It’s not as bad as all that, I’ve cut it out of my diet for about fifteen years. It involves A LOT of reading ingredient labels but for just about everything it’s in, there is an alternative without. Sometimes it does come at a premium, though. In the past ten years or so a lot of food manufacturers realized there was a market for foods without it and often advertise it on the label (breads especially). With some things like soda, you can get real sugar, glass bottled sodas which are expensive, but another alternative is drinking water which you should be doing anyway.