In his farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about the growing power of the military-industrial complex. More than 50 years later, Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor of Public Health at City University of New York, has issued a warning no less grave about “the corporate consumption complex” – the interconnected web of corporations, financial institutions and marketers that, in the name of individual rights, promote and profit from our unhealthy habits.
In Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health, Freudenberg argues that “In a global economy that focuses relentlessly on profit, enhancing the bottom line of a few hundred corporations . . . has become more important than realizing the potential for good health.” According to Mark Bittman of The New York Times, “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.”
To turn this destructive calculus around, Freudenberg told Bittman, “What we need is to return to the public sector the right to set health policy and to limit corporations’ freedom to...
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