New Research Center Takes on Corporate-Driven Disease Epidemic

There’s been a marked shift in the types of diseases causing the most harm around the world over the past few decades. Chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease and metabolic disorders have overtaken infectious diseases like tuberculosis and cholera. But according to scientists at a newly launched research center, this dramatic change isn’t primarily driven by genetics, age or lack of exercise.

“This shift, which has dramatically changed in the last 20 years, is due to corporate-produced risk factors,” said Tracey Woodruff, director of the new Center to End Corporate Harm at the University of California, San Francisco. “One in four deaths globally is due to exposures to chemicals, plastics and fossil fuels,” Woodruff added at the center’s launch celebration last week, noting that ultra-processed foods, opioids and tobacco are other “corporate-driven risk factors contributing to disease.”

The center will leverage UCSF’s Industry Documents Library, a vast collection that began with millions of internal tobacco industry materials released through litigation and now includes documents from the opioid, pharmaceutical, chemical, food and fossil fuel industries. These documents provide researchers unprecedented insight into how companies have worked to hide evidence of harm from their products.

“We’ll be using science and the industry documents to hold industry accountable,” Woodruff explained. The goal is to study what she describes as the leading vector of disease: corporations.

Inside Climate News reached out to several industry trade groups including the American Petroleum Institute, the American Chemistry Council, and the National Association of Tobacco Outlets for comment, but received no responses.

The new center brings together pioneering researchers who have spent decades studying industry bias and what they call the “commercial determinants of health.” Their work has consistently uncovered how corporations manipulate science, delay regulations and conceal evidence of harm to protect profits.

“If you look at a whole body of research on a particular topic, you’ll see that the industry-sponsored studies differ in their results and conclusions from the non-industry ones,” explained Lisa Bero, chief scientist at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “And they differ in a way that makes an industry’s product look more favorable, either less harmful or, in the case of drugs, more effective.”

Bero and colleagues had detected this “funding effect” for years, but when presenting evidence to policymakers, companies would insist studies they funded used the same methods as independent research. This changed dramatically in 1994 when a whistleblower delivered more than 4,000 pages of confidential tobacco industry documents to UCSF researcher Stanton Glantz, followed years later by documents from a lawsuit against the pharmaceutical industry.

“These documents basically told us what was really happening,” said Bero, an authority on corporate bias in research. The materials revealed elaborate campaigns to fund favorable research, suppress unfavorable findings, discredit critical scientists, and influence how science is evaluated by regulators.

The tobacco industry’s tactics provided a playbook for other industries. “They basically cut their teeth on denying that tobacco causes disease,” said Pam Ling, who leads UCSF’s Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. “And then other industries can use the same techniques, the same PR firms, the same lawyers to make those same arguments.”

Laura Schmidt, an expert on food-related causes of disease, highlighted how the documents have exposed troubling connections between the tobacco and food industries. Around 1985, as obesity rates began rising dramatically, tobacco companies acquired some of the world’s largest food corporations. “They showed their food subsidiaries how to take chemical additives and use them in ultra-processed foods to make them more addictive and unhealthy,” Schmidt explained.

The impact has been staggering. “Now 75 percent of us are overweight or obese,” Schmidt noted. “It’s not like everybody lost their willpower at once.”

Nicholas Chartres, senior research fellow at the University of Sydney and scientific advisor to the center, specializes in studying corporate influence on regulation. While some tactics like lobbying are visible—”the fossil fuel industry in 2023 spent $130 million lobbying, and environmental groups about $30 million”—others remain hidden from public view.

One example Chartres highlighted involved the fumigant phosphine, used in tobacco production. When the Environmental Protection Agency considered tighter restrictions that would have “essentially cripple[d] the tobacco industry,” researchers discovered that former EPA scientists hired by tobacco companies successfully convinced regulators that stricter controls were unnecessary.

The center’s scientists describe the resulting health crisis as an “industrial epidemic,” with products ranging from fossil fuels to ultra-processed foods driving rising rates of cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and other chronic illnesses.

“If we’re really going to address the major risk factors of disease,” Woodruff concluded, “we have to address how corporations are causing disease.”