May you live to be 100! But you are the exception to the rule. Generally, buying liquids (other than water) in containers? Good luck. Packaged foods? Look at the ingredients. And being as saavy as you indicate, I think you know I am right about this. Sweetners are everywhere, especially fructose.
When I went on the prism diet in 1997 I learned to read labels. I was not allowed to eat any packaged food that had sugar as one of the first four ingredients. Since then I like to show people ingredient lists as a source of humor.
People would be flabbergasted to find out what foods list sugar (or corn syrup, etc) in the first four ingredients, and often it is foods you would guess have no sweetener in them.
A little off subject, but sometimes I want a snack at work that is not sweet. We have Armour Vienna Sausages in a little 5 oz can for 50 cents. These are very small cans. The ingredients label says it has, per serving, 120 calories, 80 from fat, and contains 520 mg of salt (22% of a daily adult recommended intake).
Now, that’s not all that good but it’s really not bad either, until you read what most people ignore: The multiplier. That is, the number of servings per can. It’s a trick producers have used for a while that I first discovered on an Ice cream bar that seemed to be very low on sugar and calories, considering how good it was.
Anyway, back to the little can of sausages. It contains 2.5 servings. That’s right. Six little 1.75” long mini-dogs are 2.5 servings. This means a can, which anybody can eat without breaking a sweat, contains 300 calories, 200 from fat, and 1,280 mg of salt, which is over half the recommended adult intake of salt.
Labels are actually a great source of entertainment for me, and the more entertaining the label, the less likely I am to eat what is in the package displaying the label.