Paper tells how industries ‘shape the narrative’ on health threats

The fossil fuel, chemical and ultraprocessed food industries have corrupted the Trump administration’s effort to address chronic diseases, according to a study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The paper broadly describes how companies have followed a playbook created by the tobacco industry to hide its products’ health harms and skirt regulation. It specifically calls out the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again Commission for failing to push the federal government to regulate harmful pesticides, like glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup.

Co-authored by scientists affiliated with the Center to End Corporate Harm, a joint initiative between Stanford University; the University of Sydney; and University of California, San Francisco, the paper relies on the University of California, San Francisco’s Industry Documents Library, which originated as an archive of internal tobacco industry documents obtained through lawsuits and freedom of information requests and has since expanded to include other health-harming industries, including fossil fuels and chemicals.

In reviewing those documents, the authors, were able to track how the chemicals and fossil fuel industry have followed a blueprint first laid out by the tobacco industry to stymie regulation.