Ten Corporate Business and Political Practices that Harm Health
How Do Big Food, Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Corporations Harm Health?
This List Shows 10 Ways:
1. Make disease promoting products ubiquitous
2. Encourage retailers to promote their products
3. Supersize products
4. Target marketing to vulnerable populations
5. Price unhealthy products to promote sale and use
6. Create monopolies that reduce bargaining power of consumers and government
7. Support candidates who oppose public health policies
8. Lobby against laws that protect public health
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Some of the companies that support the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a legislative group that takes corporate money to write business friendly laws. credit
9. Threaten to take jobs out of communities that oppose their policies
- When New York State considered a tax on sugary beverages, PepsiCo threatened to move out of Purchase, New York.
10. Organize Astroturf groups to oppose public health policies
A television ad paid for the American Beverage Association on behalf of New Yorkers Against Unfair Taxes
Ten Community Strategies to Combat Lethal but Legal Products
How can communities and community groups bring an end to food, alcohol, tobacco and other corporations’ harmful practices?
Read this list of 10 possible strategies.
1. Strengthen right to know and duty to disclose rules.
2. Create health zones free of commercial promotion of unhealthy products.
3. Use zoning laws to limit density of unhealthy outlets.
4. Encourage young people to create counter-advertising campaigns
5. Protect children from targeted marketing
6. Enforce existing laws on lethal but legal products
7. Require full disclosure of campaign contributions by donor and recipient.
8. Limit and require disclosure of all lobbying.
9. Train and support community groups and leaders
10. Reject the view that there is no alternative, insist another world is possible.
For more, see: Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption and Protecting Public Health by Nicholas Freudenberg, Oxford University Press, 2014.
Corporations and Health Watch 