The root problem with the American diet is that it's 3,600 calories per day. If it was 3,600 calories of fats and proteins with no added sugar, it'd still make

The root problem with the American diet is that it's 3,600 calories per day. If it was 3,600 calories of fats and proteins with no added sugar, it'd still make you obese and kill you. The solution is to eat 2,000-2,500 calories per day (give or take depending on your activity level, age, gender etc.). Achieving this solution mostly comes down to portion sizes. For sure limiting added fats and sugars plays a role, because both of those ratchet up the calorie intake without filling you up very well. What doesn't play a role is demonizing just the sugars - this approach is based on pseudoscience and it's guaranteed to fail. It's a tempting idea that you can still overeat if you overeat the correct stuff, but it's wrong. The current anti-sugar cult is the inverse of the 1990s "fat free" craze where people who wanted to gorge on junk food latched on to this idea that dietary fat was the real enemy, we produced lots of snacks with zero fat and tons of sugar, and Americans still kept on turning into bloated whales and murdering themselves with heart disease anyway. If we now go down some zero added sugar rabbit hole and gorge on bacon cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizzas the same thing will happen, because it really comes down to the calories. At the end of the day you eat a responsible number of calories or you die young.