This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher in Tagata. Got a minute?

Mm.

Chips.

One of the most sublime of salty snacks, but have you ever wondered how they

get that perfectly salty sheen on the outside?

Salt is sprayed on the surface.

Young Sioux Lee is a food engineer at the University of Illinois or Bona Champagne.

And he says not all salty foods are created equal.

There's spray on surface salt.

There's salty liquids like can soup.

And there are salty solids where the sodium's dissolved in a matrix-like structure.

Think salamis and cheeses. But when we eat those salty solids only a fraction of the

salt gets released before we swallow, meaning a lot of that salt has no effect

on taste, but a big effect on our daily salt intake.

Lee's investigating that salty solid conundrum for a company that wants to make cold cuts that tastes the same but contain less salt.

He couldn't tell me which one.

I mean, it's a fairly big U.S. based food company.

To find a salty solution, he and his colleagues created blocks of whey protein, with various proportions of fat, water, and salt.

Then they squash those tofu-like blocks underwater, to measure how much sodium the blocks released.

Turns out, the bigger and more numerous the pores within the

blocks protein structure, the more salt that was released. The study is in the

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