CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
American
Legacy Foundation Funded Web Site Targets Corporate Influence Over Public Health
21 Corporate Crime Reporter 5, January 23, 2007
A new web site – Corporations
and Health Watch – targets corporate influence over public health.
The web site is the brainchild of Nicholas Freudenberg – a Professor of Public Health at Hunter College, City University of New York.
The web site targets corporate practices that harm health across six industries – automobile food, alcohol, pharmaceutical, firearms and tobacco.
It differs from other public health web sites with its explicit focus on the adverse impact of corporate actions on public health.
“Ultimately, our goals are to identify the common characteristics of successful campaigns to change corporate practices, and to contribute to a growing movement to improve health by changing corporate practices,” the web site claims.
Freudenberg said he and other public health professionals have been growing frustrated – working to get people to live healthy lives, only to be trumped by corporate practices that undermine their work.
“I’ve been teaching public health for 30 years,” Freudenberg said in an interview earlier this week with Corporate Crime Reporter. “My students go out and practice in public health settings in the region and around the country. And they feel frustrated that their work at the individual and community level is often overwhelmed by the actions of the tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceutical, and automobile industries. They are frustrated and feel like Sisyphus – like they are rolling stones up the hill in getting people to stop smoking and eating healthier while these companies are spending millions of dollars a year to persuade people to do the opposite.”
Freudenberg said his “Framing Public Health Campaigns” project – which the web site is a part of – was funded by a $150,000 grant from the American Legacy Foundation – the one billion dollar foundation created out of the 1999 master settlement between the states and the tobacco industry.
“Over the past ten years, there has been a move to return to the founding principles of public health – to look at the social determinants of health as well as individual behavior like smoking, drinking, overeating,” Freudenberg said.
“There are two schools of thought – one is that the primary responsibility is on the individual,” Freudenberg said. “And individual behavior and lifestyle are the important influences on health. But the other school says that those choices are made in a social, economic and environmental context. So, for example, Kelly Brownell, a researcher at Yale University has talked about an obesigenic environment – the toxic environment here in the United States that encourages people to engage in behaviors and adopt lifestyles that promote obesity. We need to look at the decisions around advertising, product design, around pricing that influence the choices that individuals make. Nobody makes a choice in a vacuum. By creating social policies that make it easy for people to choose health, we will be able to reduce some of the daunting health problems that we are facing – like obesity, diabetes and heart disease.”
Each month, the Corporation and Health Watch web site will feature a corporate campaign.
This week, Corporations and Health Watch spotlights an environmental campaign (titled “Jumpstart Ford”) to get Ford Motor Company to produce cleaner, more fuel efficient automobiles.
Freudenberg is also writing a book on the subject – due out next year – tentatively titled – Confronting Disease Promotion: A Guide To Changing Corporate Practices that Harm Health.
(For a complete transcript of the “Interview with Nicholas Freudenberg,” see 21 Corporate Crime Reporter 5, January 29, 2007, print edition only.)
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