More than half of Americans today are overweight, and one in three adults is considered obese. Every year, more than 200,000 people have gastric bypass surgery, including children as young as 9. We are far and away the fattest country in the world, where the average adult weighs 24 pounds more than in 1960.

In “Salt Sugar Fat,” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Michael Moss places most of the blame squarely on the shoulders of the processed food industry and its primary goal, simply put, of making food addictive.

According to Moss, who interviewed government officials, food scientists and whistleblowers for the book, the processed food behemoths (Kraft, General Mills, Pillsbury, Nestle and others) are engineering “foods” that have little or no nutritional value, yet make us want more.

It is a multibillion-dollar industry that is also practicing its own addictive behavior — addiction to profits and to destroying the competition at any cost.

Moss, who made “pink slime” a household phrase after a 2009 article on beef safety for the New York Times, also shows in disturbing fashion how these companies lie, rationalize and manipulate to defend their products and increase their profits.

After all, they are only giving us what we want, right?

Moss explains how creepy company scientists find the “bliss point” in various foods — “the precise amount of sugar or fat or salt ... no more, no less ... that will send consumers over the moon.”

He tells us why Cheetos are considered the perfect junk food — because they dissolve in your mouth, your brain thinks they have no calories, and — you guessed it — that drives you to eat more.

What about salt? Consider that scientists have developed a way to shape salt, at the molecular level, to “explode” on the tongue. It's why we just can't stop eating theater popcorn.

Fat? Consider that the average American now eats 33 pounds of cheese per year, triple the amount we ate a mere 30 years ago.

And sugar? We Americans average 22 teaspoons a person, every day (71 pounds a year).

And it's ubiquitous: A half cup of Prego spaghetti sauce has more sugar than three Oreo cookies.

The author has special disdain for Coca-Cola, “which isn't so much a company as a $35 billion institutional force.” Americans drink more than a gallon a week of the stuff. But apparently that's not enough. According to a former vice president at Coca-Cola who became a whistle-blower, the company has only one question motivating them: “How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?” As Moss sees it, Coke is ruthless in its marketing and deceptive in its advertising. The company has a profit motive that borders on the diabolical.

It's debatable whether the processed food industry deserves all the blame for our obesity crisis and all the ills that go with it. After all, we do have choices about the foods we eat. And while the author's investigation provides plenty of surprises and intrigue, it can also be ponderous at times.

If there is anything redemptive in this exposé, it is that the day of reckoning for the processed food industry is coming. For Moss, it can't come soon enough.

Mark Stoeltje is a San Antonio writer and executive director of the Clubhouse, a nonprofit center serving adults with severe mental illness. Reach him at