Apple: 30 second preparation time to wash
Banana: 15 second preparation time to peel
Orange: (now this one is a chore) 1 minute prep time to peel
Those aren't meals. You still need X amount of calories per day. Cheap, industrial food is calorie rich and nutrient poor, which is why additives like sodium are put in in the first place, to make up for the lack of taste quality. Real food tastes good because it has essential nutrients.
Fruit is not calorie dense at all. If I eat one apple, in 30 minutes or less I'm starving.
I work 40+ hours a week and spend 10 hours a week at the gym and have a fairly active social life. Don't tell me it's not possible to make a low cost, nutritional meal happen because I know better.
Are you a single parent? Do you have multiple children? Does your job pay you $7/hr or less? I'm guessing the answer is no because you can spend 10 hours a week at a gym.
I make it happen every day. It may not be what I want to eat, but it's going to be good for me. Like everyone else, sometimes I just want to eat a bag of oreos and a can of beefaroni. But I don't because I know that is the way to wind up having a chat with Wilford Brimley about the diabeetus. And no one finds a 300 pound man with missing leg riding a Hover-round chair attractive.
There is a lot of talk in this thread about government controlling your eating, who is talking about you not being allowed to eat a bag of oreoes? We're discussing limits on sodium additives in food. To my knowledge, the same foods would be available?
The government controlling your eating would look more like the government increasing taxes on salt itself so that even consumers could not buy it and add it to their food.
As was said earlier in the thread... it's impossible to take salt out of your food, but adding it is easy. This law gives people MORE choice, not LESS.
Dip your oreos in liquid sugar for all I care. It's your own body and your own damn choice.
It's about decisions. People need to learn to make the good ones others need to stop trying to curb the consequences for them.
Clearly the consumer choices angle is failing, and for multiple reasons. One is, as you said, people are ignorant; the other is that they don't care; the other is that, while they have choices, their choices are very limited.
I think it's easy to paint it so black and white, but the holistic solution is to continue educating people about nutrition while creating incentives for corporations to stop adding toxic levels of sodium to foods.
Why are you so against the multi-pronged approach?