Well, it's because our government published official diet recommendations (look up the Food Pyramid) and told us we should be eating more grains than absolutely anything else. Science on sugar has been repressed in our country, and the corn industry has exerted pressure in various ways to put corn syrup into absolutely everything. When I grew up, everything I had ever learned told me it was normal and healthy. I have more recently learned to avoid it.
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).
But government now decided to update it, and get rid of all the "economic" influence, which was steered towards grain, meat and dairy industry, and only base it on what is healthy.
To make their statement clear, they literally turned the food pyramid upside down.
"The European Union, which regulates the allowed production quota of sugars, limits the production of GFS to around 5% of total sugar production in the EU, meaning that it makes up a very small percentage of the sugar consumed in Europe."
