Well, I recently read an article about recent Russian immigrants. One thing about America that surprised them was how sweet the white bread was. It was like eating cake, one of them said.
I always hated white bread. Even as a kid when that’s mostly all that was on the shelves. It tasted like puffy cardboard to me.
We have removed sugar from our diet and will occasionally eat something with sugar. Regular “healthy whole wheat” bread is way too sweet for us now and difficult to eat. I used to make 4 slices of toast with it and slather it with butter and jam.
Clearly, the manufacturers add sugar to enhance the flavor.
Read somewhere that anything labeled “low fat” has sugar added to it to compensate for the loss of flavor because the fat is removed. Consumers expect that “low fat” is healthy when it probably isn’t because they are consuming bunch of sugar.