Why isn't there a fight against unhealthy food like is for drugs?

[Homeless Nutter]

That ones actually true, but it's partially offset by the fact that we have access to more food.  The average american has greater access to nutrition, but only because the average american consumes an inordinately larger amount of food by mass.  Veggies as grown and marketed are, effectively, water balloons.  They're sold by weight, the weight is water, and the producer wants them in-space and out-of-space asap...so the hormones and cultural practices applied mostly serve the purpose of increasing the speed and uptake of held weight-in-water of any given piece of produce, necessarily diluting it's nutritional density while simultaneously increasing it's market value.  Additionally, ripe produce is not as transportable and gives the middlemen and points of sale less time to "sell it or smell it".  So what we have on the shelves, are less-than ripe water baloons.  Tomatoes, for example, are picked stone green for transport at the height of their mass before they ripen and become susceptible to disease and rot and pests, and then gassed red for sale.  They taste like watery shit because, at that point in their life, there just isn't much else to them.  

Fair enough - I can believe, that a lot of produce from modern farms contains more water per weight. I wouldn't be so quick to attribute that entirely to nefarious motivations, though - it's just that more primitive ways of cultivation tends to produce smaller fruit and veg. Also - ripening fruit, like tomatoes, bananas, avocados or mangoes, after they've been harvested is hardly a new practice. You can do it at home, without gassing them and I'm fairly certain it used to be a common practice in the days before refrigeration.

Also - I do not believe that obesity problem is caused by consuming water. So if that's all there is to it - just eat an extra tomato, or whatever and you'll get all the nutrients you want and piss out the water. It's still cheaper, than buying "organic" (which still has no guarantee of being more nutritious).

This one could be true as well, depending on what Paul is trying to say.  In addition to the above, supermarkets have massive incentives to stock their shelves with non-perishable processed goods.   Producers have massive incentives to peddle those products, since they represent the majority of produced mass on-farm.  The actual produce is only a small portion of the plant, and the produce good enough to make it to produce shelves a vanishingly small percentage of that.  The rest has to be marketable, or else the producer couldn't afford to (or shouldn't..even if they could) produce that product.  Supermarkets stock their shelves with unhealthy shit because it tastes good, sure..but also because it's cheaper for them to stock their shelves with that.  They;d rather sell you canned sauce than a ripe tomato....and they know you'll buy it, so that's what they do.

Sure - processed foods may be a problem, especially when one relies on them entirely for one's diet. Still - processing food is not a modern invention. People used to have to do it by themselves, at home, by making preserves and compotes, salting, pickling and so on, so that they had stuff to eat in the winter. All of that reduces nutritional value of food, but it's simply a necessity in a world, where we don't want half of our children to starve during winter. And since most of us don't want to spend most of our free time making pickles and jams - it's only natural, that there's an industry providing those products.

And let's not forget - supermarkets throw away massive amounts of fresh food, that goes bad and food waste in the western world is huge. If they were to stock the shelves mainly with fresh, ripe fruits and vegetables that waste would by multiplied, requiring larger percentage of land to be used for agriculture, in order to feed the growing populations. There are some sacrifices we have to make, if we insist on breeding out of control. And - ironically enough - most people insisting on outdated methods of agriculture, seem to be the same ones, that have large families...

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I'm at work so can't reply very extensively.

It wasn't a hippy who told me about farming and veg having less nutrients in. It was in one of those weekly magazines they sell. Science weekly or whatever, I can't remember the title.
It really depends on where you live though, I live in the U.K. Nigerians I know say fruit and veg tastes much better and is more nutritious and easily grown naturally over there.

Yes, well - most people I know say, that produce in their country of origin tastes better - even if it's grown using modern, "industrial" methods. There could be a lot of reasons for that, especially, that taste is subjective and nostalgia is a powerful thing.

I'm skeptical that someone can lose weight by doing no exercise and eat as much fat as they want but from what I recall it's due to eating less carbs. I knew a woman who did that diet and it worked but she didn't go crazy with eating fat and she still excersised.

If we're bringing up anecdotal evidence, I had a boss - a restaurant owner - who lost a huge amount of weight, by going on Atkins and doing no exercise. I'm sure he gained it back, once he went back to eating carbs, but the point is - losing weight is not as simple as eating less.

And exercise is largely misrepresented, when it comes to losing weight. I used to rollerblade 10-20km a day and never lost weight. Recently I haven't been exercising at all and all I did was cutting down on sugar and I've been losing weight with no effort. Exercise is important for your health, but not really good for losing weight, because it makes you eat more.

As I said - losing/putting on weight is not as simple, as some people would like to make it seem.