Is someone who describes themselves as cooking from fresh ingredients likely dumping loads of ketchup into their food?

I suspect plenty of people who say they cook with "fresh ingredients" still use off-the-shelf bread, condiments, etc. They may pick organic, more "artisan" brands, but plenty will have surprising amounts of lurking sugar.

Ketchup isn't really any less fresh than the butter/oil.

Sure, but home cooked food is fairly likely to include a sauce (e.g. vegetables in a tomato sauce) and thus not require as many condiments.

> A tablespoon of ketchup has more sugar than a chocolate chip cookie.

Ketchup has about 1/3 the calories of a chocolate chip cookie. What does it matter that it has the same amount of sugar?

In addition, out of sauces ketchup is really the odd one out, most normal sauces and dressings are not supposed to contain sugar at all.

There is a big gap between ‘supposed to’ and the real world. Pick up any bottled dressing at a typical grocery store, and sugar or corn syrup will likely be a top ingredient. See the totally unnecessary addition to ranch dressing, for example:

http://www.kraftrecipes.com/products/kraft-16-fo-dressing-li...

Or even if you are making your own, a surprising number have sugar or honey as ingredients.

https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/italian-vinaigrette

Who decides what something is "supposed to" contain? Why is it relevant?

While we're on the subject of questionably-relevant comparisons, remember that bacon contains 500% more vitamin C, and 100% less sugar than Coca Cola.

And coke makes you fat and gives you diabetes while bacon doesn’t. So it is actually an interesting comparison. Well, the sugar part.

How is that reasonably relevant? I can cherry-pick nutritional information to make any absurd comparison I want.

Which is what comparing the sugar content of ketchup and a chocolate chip cookie is. There's less sugar in a cookie than Ketchup, but ~3 times more carbs.

I was agreeing with your point.