Life is a slow (or not so slow, as the case may be) death sentence.

I don't quite get what is the deal with sugar. Those 17 teaspoon are around 50-100g, making around 10-20% of an adults daily caloric intake. That doesn't sound too crazy. Can't you just eat less starchy stuff, after all, that gets broken down to sugar anyway. Or is it that food gets so tasty that people generally eat too much?

I know the statistics point to sugar as being evil incarnate, but I feel there's more wrong with the American cuisine and now sugar gets the blame for all of it.

Personally I eat around 5 teaspoons of sugar a day, mostly in the form of marmalade and ketchup and don't seam to have any adverse effects. Also I guess you'd have to drink sweetened beverages to get to 17 teaspoons, cause at 10 teaspoons a day all my food would be unbearably sweet.

It‘s not “American cuisine”, it‘s overly processed foods. Which exist everywhere. In fact quite a large amount of countries in Western Europe fall squarely 2x over the WHO’s 2015 recommendations at over 100g per day.

I do agree that sugar is taking the blame for the companies selling us these sugary treats. I mean its literally JUST yummy carbs, it’s not like its a carcinogen. And the average person has been so completely numbed by a life of excess sugar that it makes the already predatory food companies push even more sugar in to compete.

It was remarkable to me when I switched to unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter that after about 5 days of it tasting bland, it started tasting amazing.

Since then I've been cutting the sugar in every recipe down to 1/3 to 1/4 of what's specified. You just plain don't need it: at least provided you've largely dropped sugar out of your regular diet (so very limited off the shelf food - which now tastes incredibly sweet to me these days).

The lack of fiber in foods is what makes sugar problematic for a lot of people. Highly processed food gets rid of a lot of that fiber.