The strawberry lead-in is interesting, but you don't have to ask your grandparents. They've grown in size, in a very noticeable way even in the last 13 years.
Isn't food nutrition mostly still in control of the farmer?
I've grown a lot of stuff and my most "intense" time was when I set up hydroponics and my plants were mainlining an extremely consistent amount of (admittedly artificial) nutrients and boy... we're talking extremely flavorful and massive bushes of basil (and other flora...) popping up in like a week. Had pesto for dayssss
Even my soil strawberries are like candy if I pump them with nutrients (and love).
My understanding is consumer prefer buying the biggest and tastiest looking items. We can't visually see nutrition but its easy to price-compare the larger (lower cost) items.
For example, bigger strawberries have better strawberry to stem ratios.
Yeah, it takes effort but improving quality of produce is a matter of improving the inputs, like soil ecology. Anyone can do it, if they care enough. Governments should just stop subsidizing megafarms that happen to not care.
It’s a nonsense conclusion anyway, because all major databases retest the nutrients every few years, so we have an accurate idea about our intake from typical products on the current market.
I agree with your point that as produce continues to grow in size, the growth of its sugar content outpaces the growth of its nutrient content (for selection reasons), but I'm not convinced that has anything to do with obesity. Obese people are not obese because they're eating modern produce, they're obese because they're eating large amounts of highly processed slop where the high sugar/etc content is finely controlled by chemical manufacturing processes independent from the composition of the out-of-the-ground produce that supplies the raw materials for it.
If a person's diet was composed mostly of simple farm-grown produce and meats instead of sodas, candies, and big macs, I think they'd have trouble achieving obesity even with the higher proportional sugar content of that produce.
For really specific health reasons I'd rather not get into, I had to eat the same meal, every meal, for nearly two years. I didn't cheat a single time. (It was miserable.) It consisted of slow cooked chicken, and carrots, butternut squash, cauliflower, and onions cooked in the water from the crock pot.
At first, I lost weight in a hurry, but only for the first 20 lbs, down to a set point I had run into for years, which is ~60 lbs heavier than is appropriate for my height, and still well into the obesity category.
I don't have a clear explanation for this yet, but obesity isn't a simple problem to solve. If it's not one that afflicts you, that's a great benefit! And you're right that cutting out "processed slop" is better than leaving it in.
I'm just personally pretty tired of the assumption some people make that often accompanies a point like that, that I'm heavy because I don't eat well and/or lack discipline. I've heard it from doctors, commentators, article-writers, and seen it in sidelong glances.
I wish it were simple. If it were, I'd have fixed it by now.
Oh sure, I'm not trying to say that everyone who struggles with their weight does so exclusively because of an unhealthy diet, but the obesity epidemic at large is still mostly driven by that, and all I'm saying is that the changes to produce strains aren't really influencing it. Whatever problem causes you personally to struggle with your weight regardless of your diet is even more unlikely to be related to strawberries being bigger and slightly more sugary.
Sorry if I came off as pointed or accusatory. I was just generalizing for simplicity's sake.
https://www.earth.com/news/super-sized-fruit-strawberries-we...