Salt water fish have basically been brining their whole lives. So why aren’t they automatically salty when you eat them?
In: Biology
Same reason your human meat wouldn’t taste like chlorine if I cannibalized you after a swim. Your “meat” isn’t soaking in the water. The skin protects everything beneath it.
Saltwater fish have an excretion system to get rid of excess salt. Without that the sea would be poisonous to them just as it is to us and freshwater fish. Differences in salinity inside and outside the cells would cause water to travel into or out of cells to equalise it by osmosis. So they would either lose water and shrivel up or gain water and explode. It’s all to do with the salinity level that was normal when animal cells evolved.
Fish are not just sea water in a fish-shaped bag. Their blood and tissues have chemical requirements that are maintained through a variety of processes including [osmosis](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmosis) and [active transport](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_transport). These processes keep the insides of fish less salty than the water they swim in.
Brining works on dead organisms because there are no biological processes working to counter the salt.
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