The commercial determinants of health.

The commercial determinants of health are, broadly speaking, those activities of the private sector that affect the health of populations. These can be direct, such as the marketing of unhealthy products, or more distal, like industry lobbying against emissions regulations, or duty increases, donating to political campaigns, funding unreliable or misleading research aimed at generating doubt around product harms. The power and scale of commercial ‘non-state’ actors are vast in breadth and depth, and growing, with intersectional influence that spans our physical, social, and cultural environments. Yet there has been little effort to synthesize research on the potential negative aspects of this influence for population health. This gap does a disservice to society at a time when global problems, such as climate change, demonstrate the extent to which the influence and incentives of such non-state actors must be accounted for if progress is to be made.

Studying the commercial determinants of health requires an understanding of the common elements and incentives that drive corporate strategy, and what their individual and cumulative effects are on health, policy, research and discourse. Commercial Determinants of Health is intended primarily as a comprehensive text that brings together cross-cutting ideas and evidence bases in a way that brings this field of study together, describes the state of the evidence and conceptual thinking, and considers its future direction and potential impact in light of this. The field of commercial determinants research remains one in progress, with early evidence of research funders taking interest on the broader consequences of commercial activity on health and policy, but no clear frameworks, courses, conferences, journals or books to support junior scholars as they move into this rapidly growing field. This is therefore the ideal time for a book that brings together past and recent evidence across a range of disciplines in a way that gives this field shape and direction, and in doing so becomes an important foundation for future research and translation efforts.

The audience for this book includes scholars from a range of disciplines (including for example sociology, epidemiology, ethics, law and economics), readers with a general interest in the topic, advocates and public health practitioners. Therefore, we hope that the book can make a genuine scholarly contribution, but also be accessible so that readers from different disciplinary perspectives can still find the work readable and compelling.