Anecdotal, but moving to the US, the insane amount of sugar that is put in every form of food is very scary.
1) Sweet things like muffins or cakes are generally unbearably sweet to me in comparison to what I expect in similar products in other countries (Australia, EU)
2) The cultural integration of the consumption of these foods appears to be higher in the USA; donuts at morning meetings, krullers and bearclaws on desks and tables for all-hands, quarterly meetings, etc - feels very high given that I am working in a culturally and socio-economically comparable environment relative to my home countries.
Of course, commonwealth and european countries have their own culture-driven consumption patterns (cakes for birthdays, croissants, scones for morning teas in Australia/NZ/UK) - but it doesn't appear to reach a similar level of 'saturation' as in the US.
Just another limited anecdote, of course.
I have that problem eating some items here even as a native. For some items you risk buying something lethally sweet I don't want to eat. Things like lemon cake seem basically guaranteed to be inedible (I assume making even sweeter to offset lemon).
That said, the bigger issue just seems to be serving size. A traditional British cookie/biscuit is fairly small. American cookies have grown larger and larger.
When we bake at home we regularly only use 1/4-1/3 of the sugar recommended, and sometimes that still ends up too sweet for our palates.
Seriously!! Sometimes I go to the bakery of my local grocery store and check out the muffins, they tend to have more sugar than I'd expect cupcakes to have.
It didn't used to be like this. Back forty years ago, muffins and cupcakes were pretty different things. Now it's just a matter of how much frosting is on the top.
As a kid you grow very tolerant to high sugar intake, to the point that even a Coke or Pepsi tastes only very mildly sweet. You don't really realize just how much sugar you're consuming. Most of the cheap food is loaded with sugar (to hide the fact it otherwise tastes bad, maybe? I don't know why), and many families avoid paying for anything more natural because they can't afford it; or even if they can, they feel it's a rip-off compared to the plentiful, cheap food at their local grocery store. Generations are being raised on that garbage. It certainly beats malnutrition for families who would otherwise just go hungry, but it ingrains such awful tastes and habits.
That is not to say there is no difference. When I travel to the US I find most if the food really unbearably sweet. Strange exception is fresh fruit, which seems to be a lot less flavorful in the US than over here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...
I wish there was an easy way to compare foodstuffs across countries. Too many of these discussions turn into anecdote battles with little hard data.
> I bought some organic almond butter, and it had sugar in it! Why?!
What brand? I know sugar is fairly common in peanut butter, but I don't know much about almond butter. I did a cursory search, and the three brands I checked (Justin's, Barney's, and 365 Organics) do not use any kind of sweetener.
That said, I can barely stand sweetened peanut butter now that I have switched to Smucker's Naturals (which is just ground peanuts and salt). I can only guess that the sugar is added to increase appeal.
I believe that considerably predated the fluffy wonderbread style of white bread.
