Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 615 N. Wolfe Street, Baltimore, MD, 21205, USA.
Heidelberg Institute of Global Health, Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital, Heidelberg University, Im Neuenheimer Feld 130.3, 69120, Heidelberg, Germany.
Global Health. 2022 Feb 14;18(1):17. doi: 10.1186/s12992-022-00811-x.
Noncommunicable diseases contribute to over 70% of global deaths each year. Efforts to address this epidemic are complicated by the presence of powerful corporate actors. Despite this, few attempts have been made to synthesize existing evidence of the strategies used to advance corporate interests across industries. Given this, our study seeks to answer the questions: 1) Is there an emergent taxonomy of strategies used by the tobacco, alcohol and sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) industries to expand corporate autonomy? 2) How are these strategies similar and how are they different?
Under the guidance of a framework developed by Arksey and O'Malley, a scoping review was carried out whereby six databases were searched in June 2021 to identify relevant peer-reviewed literature. To be included in this review, studies had to explicitly discuss the strategies used by the tobacco, alcohol, and/or sugar-sweetened beverage multinational corporations and be considered review articles aimed to synthesize existing evidence from at least one of the three industries. Eight hundred and fifty-eight articles were selected for full review and 59 articles were retained for extraction, analysis, and categorization.
Results identified six key strategies the industries used: 1) influencing government policy making and implementation, 2) challenging unfavorable science, 3) creating a positive image, 4) manipulating markets, 5) mounting legal challenges, and 6) anticipating future scenarios. Despite these similarities, there are few but important differences. Under the strategy of influencing government policy making and implementation, for example, literature showed that the alcohol and SSB industries have been "privileged with high levels of participation" within international public health organizations.
Understanding how industries resist efforts to control them is important for public health advocates working to reduce consumption of and death and diseases resulting from harmful commodities. Moreover, there is a greater need for the public health community to generate consensus about how to ethically engage or not engage with industries that produce unhealthy commodities. More studies are also needed to build the evidence base of industry tactics to resist regulation, particularly in the case of SSB, and in low-and middle-income countries.
非传染性疾病每年导致全球超过 70%的死亡。尽管如此，在解决这一流行病的过程中，由于强大的企业行为体的存在，努力变得复杂。尽管如此，几乎没有尝试综合现有证据来了解各个行业中推进企业利益的策略。有鉴于此，我们的研究旨在回答以下问题：1）烟草、酒精和含糖饮料（SSB）行业用来扩大企业自主权的策略是否存在新兴分类法？2）这些策略有哪些相似之处，又有哪些不同之处？
在由 Arksey 和 O'Malley 制定的框架指导下，进行了范围界定审查，即 2021 年 6 月在六个数据库中搜索了相关同行评议文献。要纳入本综述，研究必须明确讨论烟草、酒精和/或含糖饮料跨国公司使用的策略，并被视为旨在综合至少来自三个行业之一的现有证据的综述文章。有 858 篇文章被选为全文审查，59 篇文章被保留用于提取、分析和分类。
结果确定了该行业使用的六个关键策略：1）影响政府政策的制定和实施，2）挑战不利的科学，3）树立积极形象，4）操纵市场，5）提出法律挑战，6）预测未来情景。尽管存在这些相似之处，但也存在一些但很重要的差异。例如，在影响政府政策的制定和实施的策略下，文献表明，酒精和 SSB 行业在国际公共卫生组织中“享有高水平的参与特权”。
了解行业如何抵制控制它们的努力对于致力于减少有害商品消费以及由此导致的死亡和疾病的公共卫生倡导者非常重要。此外，公共卫生界更需要就如何以合乎道德的方式与生产不健康商品的行业进行接触或不接触达成共识。还需要更多的研究来建立行业抵制监管的策略的证据基础，特别是在 SSB 的情况下，以及在中低收入国家。
