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Look at how much sugar is in the food you eat every day, then look up how much sugar you are recommended to consume every day. There isn't a daily value % next to the sugar content on food labels.
Honestly, I'm not sure how much nutrition labels can even do for this problem. I suspect very few people pay much attention to the labels. Perhaps the size of the label is part of the issue? It's a great amount of information and I don't want it removed or anything, but I think what the average consumer needs is a single, prominently featured rating. Say, a letter grade. Apples might be A+, whereas a sugary (but fortified) cereal would get a D grade.
It doesn't list a DV for carbohydrates, but it does list a DV for added sugar which is the real problem. It would be really hard for someone to eat enough fruit to really overdo the sugar, but at least they'd get a lot of good fiber along with it doing so. Added sugar is just too easy a carb source but whole food sugars are pretty well balanced.
This is a topic near to my heart. As someone with Type 1 diabetes, and someone that loves fruit, I'm very good at tracking carbs and sugar in various fruits.
If you stick to fresh fruits, you're probably fine. The real concern comes when people mistake things like fruit juice or fruit that's been packaged in a can and soaking in high-fructose corn syrup for god knows how long and calling it "fruit". On things like that, hitting that daily 300g of carbs is surprisingly easy.
I never considered the lack of %DV. That really is wack as fuck.
It's not just the sugar content either, the type of sugar matters a great deal. High fructose is much worse than the same quantity of glucose.
Even if it was the "good" sugar, most food items in North America contain multiple days worth of sugar in a single serving. Most people eat multiple servings at once.
I think those new drugs look really game-changing. I know they aren't affordable yet, but soon the insurers will realize they are cheaper than the downstream costs of diabetes.
I was reading in the NYT yesterday that they were making people change behavior not just on hunger, but on the "food noise" that a lot of people have. So this will change the situation in a household and might have additional social consequences for people's consumption.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/well/eat/ozempic-food-noise.html
The rise of metabolic syndromes is probably going to continue to define the next 50 years of medicine honestly. We have a huge, global rise in T2DM, obesity, high cholesterol/BP/etc. due to many things, but primarily the American, carb rich diet and a sedentary lifestyle. That said, i'm hopeful. We've got lots of new treatments for diabetes and even obesity now with GLP1s(Ozempic and others), as well as efforts to make insulins, glucose monitoring devices, etc. cheaper and more available. This makes diabetes so much easier to manage compared to how it used to be. I really hope Ozempic/Wegovy et. al will help put a dent in obesity, because that's probably the biggest risk factor for all the nasty stuff down the line.
Physician here. I completely agree. I have seen quite a few changes and additions to therapy for DM in the last 20 years of my career. Thankfully, most of these have shown a continual decrease in the likelihood of heart attack and stroke associated with DM. As you say, the GLP1s are a miracle and offer very convenient dosing (in some cases weekly).
This is because the society and the medical industry doesn't see obesity as a medical problem but a moral failure.