We also had the food pyramid (it even originated in sweden, the WHO/FAO still edits a version of it), and I don't think it was much different. Also I don't think that science on sugar has been especially promoted anywhere either.

I don't think our preprocessed foods use as much sugar as yours (do we even have corn syrup ?). But we sure have some [edit : preprocessed foods], although they are probably not as bad as american's because of stricter regulation (bless the EU).