[flyinghamster]

Different brands of chips have very different amounts of salt as well. A brand that I like, El Milagro, doesn't actually tout low sodium, yet their chips have less than half the salt (49 mg per 28 g serving) than regular Tostitos (115 mg per 28 g serving).

[wildzzz]

Tostitos are covered in a fine dust of salt. It allows for good coverage, every bit is perfectly salted but you end up consuming more salt. I prefer tortilla chips that use course salt sprinkled on top. Not every chip will be perfectly salted and some are over salted (which are more of like process issues) but you do use less salt overall. Chipotle does this. Their chips have about 2.78mg of sodium per gram of chip. Tostitos has 4.1mg of sodium per gram of chip. Using coarse salt in cooking (when not simply dissolved into the food) does lead to being able to taste the salt better as the large salt crystal takes longer to dissolve on your tongue and also lasting longer on top the food without dissolving into it.

Although I will say that sometimes some food manufacturers use sea salt that has a higher potassium chloride content in an effort to reduce the sodium. I was buying canned corn the other day, both from the same company but one listed as lower sodium. They both used "sea salt" but the original sodium version used "natural" sea salt whereas the lower sodium one made no such claim. Likely they were using modified sea salt that had higher potassium content while still keeping the overall salinity the same. They didn't say "less salt", which is what many product do say, they said "less sodium" which is technically true.