Mouth sensor can measure the salt in every potato chip you eat

If you’re one of the approximately 36 million adults in the United States with high blood pressure (also called hypertension), your doctor may have lectured you about the importance of reducing your sodium intake. Maybe you listened, and maybe you even intended to follow your doctor’s advice. But sodium, the primary component of table salt, is everywhere in our modern diets—in snack foods, in restaurant meals, even in beverages—and your good intentions probably didn’t get you very far. To tackle this problem, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have invented a flexible electronic sensor that can be embedded in a dental retainer for real-time monitoring of sodium intake. The device, which they described in the journal PNAS, could send info to your phone, giving you instant data about whether you’re busting your low-sodium diet. More