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The aisles seem to go on forever as you push your shopping trolley towards the cereal section. You arrive, only to be met with an anxiety-inducing dilemma: do you buy the granola with low sugar or the one that is fortified with protein and vitamins? Or maybe the one with those delicious little chocolate chunks?

The supermarket can be mildly overwhelming, but at least there is no shortage of consumer choice. It seems that we are in control of the food we eat and the lifestyles we lead. We can make decisions that lead us towards better health, or we can take measured risks – after all, what would life be without a little chocolate now and again?

Health scientist begs to differ. While a researcher at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), she witnessed the tactics that corporations use to hide the harms caused by their products – and to skew evidence about their potential benefits. What’s more, some of these products have contributed to a rising tide of toxic pollutants in our environment that is impossible for even the savviest consumer to avoid.

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In February, Woodruff became the founding director at the University of California San Francisco’s (USCF) , which aims to reveal the methods that companies employ to distort science in the interests of profit. She told ���ӽ紫ý about the growing health problems associated with contaminated environments, why corporations should be regarded as a disease vector, and what can be done to counter industry’s harmful influence.

Graham Lawton: Let’s start with the basics. What kinds of health problems are you interested in?

Tracey Woodruff: The global burden of disease has shifted since the 1990s. It used to be that the largest burden was from infectious diseases. That’s decreased, which is a success. But what we’re seeing now is an – such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity – at a greater rate than communicable diseases have gone down.

This is a sudden shift, so we know it’s not genetic. A key driver is a handful of industrial products: air pollution from fossil fuels, sugar and ultra-processed food, tobacco, chemicals and alcohol. These five are responsible for almost 30 per cent of the global burden of death, at the University of Washington School of Medicine. That is huge.

What can be done about it?

If we as a public health community want to address the growing burden of chronic disease, we need to look at corporations as a disease vector. A communicable disease vector like a mosquito is a living organism that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen to another living organism via blood-sucking, for example. Corporations are the new disease vector because they transmit toxic exposures by manufacturing products or emitting contaminants that harm and kill people. We have to study the methods of these corporate drivers of disease if we want to prevent them.

What do we know about how these companies tend to operate?

One common method is hiding information. Corporations may make discoveries about the toxicity of their product and not release it to the public. For instance, my colleagues and I , also called forever chemicals, which we know cause adverse health outcomes. We found that the chemical companies 3M and DuPont knew for decades that these chemicals were harmful, and yet they were using them and just dumping them into the water. It was and still is really tragic. Editor’s note: There have been a number of lawsuits brought against DuPont and, separately, 3M, relating to PFAS chemicals, some of which are known to be toxic to humans. The companies have made payments to settle some of these cases but have not admitted liability.

Corporations also try to undermine the scientific process. They fund research that is favourable to their products and create industry trade groups like the to conceal the direct corporate funding of research. There are many examples. In an , revealed in 2005 by researchers at UCSF, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson and several other tobacco companies funded a scientist to be the lead author of a journal article casting doubt on proposed stricter safety limits on the pesticide phosphine, which the companies used to fumigate stored tobacco. The was published in a journal of which the scientist was editor-in-chief.

Corporations may also skew findings when they come out, as they are selective in the way that they promote information. And, if the public starts to see that a product is causing health harms, the industry will cast doubt on the science.

How is it that corporations have such sprawling influence over the direction and outcomes of research?

In a world where it’s challenging to get grants – and in the US, it could be getting harder because of the proposed cuts to research funding by the Trump administration – people are looking for other sources of funding. And then researchers don’t want to speak out because they could lose their funding.

You have also said that some companies also rig the regulatory process. How does this work?

I saw this when I worked at the US EPA, where I advised on guidelines that are used to evaluate the carcinogenicity of different chemicals. The EPA is one of the few federal agencies that has the power to influence every industry in the US, so many corporations are very actively engaged in its activities. They have a financial stake in getting their products approved, and they have money to spend on making their interests known. It felt like every chemical had its own personal lobbyist.

