You walk as much as you can, eat healthily, and attend the gym. You receive a vaccination and wash your hands. Your health is in your hands. We tell ourselves stories like this all the time. Sadly, it’s not entirely accurate.
Outside factors have a great deal of influence, particularly those manufactured by corporations and regularly offered products that have the potential to kill or sicken us.
For example, you and your family have been exposed to hazardous chemicals for decades, some of which have been connected to malignancies of the kidney and testicles. These substances, sometimes referred to as “forever chemicals” or PFAS, are very likely present in your body.
As of right now, we know that exposure to only four product classes—alcohol, cigarettes, highly processed foods, and fossil fuels—is responsible for one in three deaths globally. In other words, 19 of the 56 million fatalities that occur worldwide each year (as of 2019) are related to them. Nowadays, pollution is the leading environmental factor contributing to early death, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels. Impacts are disproportionately felt by low-income and communities of color. More than 90% of deaths linked to pollution take place in low- and middle-income nations.
This indicates that companies that produce, market, and sell these dangerous items are the primary global risk factor for illness and death.
Even worse, these companies frequently cover up the negative effects of their goods to increase profits at the expense of human health, even after they become aware of the harms they create. Big businesses in the food, pharmaceutical, chemical, oil, and tobacco industries have all used similar strategies to distribute the ills while privatizing the profits.
Businesses who take steps to hide the harm their products cause hinder us from defending our children and ourselves. Nowadays, there are numerous instances of corporate misconduct that are well-documented. Examples include asbestos, fossil fuels, sugar, silica, asbestos, pesticides, and tobacco. In these cases, companies purposefully created doubt or concealed the risks associated with their products in order to evade regulation and preserve profits.
Here’s how to stop this from happening again in three ways:
1) Make companies follow the same open science and data-sharing guidelines as independent scientists.
2) Cut off the financial ties that bind industry to scholars and researchers.
3) Require corporations to make their contributions to researchers and legislators publicly transparent.