I remember being in the US, and the friendly family friends talking about how we would get their favorite pie, sound awesome, Key Lime Pie, and I love lime. I tried it and I almost fell over backyards it was basically pure sugar with a the slightest taste of lime.

I’m American but have a lot of Chinese friends (through my wife). They talk about American desserts with the same disdain that I talk about Chinese desserts. “It’s too sweet” vs “this tastes like a dish sponge”. I love key lime pie. I got a gigantic one at Costco and subjected my wife’s friends to it. Many of them ended up liking it!

I think there's a vicious cycle of cheaper to make with HFCS, consumers like to eat things that are sweet/salty/fatty, so convenient to eat and less time for consumers to cook at home in the USA, industrial scale food production in the USA also benefits from HFCS subsidies and becomes additional lobbyists for HFCS and worm their way into recommended diets and become suppliers to public school cafeteias. We are all raised on very sweet breakfast cereals (at least in my public school cafeterias) from a very young age going from K-12 and continuing through cafeterias through college and kids have traditionally been taught fruit good but not juice bad so a lot of consumption via disposable drink boxes as well for a long time - I dunno if recent generations have been able to break any of these things starting kids off on sugar in large scale way.

It's not just the USA. Vietnam and Turkiye use lots of sugar in non-traditional foods while Thailand has included palm sugar in even their traditional foods for as long as I can remember.

Yes, though American portion sizes are huge as others noted.

I remember some report about how Mexico had a very different rate of obesity from the USA until some of the free trade agreements kicked in and multinational food companies with USA branches started getting a bigger share in the Mexican market, ending up with the Mexican diet resembling more of the USA diet.

Interesting! I have no evidence but I got the impression that Turkiye's sugar industry (the richest man owns Ülker, a confectionary conglomerate) was unnaturally large and not always that way...

I could not find the recent article I heard on the radio but this covers it https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/04/05/5220383... and there's a separate wikipedia entry just for obesity in Mexico, it's hit them so hard, it's like a hotbed for studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_Mexico

It seems this is America's version of the resource curse. I suppose something must be done with the infinite sugar our farms generate?

The answer is that sugar is addictive _and_ suppresses satiety.

The Bliss Point [1] is a well-known factor in developing food products, and when you can reach it with a high amount of sugar, you generate a food or drink that people find delicious but aren't sated by (i.e. they still feel hungry), which makes them eat/drink whatever it is in greater quantities. This becomes a virtuous(?) cycle for the producer because people will then buy more.

Another classic technique is adding salt to beverages (check the salt content of Coca Cola for example). Salt is designed to make you thirsty, which makes you drink more of the beverage. The reason Coca Cola (as an example) doesn't taste salty? It's been saturated by all the sugar.

I highly recommend Dr Robert Lustig's talk on sugar [2]. While it's an old presentation at this point, most of the content is evergreen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

>I don't quite get how Americans love sugar so much.

It's not that we love sugar so much (we do), but it's in just about every processed food. Go to the grocery story and try to find boxed food without some sort of sugar in it, it's a chore. Even spaghetti sauce has it.

"Subway, eat fresh?" Ireland classified their bread as cake because it has so much sugar in it.

https://www.eater.com/2020/10/1/21496848/irish-supreme-court...

As another poster mention, add salt and fat and you break the satiety mechanism in our brains.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/02/26/172969363/ho...

>Ireland classified their bread as cake because it has so much sugar in it.

Which is fascinating when you consider that refined flour, used to make most breads, breaks down to 70%+ glucose (the sugar thing that is the cause of enormous health consequences). Sugar/sucrose only breaks down to 50% glucose (the rest fructose that the body purges). So you literally get less blood sugar when you replace flour with an equal quantity of sucrose/sugar.

Somewhere else in here someone mentioned that bread in the US tastes sweet, and again if you put white bread on your tongue, it is basically sugar. Your enzymes immediately start cracking the simple carbs into glucose molecules. This basic of chemistry is true worldwide.

The focus on sugars in particular might be a bit misleading and something that will be seen as an error in nutrition advice. People choose low or artificial sugar options that are instead simple carbohydrates, not realizing that they are quite literally eating worse than the equivalent amount of sugar.

This is the ketchup you are looking for:

https://www.truemadefoods.com/

Because successive public health campaigns demonized fat, then salt. Both of which drive flavor. Only sugar is left, and sugar has very powerful lobbies

Even things that are supposed to be sweet are way too sweet, like say ice cream.