At the EPA, there are advisory panels that peer review the science. But people who have financial conflicts of interest are included on these panels. Research has shown that even when conflicts are declared, it still can produce more bias from members and can then bias the findings. In some cases, to provide advice about strategy.

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How, in general, do you find out about what companies are doing behind the scenes?

Back in the 1990s, a UCSF professor, , received some internal documents from the tobacco industry, and he made the very wise decision to check all the documents into the library. Once they were in there, even though the tobacco industry tried to get them back and sued, they were protected under academic freedom. That was the beginning of the .

The value of the library is that you can read what the industry was saying in their own words, what they knew and when they knew it. There have been over a thousand research publications using the library to identify how they influenced the scientific and regulatory processes.

Since that time, there have been other collections added. So we have the sugar and pharmaceutical industries, we have a small collection on forever chemicals, we have asbestos-contaminated talcum powder, we have glyphosate – the active ingredient used in some weedkillers. Recently, we’ve acquired documents from the opioid industry.

How does the library obtain such documents? They were presumably never intended for public consumption.

We get them through various mechanisms. The original documents were sent from an anonymous whistleblower at the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation. Some come from Freedom of Information Act requests. A lot of them have been collected through court cases against various companies, too. One of the things that comes out when you look at the documents is that the corporations act together – they share strategies, they collaborate, sometimes they hire the same lobbyists, sometimes they have .

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Does all this mean that we as individuals have less control over our health than we like to think?

Yes! It’s not that people have no control over their health, but there are a lot of structural factors that make it difficult. A good example is the food system. When you go into the grocery store, ultra-processed food occupies a lot of space. There have been estimates that , and it’s continuously marketed to you. That makes it hard to avoid those products. Air pollution is another good example: if you live near polluting sources, you have little control over the polluted air you breathe.

This idea goes against the grain of corporate messaging, which often suggests that we are responsible for our own health. One of the threads that came out from the tobacco papers is that industry lays blame on the individual: “It’s your fault, you didn’t exercise, you ate a bad diet, you smoked.” The trouble is, that distracts from one of the more effective ways to solve the problem, which is government regulations.

It sounds like corporations have more control over our health than we do …

Yes, I would agree with that.

People who hear that might wonder: what can I do?

It’s a two-pronged approach. First, you can take individual actions that will reduce your exposure to toxic chemicals, such as reducing the use of plastics and installing an air filter in your home. People can also send signals to the marketplace, for example by not buying harmful products. Second, we also encourage people to be engaged civically, because we need government action to implement systematic changes. Register to vote, actually go and vote, and then tell your government officials what you want. You have to recognise that industry has a profit motive. They’re responsible to their shareholders. They’re not responsible to the public’s health, so we have to force the issue.

One aim of the centre you direct is to find ways to counter industry’s influence. What might those look like?

The first is to remove people who have financial conflicts of interest from all government review boards and committees. We know this can be done; the International Agency for Research on Carcinogens, which is a division of the World Health Organization that reviews the science on environmental factors’ potential to cause cancer, put in place a policy to this effect in 2015.

It is also important when you’re doing evaluations of scientific evidence that you identify and account for any financial conflicts of interest in the funding of studies. In that way, you can ensure that your evidence evaluation is more robust and less biased.

Finally, increasing government funding of science so that scientists don’t have to be reliant on industry funding would help to reduce the influence of corporations.

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And are you expecting pushback against what you’re doing?

Many of the members of the centre have had pushback on them individually, or on the work they’re doing. One has a long history of working on how the tobacco industry influences science and policy, and early in her career the tobacco industry flat-out attacked her by sending letters to UCSF saying that she shouldn’t be promoted. So we could expect some of that too.

You are swimming against the political tide.

Yes, but there’s a silver lining in that there is a portion of the population that wants the government to do more in this area. I think there was a component of the 2024 US election that was about people’s frustration with the government in addressing the growing burden of chronic disease. People are concerned and – I think rightfully – a little scared that their friends are sick and the government needs to do a better job of helping them.