Want to eat lots of salty potato chips without overdoing the salt? Frito-Lay thinks it has the answer. Apparently, because of the way salt crystals form, most of the salt you eat doesn’t have time to dissolve on your tongue — but instead is digested. Now Frito-Lay/PepsiCo, the maker of Lay’s potato chips, says it has redesigned salt to melt more efficiently — allowing them to cut back on the amount you eat without sacrificing taste.

“Early on in our research, it became apparent that the majority of salt on a snack doesn’t even have time to dissolve in your saliva because you swallow it so rapidly,” Mehmood Khan, senior vice president and chief scientific officer and a former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist told FoodProcessing.com

“There was an opportunity for our scientists,” said Khan. “If we could figure out a way of getting the salt crystals to dissolve faster, then we could decrease the amount of salt we put on a snack with no compromise on taste.”

The new salt will not need FDA approval because its still sodium chloride, just a different shaped crystal, the article says.

PepsiCo Reduces Sodium by Restructuring Salt [Food Processing via PopSci]

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