Mouth sensor keeps tabs on your sodium intake

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/05/09/mouth-sensor-keeps-tabs-on-you.html

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Where is the sugar/starch version of this for insulin dependent diabetics?

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If you’re eating fries out and don’t know that they’re loaded with salt, god help you.

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Georgia? I wonder if it’s filled with chewing tobacco?

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Using fries is a bad example, showing people how much salt is in things they don’t see salt on (processed foods I’m looking at you) would be a better eye opening example.

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As I understand it, the salt-hypertension connection is looking more and more problematic, but my wife has a different condition that calls for carefully controlling salt. Unfortunately, this is basically useless for that: if the salt content isn’t printed and effectively zero, then the answer is always no. No premade foods (or ingredients), and no eating out.

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I looked at the relevant studies myself and like most fields of study in nutrition it is sheer chaos. The best controlled studies I’ve seen show that there are people for whom salt has a low-to-moderate effect quickly mediated by adequate renal function (the body is pretty damn good at excreting salt) and those who are sensitive to sodium for whom the effect is dramatic. But you can generally tell if you are the latter group because if you take salt you swell up dramatically since you retain water.

That said, eating high-sodium foods is probably something you should avoid because those tend to be industrial heavily processed foods and just about the only robust result in nutrition is that those are never good for you, though the reason people give as to why tends to shift a lot.

And my sympathy for your wife’s condition. Before I did my research and verified via rigorous blood pressure monitoring that whatever salt may do to others, it does nothing to me, I tried to keep to 500mg sodium a day and found it, effectively, impossible.

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Wow, yeah, that’s nuts. We get 1500mg (that’s less than a pinch, or about a third of a teaspoon for those unused to dealing with such measures), and that’s quickly eaten up by unprocessed foods like meat and vegetables.

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Lets not forget that we live in a horrible dystopian future. This technology will be abused by your insurers. Any sensor they can force you to wear will be fair game to spy on you for the purpose of price gouging as punishment for exercising your freedom of choice. Kill it with fire. Then kill the guy that invented it with fire. Then kill the investors that supported it with an equally hot fire. Then kill the economic system that created the investors that put money on it, with fire. After that’s been done destroy the computer that hosts the files, that could be used to recreate this technology, you guessed it, With fire. This will become a tool to keep people from getting medical care. STOP INVENTING SHIT LIKE THIS YOU FUCKS.

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