摘要：In this article, we critically reflect on the responsibilities that the food industry has for public health. Although food companies are often significant contributors to public health problems (e.g., obesity, type 2 diabetes), the mere possibility of corporate responsibility for public health seems to be excluded in the academic public health discourse. We argue that the behavior of several food companies reflects a split corporate personality, as they contribute to public health problems and simultaneously engage in activities to prevent them. By understanding responsibility for population health as a shared responsibility, we reassess the moral role of the food industry from a forward-looking perspective on responsibility and ask what food companies can and should do to promote health. Companies and corporate activities are often portrayed as major causes of health problems, and this is so for good reasons. The detrimental impact of the sale of tobacco products and alcoholic beverages on health is obvious, and nowadays the food sector is also criticized for contributing to disease and ill health. Many food and beverage companies produce and market products that contain large amounts of salt, sugar, and fat, which are important contributors to obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other so-called lifestyle diseases. 1–3 At the same time, food companies are active in innovation and product development that aim to create healthier products or variants (e.g., by removing trans fats or reducing salt). Some also engage in social programs that encourage people to take up a healthy and active lifestyle. 4,5 Nevertheless, such activities may well cause skepticism because in a competitive market context the ultimate motivation of companies seems to be to make a profit, even at the expense of consumer health. Here we suggest that the situation is more complex and that the behavior of several companies reflects an ambivalence or even a split corporate personality, as they both contribute to population health problems and engage in activities to prevent such problems. Moreover, as far as population health involves collective action to promote and protect the health of the population and the food industry can play a major role in promoting healthy nutrition, it makes sense to see companies not merely as culprits that cause health problems but as sharing in societal responsibility for population health. 6,7 This implies that in evaluating the moral role of the food industry, one should focus not only on backward-looking responsibility (involving questions of praise and blame) but on forward-looking responsibility as well: from an ethical perspective, what can and should food companies do to promote health? In this article, we suggest pathways for corporate responsibility and propose a research agenda in which governments, individuals, civil society, and business play a central role in taking on population health problems.
