I think there's a vicious cycle of cheaper to make with HFCS, consumers like to eat things that are sweet/salty/fatty, so convenient to eat and less time for consumers to cook at home in the USA, industrial scale food production in the USA also benefits from HFCS subsidies and becomes additional lobbyists for HFCS and worm their way into recommended diets and become suppliers to public school cafeteias. We are all raised on very sweet breakfast cereals (at least in my public school cafeterias) from a very young age going from K-12 and continuing through cafeterias through college and kids have traditionally been taught fruit good but not juice bad so a lot of consumption via disposable drink boxes as well for a long time - I dunno if recent generations have been able to break any of these things starting kids off on sugar in large scale way.