Indeed:
“What we need,” Freudenberg said to me, “is to return to the public sector the right to set health policy and to limit corporations’ freedom to profit at the expense of public health.”
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Rethinking Our ‘Rights’ to
Dangerous Behaviors
FEB. 25, 2014
In the last few
years, it’s become increasingly clear that food companies engineer
hyperprocessed foods in ways precisely geared to most appeal to our tastes.
This technologically advanced engineering is done, of course, with the goal of
maximizing profits, regardless of the effects of the resulting foods on
consumer health, natural resources, the environment or anything else.
But the issues
go way beyond food, as the City University of New York professor Nicholas
Freudenberg discusses in his new book, “Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting
Public Health.” Freudenberg’s case is that the food industry is but
one example of the threat to public health posed by what he calls “the
corporate consumption complex,” an alliance of corporations, banks, marketers
and others that essentially promote and benefit from unhealthy lifestyles.
It sounds
creepy; it is creepy. But it’s also plain to see. Yes, it’s unlikely there’s a
cabal that sits down and asks, “How can we kill more kids tomorrow?” But
Freudenberg details how six industries — food and beverage, tobacco, alcohol,
firearms, pharmaceutical and automotive — use pretty much the same playbook to
defend the sales of health-threatening products. This playbook, largely
developed by the tobacco industry, disregards human health and poses greater
threats to our existence than any communicable disease you can name.
All of these
industries work hard to defend our “right” — to smoke, feed our children junk,
carry handguns and so on — as matters of choice, freedom and responsibility.
Their unified line is that anything that restricts those “rights” is
un-American.
Yet each
industry, as it (mostly) legally can, designs products that are difficult to
resist and sometimes addictive. This may be obvious, if only in retrospect: The food industry has created combinations that
most appeal to our brains’ instinctual and learned responses, although we were
eating those foods long before we realized that. It may be hidden (and
borderline illegal), as when tobacco companies upped the nicotine quotient of tobacco.
Sometimes, as Freudenberg points out, the appeals may be subtle: Knowing full
well that S.U.V.’s were less safe and more environmentally damaging than
standard cars, manufacturers nevertheless marketed them as safer, appealing to
our “unconscious ‘reptilian instincts’ for survival and reproduction and to
advertise S.U.V.’s as both protection against crime and unsafe drivers and as a
means to escape from civilization.”
The problems
are clear, but grouping these industries gives us a better way to look at the
struggle of consumers, of ordinary people, to regain the upper hand. The issues
of auto and gun safety, of drug, alcohol and tobacco addiction, and of
hyperconsumption of unhealthy food are not as distinct as we’ve long believed;
really, they’re quite similar. For example, the argument for protecting people
against marketers of junk food relies in part on the fact that antismoking
regulations and seatbelt laws were initially attacked as robbing us of choice;
now we know they’re lifesavers.
Thus the most
novel and interesting parts of Freudenberg’s book are those that rephrase the
discussion of rights and choice, because we need more than seatbelt and
antismoking laws, more than a few policies nudging people toward better health.
Until now (and, sadly, perhaps well into the future), corporations have been
both more nimble and more flush with cash than the public health arms of
government. “What we need,” Freudenberg said to me, “is to return to the public
sector the right to set health policy and to limit corporations’ freedom to
profit at the expense of public health.”
Redefining the
argument may help us find strategies that can actually bring about change. The
turning point in the tobacco wars was when the question changed from the
industry’s — “Do people have the right to smoke?” — to that of public health:
“Do people have the right to breathe clean air?” Note that both questions are
legitimate, but if you address the first (to which the answer is of course
“yes”) without asking the second (to which the answer is of course also “yes”)
you miss an opportunity to convert the answer from one that leads to greater
industry profits to one that has literally cut smoking rates in half.
Similarly, we
need to be asking not “Do junk food companies have the right to market to
children?” but “Do children have the right to a healthy diet?” (In Mexico, the
second question has been answered positively. Shamefully, we have yet to take
that step.) The question is not only, “Do we have a right to bear arms?” but also
“Do we have the right to be safe in our streets and schools?” In short, says
Freudenberg: “The right to be healthy trumps the right of corporations to
promote choices that lead to premature death and preventable illnesses.
Protecting public health is a fundamental government responsibility; a decent
society should not allow food companies to convince children to buy food that’s
bad for them or to encourage a lifetime of unhealthy eating.”
Oddly, these
are radical notions. But aren’t they less “un-American” than allowing a company
to maximize its return on investment by looking to sell to children or healthy
adults in ways that will cause premature mortality? As Freudenberg says,
“Shouldn’t science and technology be used to improve human well-being, not to
advance business goals that harm health?” Two other questions that can be
answered “yes.”
