Sydney and Lisa Bero: University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus Sydney, May 2 (The Conversation) You go to the gym, eat healthy, and walk as much as possible. You wash your hands and get vaccinated. Take control of your health. This is a common story we tell ourselves. Unfortunately, this is simply not true.
Factors outside our control have a huge impact – especially those products that can make us sick or kill us, made and routinely sold by companies.
For example, you and your family have been exposed to dangerous risks for decades forever chemicals, some of which are linked to kidney and testicular cancer. You are almost certainly carrying these chemicals, known as PFAS or forever chemicals, in your body right now.
And this is just the beginning. We are now exposed to only four classes of product – tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods and fossil fuel – Linked to one in every three deaths worldwide. That is, they account for 19 million of the world’s 56 million deaths each year (as of 2019). Pollution – primarily from fossil fuels – is now the biggest environmental cause of premature death. Communities of color and low-income communities experience disproportionate impacts. More than 90% of pollution-related deaths occur in lower middle income countries.
This means that the major risk factors for disease and death around the world are the corporations that make, market, and sell them. unhealthy products, What’s worse is that even when these corporations are aware of the harms their products cause, they often systematically hide these harms in order to increase profits at the expense of our health. Major tobacco, oil, food, pharmaceutical and chemical corporations have implemented similar techniques, privatizing the profits and spreading the losses.
profit and loss statement
When companies hide the harm their products cause, they prevent us from protecting ourselves and our children. We now have many well-documented cases of corporate wrongdoing such as asbestos, fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides, sugar, silica, and of course tobacco. In these instances, corporations deliberately created doubt or concealed the harm of their products in order to delay or prevent regulation and maintain profits.
Decades of empirical evidence shows that these effective tactics have indeed been shared and strategically transferred from one industry or company to another.
For example, when large tobacco companies Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds purchased food companies Kraft, General Foods, and Nabisco in the 1980s, tobacco executives brought in marketing strategies, flavors, and colors to expand product lines and reduce fatty, Engineered sweet and salty hyperpalatable foods. Cookies, cereals and frozen foods are linked to obesity and diet-related diseases. These foods activate our reward circuits and encourage us to consume more.
Or consider how ‘Forever Chemicals’ became so widespread. A team of scientists (including this article’s co-author) examined previously secret internal industry documents from 3M and DuPont, the largest manufacturers of the chemicals PFOA and PFOS in forever.
The documents revealed that both 3M and DuPont used tobacco industry tactics, such as suppressing adverse research and distorting public debate. Like Big Tobacco, 3M and DuPont had a financial interest in suppressing scientific evidence of the harms of their products, while publicly declaring in-demand products like Teflon as safe.
For decades, the forever chemicals PFOA and PFOS have been used to make Teflon pans, Scotchgard, firefighting foam and other non-stick materials. By the early 2000s, one of these, PFOS, was present in our blood at 20 times the level its manufacturer, 3M, considered safe.
As early as 1961, the chief toxicologist of DuPont’s Teflon subsidiary reported that the company’s wonder material had “the ability to increase the size of rats’ livers at low doses”, and he recommended handling the chemicals “with extreme caution.” . According to a 1970 internal memo, the DuPont-funded Haskell Laboratory found that chemical class C8 (now known as PFOA/PFOS) was “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when swallowed”.
Both 3M and DuPont conducted extensive internal research on the dangers posed to humans by their products, but they shared little of it. The risks of PFOA, including pregnancy-induced hypertension, kidney and testicular cancer, and ulcerative colitis, were not publicly established until 2011.
Now, 60 years after DuPont first became aware of the harm these products were causing, many countries are facing human and environmental consequences and very costly cleanups.
Even though the production of PFOA and PFOS is being phased out, the chemicals easily accumulate in the body and take decades to dissipate. Worse, PFOA and PFOS are just two of more than 15,000 different PFAS chemicals, most of which are still in use.
How can we stop the corporate blow to our health?
My co-authors and I work in a field known as commercial assessor Health, that is to say, the harm that corporations can do to us.
Hiding evidence is a major way for companies to avoid regulation and lawsuits. Internal studies showing harm can be easily hidden. External studies may be influenced by corporate funding, business-friendly scientists, legal action, or lobbying of policy makers to avoid regulation.
Here are three ways to prevent this from happening again:
1) Corporations are expected to adhere to the same standards of data sharing and open science as independent scientists.
If a corporation wants to bring a new product to market, they must register every study they conduct on its harms and release it publicly so the public can see the results of the study.
2) Break financial ties between industry and researchers or policy makers.
Many large corporations will spend money on public studies to obtain results favorable to their interests. Cutting these financial ties means promoting public health research, either through government funding or through alternatives such as taxes on corporate marketing. It would also mean curbing corporate political donations and bringing lobbying under control by limiting corporate access and spending to policymakers and increasing transparency. And it would mean closing the revolving door where government employees or policymakers work for the industry they used to regulate after leaving office.
3) Mandate public transparency Corporate funding to researchers and policy makers.
In 2010, the United States introduced legislation to enforce transparency on how much medical and pharmaceutical companies were spending to influence the products used by doctors. Research using data uncovered by these laws has shown that the problem is widespread. We need this model for other industries so we can clearly see where the corporate money is going. Registries should be comprehensive, permanent and easy to search.
These steps will not be easy. But the status quo means corporations can sell dangerous or deadly products for much longer than necessary.
In doing so, they have become one of the biggest influences on our health and will continue to harm future generations – something that is hard to counter with yoga and willpower. And your health is more important than corporate profits. (talk) NSA NSA
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