Sugar isn't really optional these days. It's snuck into so much of our processed food it's sickening.

Indeed. Added sugar and high fructose corn syrup is in everything. I have to go out of my way to find a brand of bread that doesn't have added high fructose corn syrup. It's ridiculous.

I havent bought bread in probably 4 Years now. Investing half an hour of work (distributed over the day) every other week for a 2kg Bread. Half of it goes in the freezer.

Also buying fresh vegtables and cooking instead of buying ready made dishes helps.

Yup, this is basically the only realistic way to avoid it, switch to types of food that cannot by their very nature have sugar added.

I would imagine most of those fresh vegetables have been domesticated/bred to increase sugars.

You're probably right, but that's still a lot better than manufactured foods. Also the funny thing with fruit and veg is that the opposite can happen, with the "Red Delicious" as the leading example, bred for looks and lost all the taste.

Even without human interference, fruit can actually be bad for you if you eat it at the wrong time and in the wrong quantities - fructose has the same effect as sugar - but now we are basically getting into nutrition more generally which is a tricky subject. Fruit still comes with many other nutritional benefits compared to sugary manufactured snacks, and even fibre that make it worth while (note that orange juice, as minimally as we are processing the fruit, still allows you to consume it in unnatural quantity and concentration, which can be very bad).

It is optional to eat those foods for the vast majority of people, but it isn't as convenient.

Not just inconvenient, but expensive and out of reach.

Not really. That's exactly when I had in mind when I said "vast majority of people". The biggest problem is access to a cooking fire and some sort of refrigeration you can rely on for most of the year.

It does require spending a little time cooking and probably to shop around rather than getting everything from a (possibly overpriced) supermarket depending on how much you can spend. So it's strictly an inconvenience, it requires stretching the argument really thin to view it otherwise.

I have a simple rule: If it has processed sugar in the ingredient list _anywhere_ I don't buy it.

If everyone did this, less processed sugar would be in our food supply. (corn syrups especially but also weird stuff like stevia, sneaky stuff like maltodextrin, etc..)

Unfortunately that runs into the issue of education, expense, and general preference. We're never going to remove it by relying on consumer choice.

Everything is a choice to some extent. You could have gone and lived in the middle of a forest to avoid the lead poisoning.

The problem is there are far too many pollutants for everyone to be able to educate themselves about every one, and take steps to avoid them. Instead, it's the role of government to decide in each case whether to allow, ban, tax, inform or restrict each type of pollutant.

Between the marketing for children, the many "sugar holidays" (Valentines, Easter, Christmas, Halloween, etc), the widespread use of processed foods in children's diets, the fact that every single grocery store in America puts sugar products on loud display, and that some restaurants only serve sugar based drinks, I would argue that it is not possible for American children to avoid sugar.

An adult can choose to eat it or not (I'm ignoring the addictive nature of concentrated sugar), but our public health establishment has been foolishly stupid (combined with industry marketing) at making people think that fruit juice is natural or healthy. It's about as natural as cocaine is. Sure, it comes from a plant, but it gets refined and concentrated into levels that are unheard of in nature and toxic to the body.

Virtually my entire extended family are working class people, and they all were feeding their kids apple/orange juice on a regular basis without diluting it. When I showed my sister that she could literally do a 5% solution of apple juice in water, and it still tasted sweet, she was blown away. I'm pretty sure most members of the laptop class know that juice is bad for kids (gatorade too), but that message hasn't filtered to most of the population. And these kids are too young to know how toxic it is for them.

> public health establishment has been foolishly stupid (combined with industry marketing) at making people think that fruit juice is natural or healthy.

Can you cite specific examples of the public health establishment pushing juice as healthy? I got a minor in nutrition over a decade ago and back then, public health officials were very quick to call out the juice industry for its predatory tactics on kids and false equivalencies. This doesn't match my experience in university at all.

You're exactly right. Public health in general has not pushed juice, but what I should have stated is they have been complicit in not condemning it and pushing for prominent labeling on juice. They've sat back and allowed it to be marketed aggressively, to a point where the mayor of NYC exempted fruit juices from the proposal for a sugar tax. The general public thinks juice is healthy. That's easily remedied with public health messaging, but we all know why it hasn't: farmers/USDA/lobbyists.

Gatorade ? Gatorade can't be bad. It has electrolytes!