“One thing that I noticed while I was at EPA is that every single one of these chemicals had their own personal lobbyist,” said UCSF professor and former EPA scientist and policy advisory Tracey Woodruff, PhD, MPH as she opened the first UCSF Symposium to Evaluate and Counter Harmful Industry Impacts on Health last month.
The symposium was planned by the newly launched Partnership to Analyze and Counter Industry Health Harms, involving UCSF faculty across disciplines, whose common interest is investigating and empirically identifying the many ways corporate activities harm health and communities — particularly low-wealth populations and communities of color.
“What we’re seeing is a shift. Communicable diseases, which were the highest burden of disease globally in 1990, are not the highest contributor anymore. It’s now non-communicable diseases like cancer, cardio-respiratory, neurodevelopmental disorders that account for 64% of the global burden of disease,” said Woodruff. “The increase in these chronic diseases is the manifestation of the global economic system that is prioritizing products and profit over health…What we have now is an industrial epidemic.”
The symposium included presentations from experts across the fields of tobacco, food, alcohol, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals research. Presenters presented case studies that showed how industries work together to influence science and the regulatory process.
Research helps hold corporations to account
Investigative journalist for ProPublica, Sharon Lerner, talked about the vital role researchers play in providing empirical truth and how documents, such as those found in the UCSF Industry Documents Library (IDL), are critical to revealing industry harms and industry influence on regulatory bodies.
“The documents suggest there are a large number of competing interests that have been involved in influencing dietary regulations related to dietary fat and breast cancer, including food, chemical, fossil fuel, and tobacco industries, and front groups,” said UCSF Assistant Professor Cristin Kearns, PhD, who analyzed industry documents from the IDL to reveal how multiple industries knew about – and hid – their products’ links to breast cancer.
“The key thing here is why does …tightly coupled relationships between industries—matter to those of us who care about public health?” asked UCSF Professor Laura Schmidt, PhD, who studies how the tobacco industry influences the food industry. “It matters because in the case of tight coupling, it allows one industry to share with another industry what it knows, and specifically, what it knows about making products more harmful…more palatable, and…more easily marketed to vulnerable populations like children and ethnic minority groups.”
Schmidt pointed to examples of food brands owned by tobacco companies, including Kraft, Post cereal, Nabisco, Oreos, Jell-O, and Lunchables. She also explained that the partnership between tobacco and food brands led to the creation of many ultra-processed foods, which (according to research) people consume in much greater amounts than healthy food.
Sunshining industry alliances
Pam Ling, PhD, Director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, said the tobacco and alcohol industries have a long history of collaboration to sell their products. For example, the tobacco industry learned that it could get people to buy more cigarettes by linking them to discounts on beer.
“The fact that the alliances between tobacco and alcohol were hidden and people don’t really know about tobacco companies owning food companies works for them and allows them to create alliances and it’s very important [for them] to keep those things quiet,” said Ling when she explained that the tobacco industry created a front group and partnerships to fight excise taxes on their products.
Industry influence and backroom deals
Yogi Hendlin, PhD, an assistant professor with the Erasmus School of Philosophy and a research affiliate with the UCSF EaRTH Center, explained how industry influence and backroom deals led the European Union to renew the carcinogenic herbicide glyphosate for use for another 10 years “by default,” despite increasing evidence about the health harms of glyphosate.
“One of the problems with glyphosate, but also PFAS and many other chemicals, is that we’re not actually following the science or following through with government regulations or enforcing laws on the books,” said Hendlin. “We see the same problem in this country with e-cigarettes and loopholes around disposable e-cigarettes, so this is not something confined to one industry, this is a global, industrial epidemic and problem.”
Looking ahead
The symposium posed an overarching and critical question: if industries are working together, why aren’t we? In Schmidt’s words: “Risk factors don’t operate in isolation, yet researchers currently work in siloes.”
Providing a forum for researchers to collaborate on industry harms is one of the goals of the new Partnership to Analyze and Counter Industry Health Harms. Other goals of the partnership include:
- Conducting empirically based research that identifies and documents how industry influences research and policy;
- Identifying effective strategies for ensuring research and policy and regulatory decision making are not subject to industry bias;
- Communicating and teaching about industrial risk factors and why it matters for health equity.
“Research needs to be conducted in the best interest of protecting public health and industry should contribute to the cost of that research, while not being involved in the process,” said Nicholas Chartres, PhD, senior research fellow at The University of Sydney who is helping to coordinate the new partnership.
“Industry is working together so one of the goals of this initiative is to develop our own collaboration so we can be more effective because, clearly, this is one of the biggest public health issues we face,” said Woodruff. “The tactics these industries use to undermine health, are also used to undermine the regulatory process leading to health harms.”
View more videos from the Symposium:
About the author
Ariel Eastburn McCormick, MA is an Administrative Project Coordinator for PRHE. She graduated with a BS in Social Sciences from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and graduated with an MA in Applied Anthropology from Humboldt State University.
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