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Electric Fork Simulates a Salty Flavor By Shocking Your Tongue (med.news.am)
An anonymous reader writes: It's common knowledge that excess sodium can be detrimental to one's health. So researchers in Japan have built a prototype electric fork that uses electrical stimulation to stimulate the taste of salt. The battery-powered fork was engineered and designed at the University of Tokyo's Rekimoto Lab. It features a conductive handle that completes a circuit when the tines make contact with a diner's tongue, electrically stimulating their taste buds. The prototype fork, which was built from just $18 worth of electronics, creates a sensation of both salty and sour, and has adjustable levels of stimulation.
Of this device electrocuting you?
coming soon: fridge with tazer
That not enough sodium in your diet can be detrimental to one's health.
And more importantly, not enough Iodine, depending on location, can be pretty bad also.
Bring on the Iodised salt!
Come on people, is it that complicated? everything in moderation, and a well rounded and balanced diet?
Of course, if they can invent a Chocolate fork... I suspect they will do well.
In my foolish youth, I once touched the leads of a 9-volt battery to my tongue. I figured that the current would go from one lead to another, and not through any part of my body except the tip of my tongue, so it was safe. (The problem with that is that saliva is a good conductor, so even at 9V there is a potential for a massive amount of current to enter your body. Don't try this at home!)
In the end, I suffered no injury, but I did feel what I remember as a bitter taste in my tongue.
It seems like every 10-15 years, dietary and health science finds a new boogeyman or two. At one time, fat was considered the devil. Cholesterol was a common target, too. Now, we're being told that fat and cholesterol aren't that bad for you. Instead, we're being told to avoid salt and sugar. I bet we'll soon be told they're not bad for us, either. Buying a fork that simulates the taste of salt might be a fad now, but it'll probably be a useless trinket in 15 years. The only science with a worse record on their predictions is climate science and everything they say about global warming. Dietary science is full of scams. We're told that we should be juicing, which supposedly involves slicing up food into pieces that are small enough to release more nutrients at the molecular level. Of course, this is complete BS. We're sold products that are supposed to make our bodies more alkaline, especially in the bloodstream. In fact, the body buffers the blood to remain at a pH around 7.4, and variations from that would be quite harmful. There's just so much BS that it's hard to take anything seriously except the most basic of things like eating plenty of fruits and vegetables and trying to balance the intake and burning of calories. Just about everything else is BS, and the bacteria in the gut are probably far more important than the salt content of foods.
when I was a kid I wore braces. I also tested batteries with my tongue. One day I decided to connect a 9V battery (the one with the poles side by side) with my braces, to see what will happen. One pole on the upper side, the other on the bottom. There was a big shock, my field of vision became bright white for a split second, and I never tested batteries with any part of my face ever again.
how can this be into the news today ?!?
Based on your used ID I see you took an abnormally large time to read your first post here but I guess you had your reasons. Anyway, Welcome to Slashdot! \o/
When I was a kid, I checked if 4.5V and 9V batteries were OK just by "tasting" them with my tongue: if the tasted salty they were ok. It was a common practice among my friends, so how can this be into the news today ?!?
The problem is that to a lot of people, DC doesn't taste salty. It gives an electric tingle (1.5V) up to electric pain (9V). There's no mistaking a current for salty for many of us.
And even for those who "taste" current as salty, it doesn't linger, and doesn't spread around the mouth, so it's not like salt at all.
In post-lost-decades Japan, cattle prods you.
ISTR hearing about new research showing that the amount of salt in your diet has little to no effect on coronary heart disease.
While we're on the subject, the amount of fat in your diet has been shown to have no effect on blood cholesterol levels.
Not that I'm suggesting you consume salt by the bucketful or anything.
If I don't want to eat radioactive food, EVERYONE knows to avoid the Insta-Mash, the Fancy Lads Snack Cakes, the Dandy Boy Deviled Eggs, and similar.
See your Vault-Tec Vault Dweller's Survival Guide for more details. . .
There's a lot of cynics here, but this kind of thing is great for someone who needs sodium regulation, especially the elderly. Simulated taste could also help a lot of people work towards a healthier lifestyle.
If you look at the labs homepage you see they're doing all kinds of things related to human augmentation, telepresence and human-machine interaction. The stuff ranges from the silly ("hoverball": use a small drone as an active ball in sports) to the useful ("Expressive typing": read the accelerometer in hard drives to estimate keyboard typing force). This fork is probably more about exploring what is possible to achieve rather than trying to solve a particular problem.
With that said, there are people that really can't eat salt; some people with kidney diseases for instance. For such people, this may help make their food a bit more palatable.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I assumed this was a joke, but apparently it's a pretty common thing for kids to do.
Would this not just make the fork taste salty? Once the food is deposited and you start chewing, the salty flavour will be gone and your food will feel like it needs salt.
