Countering industry promotion of harmful products to protect public health.

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), caused by the consumption and use of unhealthy products, cannot be attributed to individual behaviours alone. The way that our world has changed in recent decades shows that the problem needs to be addressed through changes in policy rather than focusing solely on behaviour change. The efforts to reduce the harm caused by smoking over the past 50 years have given us a blueprint for how to reduce the harm caused by the tactics used by big industry to promote and sell harmful products. These commercial determinants of health (CDOH) can be countered by pre-exisitng powers at the local level, but we need national policy changes to help counter these CDOH more effectively.