A Healthier Profit The Cost of Business as Usual and the Case for Health

A clear-eyed account of how commercial forces influence health--and why understanding them matters.

We tend to think of health primarily as a matter of personal choice. In reality, it is profoundly shaped by powerful commercial forces that design our environments, shape what we consume, influence the policies that govern us, and even weave the stories we tell ourselves about harm and responsibility.

In A Healthier Profit, Nason Maani and Sandro Galea delve into how the myriad actions of the business sector affect health in unequal and sometimes hidden ways. Drawing on years of research into the commercial determinants of health, the book takes readers inside the systems through which corporations shape health outcomes: from marketing and lobbying to financial incentives and public relations strategies. It explains how certain industries quietly profit from harm-and why those harms have become invisible. This is not just a story about wrongdoing, or about us versus them. It is a story about agency, power, incentives, and the rules that structure our societies. When those rules change, so can our health.

A Healthier Profit speaks directly to the moment we are in: a time when the gap between what we know about health harms and what we do about them can no longer be ignored. Accessible, clear-eyed, and urgent, it offers a way of understanding the forces shaping our world and asks what a healthier profit might look like for citizens, employees, investors, policymakers, and business leaders.

Nason Maani is Senior Lecturer in Inequalities and Global Health Policy at the University of Edinburgh and Deputy Director of the UKRI Population Health Improvement Network's Local Health, Global Profits research theme. His research examines how commercial actors shape health inequalities, knowledge, and public discourse. A Senior Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow, he is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and a visiting Associate Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He co-edited The Commercial Determinants of Health (Oxford, 2022), alongside Sandro Galea and Mark Petticrew, and he hosts the Money Power Health podcast on the forces shaping population health.


Sandro Galea is the Margaret C. Ryan Dean of the School of Public Health, the Eugene S. and Constance Kahn Distinguished Professor in Public Health, and Vice Provost of Interdisciplinary Initiatives at Washington University in St. Louis. He has been named an epidemiology innovator by Time, a top voice in healthcare by LinkedIn, and is one of the most cited social scientists in the world. His writing and work are featured regularly in national and global public media. He is the author of Well and The Contagion Next Time, among many other books. A native of Malta, he has served as a field physician for Doctors Without Borders and has held academic and leadership positions at Boston University, Columbia University, University of Michigan, and the New York Academy of Medicine.

Chapter 1: Why a Healthy Profit?

Understanding How Profit Affects Health
Chapter 2: For the Health of All
Chapter 3: Harms
Chapter 4: Products
Chapter 5: Power
Chapter 6: Discourse
Chapter 7: Responsibility
Chapter 8: Banality
Chapter 9: The System

Moving from Understanding to Action
Chapter 10: Good Faith
Chapter 11: The Nature of Work
Chapter 12: Redefining Power
Chapter 13: Redefining Responsibility
Chapter 14: Redefining Agency
Chapter 15: Redefining Success
Chapter 16: Redefining Legacy
Chapter 17: The Hard Sell

Chapter 18: Epilogue

References
Index