Researchers Study How Corporate Manipulation Impacts Health
There’s been a marked shift in the types of diseases causing the most harm around the world over the past few decades. Chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease, and metabolic disorders have overtaken infectious diseases like tuberculosis and cholera. It’s not genetics, age, or lack of exercise driving the rapid rise in chronic disease, scientists at a new research center say.
“This shift, which has dramatically changed in the last 20 years, is due to corporate-produced risk factors,” said Tracey Woodruff, an expert on the health impacts of environmental exposures and director of the new Center to End Corporate Harm at the University of California, San Francisco.
“One in four deaths globally is due to exposures to chemicals, plastics, and fossil fuels,” Woodruff said at a celebration of the center’s launch this month in San Francisco, adding that ultra-processed foods, opioids, and tobacco are other “corporate-driven risk factors contributing to disease.”
The new center will foster collaborations among scientists who study industry tactics to hide the harms of their products, taking advantage of UC San Francisco’s Industry Documents Library. The library, started to provide permanent access to millions of internal tobacco industry materials released through litigation, now curates collections of documents across the opioid, drug, chemical, food, and fossil fuel industries.
“We’ll be using science and the industry documents to hold industry accountable,” Woodruff said. The goal, she said, is to study what she calls the leading vector of disease: corporations.
Inside Climate News asked the American Petroleum Institute, the American Chemistry Council, and the National Association of Tobacco Outlets for their perspectives on the new center, but none of the industry trade groups responded.
The center will harness the intellectual firepower of scholars and pioneers in the study of industry bias and the “commercial determinants of health” to build on groundbreaking research uncovering industry tactics to manipulate science, delay regulations, and hide evidence of harm to defend their profit margins.
“If you look at a whole body of research on a particular topic, you’ll see that the industry-sponsored studies differ in their results and conclusions [from] the non-industry ones,” said Lisa Bero, chief scientist at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “And they differ in a way that makes an industry’s product look more favorable, either less harmful or, in the case of drugs, more effective.”
For years, Bero and her colleagues detected this “funding effect.” But when they presented the evidence to regulators or policymakers, companies would insist that the studies they financed used the same methods as independent studies.
Then in 1994, a whistleblower dropped off more than 4,000 pages of confidential internal tobacco industry documents from the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. in the office of UC San Francisco researcher Stanton Glantz. About a decade later, the researchers obtained another collection of previously secret documents, this time from an off-label marketing lawsuit against the drug industry.
“These documents basically told us what was really happening,” said Bero, a leading authority on corporate bias and conflicts of interest in research.
The center will harness the intellectual firepower of scholars and pioneers in the study of industry bias and the “commercial determinants of health.”
Researchers could now analyze memos, letters, emails, and other materials written by company executives, scientists, lawyers, and PR firms. They unearthed elaborate industry campaigns to fund research that supported their products, suppress research that didn’t, discredit researchers who questioned their products’ safety, and even influence how science should be evaluated.
It was extremely difficult to convince policymakers and regulators of these tactics, Bero said, until researchers could show them what industry players were doing, in their own words.
Scholars have the longest history of documenting these tactics from studying the tobacco industry.
“They basically cut their teeth on denying that tobacco causes disease,” said Pam Ling, a physician and public health expert who leads the UC San Francisco Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. “And then other industries can use the same techniques, the same PR firms, the same lawyers to make those same arguments.”
Corporations’ efforts to fend off health-protective regulations has led to “an industrial epidemic,” the new center’s scientists said, with products from fossil fuels to ultra-processed foods contributing to rising rates of cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and other chronic illnesses.
Thousands of documents in the industry library shed light on what’s going on in the ultra-processed food industry, said Laura Schmidt, an expert at the center focused on food-related causes of disease.
Rates of obesity and cardiometabolic disease started increasing around 1985, Schmidt said, and just got worse and worse. “Now 75 percent of us are overweight or obese.”
Something had to have happened in the environment, she said. “It’s not like everybody lost their willpower at once.”
Around the same time the obesity epidemic took off, the tobacco industry acquired the largest food companies in the world, Schmidt said. They showed their food subsidiaries how to take chemical additives and use them in ultra-processed foods to make them more addictive and unhealthy, she said.
The documents have also revealed how companies influence the regulatory process.
Some of the influence is easy to see and track, like lobbying. “We know the fossil fuel industry in 2023 spent $130 million lobbying, and environmental groups about $30 million,” said Nicholas Chartres, a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney and lead scientific advisor to the center, who specializes in researching the role of corporate conflicts of interest in science. “There’s a huge disparity, but we see it.”
“If we’re really going to address the major risk factors of disease, we have to address how corporations are causing disease.”
Researchers reviewed thousands of internal industry documents and EPA documents obtained through federal records requests and showed that ex-agency scientists hired by the tobacco industry convinced regulators tighter restrictions were unnecessary.
Ultimately, the center aims to help people and policymakers see corporations as risk factors.
“If we’re really going to address the major risk factors of disease,” Woodruff said, “we have to address how corporations are causing disease.”
Liza Gross is a reporter for Inside Climate News based in Northern California.