Because it's delicious.
Why do people eat too much sugar? Because they like delicious things and eating delicious things makes them happy. Maybe we should focus on why people use food to feel happy rather than why food is manufactured to make people feel happy.
That's not really fair. I agree with your general skepticism in this thread (there's a reason that most of these studies show small effects due to dietary modifications but most anecdotes of the same are "and now everything is amazing!"), but the human body is designed to crave things like fat and sugar and to feel good when they're acquired.
Some kind of ascetic lifestyle -- where we can remove the desire for the pleasure of eating -- may be possible, but the physical design of the body and our reward system indicates that enjoyment from eating food is built right in.
It would be like ignoring people perpetuating fraud and instead only trying to solve all the ways that the human brain is susceptible to it.
Because it's delicious
It's not though. It's only delicious for people who have high sugar intake. And besides, deliciousness is subjective and orthogonal to nutrition, while nutritional value is largely objective (we hope).
Smoking is bad for you, so it's illegal for minors to buy and it's illegal to even smoke with a minor in the car. High sugar intake is bad for you, so it's illegal to advertise sweets to children /s.
Maybe we should focus on why people use food to feel happy rather than why food is manufactured to make people feel happy.
You really think for us to have any hope of changing the prevalence of obesity is to get people to change their behavior, instead of minimizing the accessibility and prevalence of the environment which reinforces said behavior? It'd be great to do both, but realistically...? Get millions of people to change their behavior and opt for the more expensive / less flavorful foods? (And I mean less flavorful in a subjective sense, since they're used to very sweet, very salty things.)
We can't convince others with an aggressive tone. Like I'm doing. But we can definitely win over an audience.
You can't possibly be this ignorant of nutrition. Do you really think sugar is somehow objectively and universally delicious (excluding the trivial definition in which almost every taste is "delicious" in that it contributes to the overall palette of flavor)?
I didn't quite cut sugar out of my diet but around college I stopped eating as much, and I now found most of the desserts or candy one would find in the supermarket to be too sweet for my tastes, as well as most "normal" sweetened drinks (by contrast to e.g. many fruits). How does that mesh with your claim that sugar is added because it's simply "delicious", as opposed to other's model of a feedback loop between amt of sugar consumed and amt of sugar desired?
Stop eating it for a few weeks and you will find food with a lot of added sugar disgusting (eg: coke).
Addictiveness has nothing to do with whether or not something is a drug. Like it or not.