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However, we still all know those people who talk about how they eat organic vegan toast every morning (or whatever) and are still grossly overweight.

Wait, what? That hasn't been my experience at all. The health nuts are inevitably the ones who are in (at least somewhat) good shape. And people who are obsessively fixated on their diets tend to be much better at calorie counting than folks who don't give a shit.

Take an obese person from the city. Put them in a nice villiage in the middle of a forest.

They'll die, because they don't have any clue how to survive as a domestic farmer. Or they'll get by on a diet that's lackluster at the best of times and starvation-inducing during the lean years. For all the sins of industrial agriculture, the advent of modern fertilizers and farm automation has - quite literally - been a lifesaver for billions of people.

You can definitely wag a finger at the deplorable state of commercialized junk food. But there's no reason we need to live at the edge of civilization just to escape a parade of process sugars and saturated fats. You can stick to refrigerated vegetables and fruits and dried legumes and grains, with modest amounts of meat (if that's your vibe). Cook using oil and salt and sugar to taste, rather than letting some factory or fast food kitchen set the portions for you, and so long as you're not pulling from the Paula Dean cookbook you'll be fine.

This notion that you need to be a hermit in order to be healthy is just another absurdist fad diet. Stress definitely plays a role in eating habits and health issues, but do you know what's stressful af? Living way out in the fucking wilderness without a steady supply of basic necessities.