GLP podcast: Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Food—health harming industries or life-saving innovators?

Fossil fuels, pesticides and food processing have dramatically improved living standards around the globe. This may be a controversial claim, but it’s difficult to dispute. Inexpensive energy and abundant food are two essential components of the unprecedented economic growth the world experienced over the last century. Yet this is not the message that comes through when certain academic voices talk about these innovations or the industries that produced them. Instead of considering the risks and the benefits of, say, pesticides—e.g., crop yield increases, reduced disease spread—these figures speak exclusively of their potential to cause harm.

Consider this curious New England Journal of Medicine perspective from the University of California, San Francisco’s Center to End Corporate Harm. The article erroneously brands fossil fuels, processed foods, synthetic chemicals and prescription opioids—a diverse array of useful tools when reasonably used—as “corporate vectors” of disease, no different than cigarettes. It urges researchers to weaponize “internal industry documents,” much like the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s, to facilitate litigation to cripple the companies that make these products.

The framing is overly simplistic and ideological, collapsing distinct tools and risks into a cartoonish conspiracy of corporate villainy. Tobacco’s decades-long denial of nicotine addiction and cancer risk was uniquely deceptive. Fossil fuels have driven the large gains in global life expectancy by replacing deadly biomass cooking fires and enabling modern agriculture and medicine—benefits the NEJM article largely ignores.

Selective document-mining amounts to hindsight bias and cherry-picking. Every industry keeps internal memos, but when you read the allegedly scandalous documents, they usually don’t reveal nefarious behavior. GLP has reported on multiple cases in recent years confirming this fact (see here and here).

Instead of blanket litigation, proper regulation and evidence-based education continue to offer a more sensible alternative. Demonizing “corporate vectors” is a distraction from the actual causes of our public health challenges.

Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies as they examine so-called “health harming industries.”

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Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish