could be used to apply the taste of unhealthy, indulgent foods to healthier, but blander ones.

In 2020, a year before unveiling TTTV, Miyashita created the "Norimaki Synthesizer," a similar device that uses five agar-based gels to simulate the five tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (via Gizmodo). They're all contained in a handpiece coated in copper so that when the user presses the gels to their tongue, it creates an electrical circuit through their body. This facilitates a process called electrophoresis, whereby molecules within each of the gels can be moved closer to or further from the user's tongue, modulating the intensity of the five flavors.