>In the western world

Nah really just the US has the giant value bags of Hershey's product with almost no cacao solids. The commonwealth western nations are still sweet but have higher minimums.

Don't believe me? A good benchmark is kitkat bars. Try the regular from US, Canada, England, and Japan. Only the US one tastes overwhelmingly of sugar and not chocolate. Japan's chocolate is far less sweet but they don't seem to emphasize solids as much as UK does.

I've been recently pondering sugar tolerance. I've been avoiding it for the last few years, eating it only sometimes and moderately, checking sugar contents of processed food I buy, etc. I'm at a point where anything with more than ~30% sugar tastes bad: it gives a sort of mouth-wrinkling shock to my taste receptors; my sugar tolerance is decreasing.

Given that sugar is addictive and most producers seem to have the attitude that the more sugar you sneak into the product, the cheaper it is and the more it sells, maybe Nestle (Kitkat's producer, right?) tests for regional tolerance and puts in the maximum amount of sugar, where the person still doesn't feel an overwhelming sugar shock when tasting? Just speculation, but it's a possibility I'd investigate if I were an evil food industry mogul.

Many (many!) years ago a friend brought some bottles of Pepsi from a trip to Egypt. I still had a couple of the bottles left until last year, when I finally ditched them. The reason he brought them was to show how the Egyptian version of Pepsi had much more sugar added (I didn't actually think that was even possible..). Then again refined sugar was invented in that region of the world and was used hundreds of years before anywhere else.

As for myself, I just hate how shop-made cakes are mostly sugar - it feels like my mouth is burning. I don't understand why they do it. Nearly everyone I know prefer home-made cakes (made from basic ingrediants, not mix bags).

Haha, true about the cakes. If you look at baking recipes sugar is usually measured in cups. There's a bakery near my place that offers no-added-sugar items. I find them delicious. They're probably mostly targeting diabetics, but they sure have my business.

Since we're trading anecdotes, I was told that in Egypt people drink sugar drinks, like Cocacola, like you would drink alcohol in the West. Islam forbids drinking alcohol, so they use the next most boring drug: sugar. The picture that was painted for me was a group of grown men sitting around a cafe-bar drinking Cocacola.