Overview

Why do sugary beverage and fast food industries thrive in the emerging world? An interesting public health paradox has emerged in some developing nations. Despite government commitment to eradicating noncommunicable diseases and innovative prevention programs aimed at reducing obesity and type 2 diabetes, sugary beverage and fast food industries are thriving. But political leaders in countries such as Mexico, Brazil, India, China, and Indonesia are reluctant to introduce policies regulating the marketing and sale of their products, particularly among vulnerable groups like children and the poor. Why? In Junk Food Politics, Eduardo J. Gómez argues that the challenge lies with the strategic politics of junk food industries in these countries. Industry leaders have succeeded in creating supportive political coalitions by, ironically, partnering with governments to promote soda taxes, food labeling, and initiatives focused on public awareness and exercise while garnering presidential support (and social popularity) through contributions to government anti-hunger and anti-poverty campaigns. These industries have also manipulated scientific research by working with academic allies while creating their own support bases among the poor through employment programs and community services. Taken together, these tactics have hampered people's ability to mobilize in support of stricter regulation for the marketing and sale of unhealthy products made by companies such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestlé. Drawing on detailed historical case studies, Junk Food Politics proposes an alternative political science framework that emphasizes how junk food corporations restructure politics and society before agenda-setting ever takes place. This pathbreaking book also reveals how these global corporations further their policy influence through the creation of transnational nongovernmental organizations that support industry views.

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9781421444284

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This groundbreaking work exposes the strategies by which sugary drink and fast food companies boost profits and sidestep accountability, leaving individuals and health systems to suffer the consequences...[Junk Food Politics] illuminates how this corrupt system of control operates, with corporations pushing unhealthy foods at low prices to [maximize] their profits, while states work with them and become complicit in exacerbating the costs to people and health systems. Gomez offers a groundbreaking perspective on commercial determinants of health, which is desperately needed to capture the complexities and tensions inherent in junk food policy. —LSE Review of Books

Author Information

Eduardo J. Gómez is an associate professor and the director of the Institute of Health Policy and Politics in the College of Health at Lehigh University. He is the author of Geopolitics in Health: Confronting Obesity, AIDS, and Tuberculosis in the Emerging BRICS Economies.

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