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.