Better yet, buy the ingredients and make your own. Most food is not hard to make from scratch, tastes better, and is healthier because you see what goes into it and can choose to moderate elements.

But it takes a little time and a bit of care.

The time is the rub.

If you're stuck in traffic for time measured in hours, you're not baking fresh bread during the week.

LOL "the market demands". Sure, and Opium was also demanded by the market, should we just add it to all food items?

No we shouldn't. But we also shouldn't pretend that demand for opium is manufactured by evil people. There's high demand for opium because it makes people feel really good.

The same thing is true for junk food. People eat it because it tastes good. How much food should be regulated is up for debate but there's something irritating about this reflex to blame every problem on some shadowy cabal of rich people.

Where are you finding many options in products without HFCS or additives?

Even the much-higher-end supermarkets near me don't have meaningful alternatives for a lot of products where I am, and I'm in a HCOL area.

I've not yet been unable to find something without corn syrup (I don't feel that "high fructose" or not changes how much of a filler it is), but it can be a pain in the ass to read the ingredients on everything on the shelf.

If I were FDA dictator for a day, I'd requite a corn logo on anything with corn syrup, and crossed corn for anything with HFCS.

Now calorie inflation can be done with sugar, too - the real deal is to have things that aren't "diabetes inducing sweet".

What sort of products are you looking for?

I read the ingredients on everything (I'm a vegetarian) and I don't buy anything with corn syrup or sugar that isn't a once-in-a-while treat.

I'm not saying it's a conspiracy. I'm saying it's fact. Humans like sweet foods because with the exception of felids, pretty much every species on the planet gains a survival advantage by consuming as many calories as possible when eating. This means that our brains feel rewarded when we eat sugary foods, and rewarded behavior is repeated behavior. That wasn't a problem when such foods were rare but now that they're available pretty much anywhere on-demand, yeah, it's a problem.

Personal accountability can only go so far when you're shown ads for sugary cereals and candy every morning as a kid.

Contrast that with, say, the current marijuana market in my region. It's regulated, it's only available at a relatively high price from licensed dispensaries. There are billboards but not much in the way of TV or radio ads. It's not marketed to kids. If you get addicted to marijuana in the Lower Midwestern US, that's a lack of personal accountability because you can't point to all of the stuff that's used to make junk food popular and say "they got me addicted!".