I was watching a guy on yt review hungry man tv dinners and one of the TV dinners had 2,400 mgs of sodium. Why do they add so much?
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Because salt makes things taste good. The reason good restaurant food tastes so good is because they use more butter and salt than you probably do at home. Same goes for packaged products.
Also they probably added MSG, which is also sodium.
salt is addictive, salt adds flavour, and most food thats “cheap and convenient” is often the worse food *for you*
Spices are expensive, salt is cheap. To make something taste good, you need to add a lot of flavor (spices). A cheap alternative is to oversalt stuff and add minimal spices. Salt makes the brain interpret other flavors stronger.
Glutamate (Umami) also has the same effect on the brain, so if needing a low sodium diet, you can add glutamate rich items instead of salt. But these are protein-based and much more expensive on a large scale than salt is as well.
Salt/sodium is cheap and makes things taste good. It has nothing to do with preservation.
Salt is cheaper than every other spice, so they pack in cheap and shitty ingredients, and mask how shitty it is with salt and MSG, another popular form of sodium.
Frozen dinners have high sodium content because sodium acts as a preservative and helps to extend the shelf life of the food. Without the added sodium, the frozen dinners would spoil faster and have a shorter shelf life. Additionally, the high sodium content also adds flavor to the meals, which is important because frozen dinners can be bland due to the freezing process.
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