Psychology

Yup, 90% of what makes manufactured foods so unhealthy is that the ingredients are wildly overportioned basically to cut the corners between homemade/artisan work and industrial mass production.

It's literally built to only be "good enough", and that in part means shoving as much sugar in that bitch as solubility will allow to make sure it'll taste ok-ish even way past when normal equivalents would have spoiled.

This is also why anyone who comes to the US from abroad swears our food tastes sickeningly sweeter than their own domestic equivalents.

Of course then we're getting into HFCS which is a whole can of worms within the can of worms of why home cooking is always gonna be better for you even when you home cook something that's an abomination unto god in health terms like a pizza stuffed pizza or a fry burger or a grilled cheese packed as dense with bacon and caramelized everything and marmalade and anything else you can cram in there as possible. It's because home preparing and assembling the ingredients already takes out a shitton of the sugars that were being used to artificially enhance the taste to cover up the mass manufacture corner cutting.