It's not just the Americans at all, in fact: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/sugar-con... // https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
I'm saying this as a general reminder: Sugar intake is a major issue globally.
The astonishing thing to me is that we can sell a 32 fl oz (950 mL) drink as "large", instead of "a week's supply of empty calories that you should never consume in one sitting".
Food sizes too. I was regularly splitting a meal across two sittings (e.g. eating the other half of my lunch for dinner) when I was in the US.
Activity level matters a lot. Genetics matter a lot. There are a lot of late teen boys (teen boys are likely in sports at school, and hormones means they will use a lot of energy anyway) who need 6000 calories per day. There are a lot of adults only only need 1700 per day (they really should exercise more!). We can talk about the 2000 calories daily requirement, but that is a round number that is close enough for discussion but not really relevant to any individual.
What you grew up with matters - if your body is always low on calories it will compensate by growing less, so if you someone young gets calories they will tend to be larger (there is a lot of genetic variation between humans that makes hard to measure at levels smaller than national population over decades), in various ways and need more calories to maintain the same weight. It isn't clear if this shows up in anything other than body size though some suspect it does.
There is also the question about what people eat between meals. Some people eat big meals but never snack between meals. Some people don't eat much at a meal - but they always have snacks in between. There is a lot of variation. I know some people who get half their calories from soda (beer is another large source of calories for some people, but that starts to get into alcoholism).
There is probably more that you don't know about others and so be careful about drawing any conclusions.
That growing young male teen you reference (not sure why we need to focus on boys, here) would not in any circumstance choose a 500ml Coca Cola to satiate their "hormones". Nor word any trained dietican.
That's the point of this discussion. There is enough information to learn everything about a healthy balanced diet. Your point is not that; rather your point is that there are....different habits of animals. Yes, agreed.
I agree that soda is not a good way to get those calories
Wait till you see all the tricks food producers use to avoid the added sugar label. “grape juice concentrate” is not an added sugar if the food is grapes flavored, for example.
Increasingly marketed-as-healthier foods don’t include any sugar at all. Yet half the ingredients are various sugars. Sometimes as cheeky as “sugarcane concentrate”
Of course, all of this information is already available via nutrition facts for most sold foods.
The root problem here doesn't seem to be the availability of information, I expect it to be more about the availability of time and effort to spend on priority of personal health. I don't think the issue is that people don't know that food isn't bad for them, it's that their health is lower priority than their immediate needs of feeding themselves and their families.
If anything, as you point out, this seems to be a better way for food manufacturers to bend the rules to avoid the logo and make something seem healthier than it is rather than giving more information to consumers. The _fact_ (X Grams of Sugar) is on the package but the logo indicates that the food contains more than x grams of "recommended" "added" sugars, two things that can be misunderstood and/or gamed.
Drinks in particular are tricky here. Take apple juice for example. You can have 2 brands with vastly different sugar levels and neither has added sugar. Just different concentrations.
Consumers (especially kids) will generally prefer the sweeter brand. And it all sounds healthy because it’s marketed as pure fruits! It’s even true, the juice is pure fruit. Just in concentrations that are extremely unhealthy.
The stats say it has greatly decreased sugar consumption in soft drinks. From my point-of-view (someone who rarely drinks soft drinks) it seems that most soft drinks now mix artificial sweeteners and sugar, so effectively all soft drinks are now "diet" varieties.
As the sugar level is directly proportionate to the overall volume, it can be quite surprising how much sugar there is when you aren't used to such massive servings.
There are two sizes of single-serving sodas sold commercially in the US.
A small one, a can, is 12 oz, 355 mL.
A large one is 20 oz, 591 mL.
To buy a 32-ounce soda, you'd have to do something very strange.
(There is another common commercial size, the two liter bottle of exactly 2000 mL. Those aren't intended to be bought and drunk; they're intended to be bought, taken home, and stored in your refrigerator over time.)
The largest coke you can order at McDonald's in the US is 380 calories (100g sugar) (not sure what size because it's not obvious from their website).
The largest coke you can order at McDonald's in Portugal (where I happen to be) is 197 calories (49g sugar).
- https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/coca-cola-large.h...
- https://www.mcdonalds.pt/produtos/mcmenu/bebidas/coca-cola-5...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Gulp
At least they eventually reduced the Double Gulp down to 1.5L.
You might be able to do it at a 7-11, since they sell empty cups that you're meant to fill with a slurpee. I don't know if they also have soda fountains to fill those cups.
Only 146g of sugar, 26g of saturated fat and 1100 calories.
https://foods.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/sonic/banana-...