When did Americans become so dependent on processed foods?

A Coca-Cola bottling plant in 1941. Photo by Conrad Poirier via Wikimedia Commons.

For decades, experts have warned that the average American diet is potentially harmful. Americans tend to eat food that is laden with too much sodium, fat, and added sugars, and it's making people sick.

What’s insidious about this is that a lot of Americans don’t even know that the food they’re eating is unhealthy. A lot of foods are deceptively sweeter, saliter, and fattier than one would assume. And those added ingredients make processed foods addictive.

UnTextbooked producer and host, Gabe Hostin, wanted to understand how the American food industry got this way. He found the work of journalist Michael Moss, who’s the author of Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. In it, Michael Moss writes about “food giants”, enormous companies that produce the vast majority of processed food products in America. He contends that these companies became so powerful because they figured out how to make their products irresistible, and that these innovations coincided with other societal shifts that were changing American eating habits.