Professor Gilmore:

I can talk a little bit about this. We run a website called tobaccotactics.org, which you can use to look up the organisations that might be lobbying on behalf of the tobacco industry. It identifies the front groups and third parties that are lobbying for it. We know that at least some of those third parties also lobby for the ultra-processed food and alcohol industries and take money from all those industries. That certainly goes on. We also know that they use the same practices, and that sometimes all those unhealthy commodity industries have worked collectively to change whole systems of policymaking. They pushed for the better regulation agenda, for example, because they thought it would make it harder to pass public health policies and environmental policies. We have gone on to show that systems such as better regulation make it harder to pass public health policies, because they provide those powerful industries with a route to feed in their misleading evidence and data.

There is also a revolving door. You see a lot of movement of staff—executives—from one of those unhealthy commodity industries to another. The investors also link them, so there are links at all sorts of levels. To be honest, I do not know the extent to which they learn from each other about addiction and the manipulation of products to make them addictive, but it would make sense.