Isn't this exactly why we like the Japanese? It's not just the cute style of cartooning or the way their lounge singers can imitate Elvis, no, it's not just the Tamagotchi or Paro the interactive "healing pet" seal, no it's not even Hello Kitty or Pikachu or the slightly scary Funassyi. What it is, is *kawaii*, Japanese for 'cute'.
Nobody asked for these things. They don't fill a need. But they make the world a better place.
...omphaloskepsis often...
sodium glutamate, used in combination with table salt, can significantly reduce the amount of sodium required to properly season a dish.
Of course 78% of donald trump supporters are allergic to soudium glutamate rofl
Unless this is a reference that flew over my head, because I find hearing Trump say things very depressing, and avoid it when possible, I'm not sure you're being fair to fans of Mister Silly the Circus Monkey. Say what you will about Trump and his supporters (I certainly do), but I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that if you did a survey, you'd find that significantly fewer of them report food allergies than people on the other side of the political spectrum. It's a big world, and there's more than enough idiocy to go around.
You may actually be thinking instead of Trump supporters' attitude toward the eradication of polio and other crippling and/or lethal diseases via a campaign of universal vaccination. Turns out they're against it.
But what of the electric spoon?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429935-000-food-bland-electric-spoon-zaps-taste-into-every-bite/
Did they not think to patent the E-fork as well?
The electric knife is quite another thing altogether... but maybe electric chopsticks?
There's already a long thread about how likely this device would be to kill you (the consensus seems to be "not very, unless you're holding it in your mouth while BASE jumping"). But I'm wondering whether regular use would do some sort of permanent damage to the taste buds. Like, after you use it for a couple of years, you can no longer really taste salt under any circumstances.
I am not a neurologist.
I'll wait until they have a miniaturized version that can be built-in in a piercing stud for the tongue, to make everything taste sweet, or sour or umami or salty, selectable by smartphone.
Perhaps we will have downloadable tastes for any crap we want to eat.
Does it feel like putting your tongue on a nine volt battery?
Wow. Just wow.
Absolute elimination of stray voltage from livestock buildings has been the (sometimes elusive) goal of electrical designers for as long as livestock buildings have been supplied with electricity, and now we're inducing tingle voltages on purpose??
I guess cows know to stop drinking when they feel the tingle of electricity. People? Not so much...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
"It's common knowledge that excess sodium can be detrimental to one's health."
Actually, wrong, except in the absolute form of "too much" is "too much". The reality is different people have different sensitivities to sodium. Recent research shows that for some people it is a problem while for others it is not a problem.
Our taste buds didn't originally exist for our pleasure, they were to tell the body about the food entering it, and it is still that way. If you give someone an artificial sweetener they will produce insulin. Our brains evolved to like some foods so that we would eat them. Artificial sweeteners mess up your response, and I would imagine what artificial salt taste sensations will mess us up in some similar way. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... Just eat a reasonable amount of salt, sugar, fat, etc.
So many flavors to choose from, and they chose to make it salty.
Mmmm...everything tastes like chocolate!
I would eat more salad, for sure...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Forks that make make crappy food taste like salt!
Could this tech be added to dildo's possibly for flavor or other functions? LOL
Sorry my mind went into the gutter as soon as they mentioned "salty flavor" lol
For about a decade most nutritional science has agreed that there is no real harm to consuming the amount of salt that is common in the western diet. Of course most doctors don't read science journals and thus continue to tell people to reduce salt intake. Personally I'd be much more afraid of what this might do to my taste buds then I would be concerned about consuming the salt that makes the food taste good.
OK, chips are supposed to, but I mean food that you eat with a fork.
One reason you cook with salt is that it suppresses bitter flavors. Electronically stimulating the taste buds might trigger a salty taste, but I wonder what it will do for suppressing bitter.
Nope, no sig
You mean that same salty/sour tingle you get when you put your tongue on a 9V battery? This is supposed to satiate a need for salt?
morons
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I used to take a small battery and a step-up transformer and connect the high-voltage side to my little brother's funny bone and amuse myself by making his arm jump. He went on to a successful career in electronics. And I? Here I am posting on Slashdot.
Raw ingredients don't have "manufacturers." If you think eating healthy means buying the hipster organic processed food, you're doing it wrong.
If you think "eating healthy" is grammatically correct, you're an idiot.
You want an adverb after "eating", and the one you want is "healthily". Eat healthily is what you do when you eat healthful food. Note that you don't eat healthy food, as healthy food is food that is (itself) in good health. (Unless you're eating live, healthy things - in which case I'd argue they cease to be healthy once they pass your lips.)
Further, "doing it wrong" is incorrect as well. You want "doing it incorrectly" or perhaps "doing it wrongly". A case could be made for "doing it wrong" if you mean committing an injustice (a wrong) to something (it), but that wasn't your meaning.