"Some folks view this as some kind of evil corporate overlord thing, but I think the answer is much closer to home: we like stuff with sugar in it. So other people are going to put sugar in stuff so that we'll like it more. Sadly it looks as simple as that."

I recommend the book "Good Calories, Bad Calories". It is widely thought by people who have only heard about the book third-hand (criticizing the people who wrote their second-hand assessments of it) that it's a diet book, but the bulk of it is actually a well-researched history book on how the modern conception of "correct diet" came about, you know, the bad one that we're still oh-so-slowly extricating ourselves from. Basically it answers the question "If the late 20th-century diet consensus was so bad, how did it become the consensus?"

Since I read it, my assessment of the late 20th-century diet consensus has only gone down, and the history itself doesn't change, since, you know, "not changing" is pretty much what history does. You can blip over the bits where it does try to discuss the science of proper diet; even if you're interested in this branch of scientific thought, there's more up-to-date resources now. But the history is good.