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The American food and beverages industry generates a billion dollars a day and is controlled by these 10 companies, in order of influence spending: PepsiCo, CocoCola, Mars, Mondelez, Kelloggs, Nestle, General Mills, Danone, Unilever, and Associated British Foods (a private non-US holding company, with 2023 earnings of £19.8 billion, also known as Wittington investments). 

In 2023 alone these companies spent more than $15.5 million to lobby against public health.  

All government lobbying figures are publicly reported, but what is often missed is how corporations are also influencing other strategic nongovernmental entities like professional associations and advocacy organizations.

These kinds of NGOs help create the health, nutrition, and medical guidelines that inform legislation and government policy.  

Another factor of influence is that the industry pays 11 times more for research than the National Institutes of Health, which is why the industry generates 60 percent of research studies. As a result, more regulatory determinations are being made for the benefit of commercial interests rather than for public health. 

The catastrophic impact of these efforts: US health and life expectancy figures are plummeting. According to CDC data 74 percent of adults and almost 50 percent of children are overweight or obese and nearly 40 percent of the population has prediabetes; in 1959 that figure was 1 percent. 

Influence peddling 2024: it’s not just for legislators and regulators anymore.

The American Medical Association’s top donors include drug and biotech corps: Amgen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Daiichi Sankyo, Eli Lilly, Genentech, GlaxoSmithKline, Grail, Henry Schein, Merck & Co, and Novartis. (The AMA lobbying total for 2024 is $12.6 million) 

Stanford School of Medicine received $3 million from Pfizer in 2011 and the serving dean, Dr. Philip Pizzo (pain specialist), also received pharmaceutical industry consulting payments. That same year Pizzo was appointed chair of an Institute of Medicine pain management committee, to establish pain treatment guidelines. Nine of the 19 people he appointed were paid consulting fees directly from drug companies. 

That committee subsequently recommended relaxing opioid treatment standards. Their 382 page report states: “Regulatory, legal, educational, and cultural barriers inhibit the medically appropriate use of opioid analgesics.”

The world’s biggest baby formula and food manufacturers — Abbott ($40.1 billion), Mead Johnson ($3.7 billion), and Nestle (aka Gerber $610.5 million) — are funding The American Academy of Pediatrics.

The American Diabetes Association gets funding from food, drug, and beverage companies. In the early 2000s, the ADA received a three-year, $1.5 million sponsorship deal from Cadbury-Schweppes, the world’s largest producers of confectionary products including Diet-Rite soda, Snapple tea, and Mott’s Applesauce. 

A BU School of Public Health study found that Coca-Cola and PepsiCo sponsored at least 96 national health organizations between 2011 and 2015, including the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association. 

The study also found that, at that time, these companies were simultaneously lobbying against 29 public health bills to improve nutrition or reduce soda consumption.

Anheuser Busch is surreptitiously funding health advocacy groups like Alcoholics Anonymous through its foundation.

Corporations start by sponsoring NGO educational/outreach programs. Then they fund research showing health problems may be exaggerated, which leads to findings that alter study outcomes, and culminates in increased lobbying efforts to reform restrictions, all in the industry’s best interest.

In April 2024 corporate misconduct fines surpassed the trillion dollar mark, but the reality is these institutional prosecutions are at a 25-year low and companies never fully pay for wrongdoing because of deferred prosecution agreements, or the misconduct costs are prefigured into business calculus, or price increases in the form of markups mitigate the fines.

It is literally a matter of life and death to acknowledge that government regulatory policies and guidelines need to actually be in the public interest — not for corporate benefit. 

The Politics of Health Care and the 2024 Election

From KFF: “Health policy and politics are inextricably linked. Policy is about what the government can do to shift the financing, delivery, and quality of health care, so who controls the government has the power to shape those policies. Elections, therefore, always have consequences for the direction of health policy — who is the president and in control of the executive branch, which party has the majority in the House and the Senate with the ability to steer legislation, and who has control in state houses.”

Rebalancing Commercial and Public Interests in Prioritizing Biomedical, Social and Environmental Aspects of Health Through Defining and Managing Conflicts of Interest

From Frontiers: “Abstract Biomedical research is intended to benefit human beings and their health. Toward that end, scientific norms involve examining and criticizing the work of others and prioritizing questions that should be studied. Yet, in areas of health research where industry is active, it has often utilized well-honed strategies aimed at evading scientific standards and at dominating the research agenda, largely through its financial support and lack of transparency of its research practices. These tactics have now been documented to uniformly support industry products.”

The True Extent of America’s Food Monopolies, and Who Pays the Price

The authors write, “A handful of powerful companies control the majority market share of almost 80 percent of dozens of grocery items bought regularly by ordinary Americans, new analysis reveals. A joint investigation by the Guardian and Food and Water Watch found that consumer choice is largely an illusion — despite supermarket shelves and fridges brimming with different brands. In fact, a few powerful transnational companies dominate every link of the food supply chain: from seeds and fertilizers to slaughterhouses and supermarkets to cereals and beers.”

Group Shaping US Nutrition Receives Millions From Big Food Industry

The author writes, “Documents show an influential group that helps shape US food policy and steers consumers toward nutritional products has financial ties to the world’s largest processed food companies and has been controlled by former industry employees who have worked for companies like Monsanto.”

US Nutrition Panel’s Ties To Top Food Giants Revealed in New Report

The author writes, “Almost half of a federal government panel that helps develop US nutritional guidelines has significant ties to big agriculture, ultra-processed food companies, pharmaceutical companies and other corporate organizations with a significant stake in the process’s outcome.”

The Federal Government Have Breached Their Duty to the American Public by Promoting Dietary Recommendations Causing Killer Diseases

From NYU American Public Policy Review: “The diet, and in turn health, of a person in the United States has been manipulated for decades. People are unaware that their life choices are not as autonomous as one would assume. … Public manipulation by the meat and dairy industry is done through both advertising and working relentlessly to gain support from government officials, nutrition professions and the media in order to promote the health benefits of their products. Their efforts however go unnoticed as Americans do not realize that their health and wellbeing is in the hands of those whose sole concern is yielding profit.”

‘Big Food’ Companies Spend Big Money in Hopes of Shaping the Dietary Guidelines for Americans

The author writes, “The maker of Snickers, M&Ms, and Skittles has built a global conglomerate on sugar. The privately held Mars Incorporated let it be known [in 2019] that it hopes to double its $35 billion annual revenue over the next decade, reportedly through expansion in pet food and other areas. But for now, confectionery treats are a main business, which could be why the company spent more than $2 million, in 2018 and early 2019, lobbying Congress around the federal government’s nutrition advice, among other food policy issues.”

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