what's scary is that you said UK and not US. Coming from other Anglo cultures and going to the US feels similar to what you describe moving from Russia. instant increase in added sugar and serving sizes.

I live in the US and recently tried to find bread--standard, sliced bread--without sugar in it at my local store. They don't have any. The lowest I could find was a gram of sugar per slice!

I bake various types of bread on a weekly basis, and have never seen a recipe that doesn't require sugar or honey. I'm pretty confident it's needed to fuel the yeast for the rising process vs the flour alone.

That's empirically not true. Yeast do just fine with the starches in the flour. Here's a simple recipe without sugar (and the oil is optional too): http://www.thebreadkitchen.com/recipes/simple-whole-wheat-br...

I'm afraid that's just not true. I've made sourdough bread for years, and never added any sweeteners.

There are plenty of bread recipes that require no sweetener, and it's definitely not needed for yeast to develop.

Yeast will do just fine on the carbohydrates in the flour. I find that whole-grain flour tends to lead to more yeast activity, which is sort of the opposite direction.

A lot of the packaged supermarket bread has additives to keep it fresher longer, one of which is sugar. Go either a little upmarket or to the baked-in-store section and you'll find some without it.

French bread is water, flour, yeast, and salt.

I make french bread almost weekly and all the recipes I've used require sugar.

When I was a kid, my grandma baked home bread (1930s rural style, she was born in 1926 in eastern Slovakia) and never used any sugar for that.

Bread has been staple food for millennia. For most of that time, sugar was rare, expensive or totally unavailable.

I started baking bread when I moved to the US cos it was so hard to find any without sugar.

It’s quite frightening that you’ve never heard of sourdough bread given your baking experience. And as the other replies allude to, it’s quite common historically and in other places. Are baking books edited to exclude that knowledge in America? It really brings to mind the possibility.

C’mon. http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200402-why-san-francisco-d...

I've made sourdough a few times and all the recipes I tried require sugar.

There is reason for optimism. Less than a decade ago you could barely find something in the middle aisles of a grocery store that didn’t have trans fats and now it is relatively rare. These things can be overcome in relatively short order if the will exists.