Commercial Determinants of Health: Implications for Health Interventions

Hi, I'm Professor Emma Boyland, a psychologist who researches eating behaviour and food policy based in the UK.

In the next five minutes, I'm going to provide some important insights into commercially driven health harms and the ways in which public health interventions and strategies can mitigate these harms.

Let's get started.

Poor diet and obesity play an important role in people experiencing poor health and early death.

The food industry's products are highly processed, affordable, available, and when we consume them, they're damaging our health.

The commercial determinants of health are the systems, practices, and pathways through which commercial actors affect health and equity.

Today I'm focusing on food, but there are parallels with alcohol, fossil fuels, tobacco industries.

Let's think about some of the ways in which the actions of the food industry directly and indirectly affect our health.

First, they aggressively advertise their products and brands in all sorts of media and settings, with the biggest growth being online.

There is strong research evidence that this makes us buy and eat more unhealthy advertised foods.

Second, they lobby policymakers to weaken, delay or scrap public health policies and use media as a vehicle to deploy arguments against such policies.

Third, they actively seek to undermine the science that is underpinning the regulatory actions they are afraid of.

They also try to create the illusion of support that a lot of people and studies agree with their stance.

So what are the implications of this for public health interventions and strategies?

First, public health policy interventions must be mandatory, not voluntary.

Industries cannot simultaneously profit from a problem and solve it.

Evidence shows mandatory policies are more effective.

Second, approaches must be comprehensive in scope, addressing multiple areas of the food system.

Think of the squeezed balloon.

Pressure applied in one place gets released elsewhere.

Third, synergy across the system is important.

If the definitions and processes underpinning the strategy are consistent across, for example, food labelling, food marketing, point of sale regulations and so on, then the development and implementation is much more efficient.

Chile is a great example of this.

Fourth, the aim should be for incremental integrated progress towards the public health goal.

No single policy can tackle these public health challenges.

We can't afford to wait for the perfect solution.

We need to start somewhere and add and develop.

I'm Professor Emma Boylan for 5 Minute CPD.

Thanks for watching and be sure to check out additional resources on this page and more learning at eso.org.