Episode 13: Industry-funded school education programmes with May van Schalkwyk
Money Power Health with Nason MaaniShow Notes
Hi everyone and welcome back to Money Power Health.
We often tend to think of our health as the product of our own energies, something we alone are accountable for. But in reality, our health is to a large degree shaped by the conditions we find ourselves in, the quality of our air, the wealth of our parents, the food we have access to, our opportunities for work, our time for exercise. Schools and education are a key part of this. Schools shape how we see the world and interact with each other at a critical stage in development. Most people might assume that schools are a place in which commercial influence is largely absent. That however is far from the case. Children are a key market, and brand loyalties formed in childhood can persist into adulthood, and standards of behaviour, of consumption, taste, and definitions of coolness, risk, fun are all being formed during this time.
In part due to this, there is now a long history of the manufacturers of unhealthy products funding the development of lesson plans, initiatives and activities in primary and high schools that involve issues like fossil fuels, firearms, alcohol, gambling or smoking. This has significant strategic value, and in order to understand more about why this happens, and what it means for children and young people, I am very pleased to be joined by someone who has led on several studies examining the nature and purpose of such funded materials in schools.
May van Schalkwyk is a research fellow in commercial determinant of health in the Global Health Policy Unit and Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention at the University of Edinburgh. She also has an honorary public health consultant role with Public Health Scotland and is an honorary research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where she completed her PhD in 2023 and is a member of the commercial determinants research group.
May originally trained as a clinical doctor and then specialised in public health medicine. Her research aims to explain how commercial actors influence ideas, knowledge, science and policymaking. She publishes research on the tobacco, alcohol, gambling, fossil fuels, opioid, pesticide and firearm industries, including on the influence of youth education and safety programmes as a form of corporate political activity. Full disclosure: May and I are good friends and go back some time, having met at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and worked together for over seven years researching the commercial determinants of health, including some of the articles we will be discussing.
You can find out more about the topics we have discussed, including some of May's recent research articles, in the links below: Alcohol industry funded school programmes: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0259560 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(22)00341-3/fulltext Gambling industry funded school programmes: https://academic.oup.com/heapro/article/39/1/daad196/7565070 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235282732200101X Link to public-facing videos May has made about research on the commercial determinants of health: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfnKnt8BHlSgTIdK7jfGwfg
More from Money Power Health with Nason Maani
Hello everyone and welcome back to Money Power Health. Today's episode is about what it actually looks like, from the inside, when commercial interests try to shape health policy. My guest is Elena Whitham, who served as a Member of the Scottish Parliament and as Minister for Drugs and Alcohol Policy in the Scottish Government. That role put her at the intersection of highly contested territory in public health, where evidence about what works collides with the interests of industries that profit from the products causing harm in the most deprived communities. In this conversation, Elena reflects on her own life experience navigating challenging circumstances, through to working at the local level to national politics. She discusses what commercial influence on health policy-making actually looks like in practice, how it shaped her thinking and approach, the importance of civil society and academics, what advice she would give to other policy-makers based on her experiences, if they are to make a healthier, more equitable Scotland. If you are interested in finding out more about some of the issues we discussed, please find some links with further information: -Responses to a recent consultation on alcohol advertising and promotion: https://consult.gov.scot/alcohol-policy/alcohol-advertising-and-promotion/ -Link to the Public Health Scotland evaluation of Minimum Unit Pricing: https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/evaluating-the-impact-of-minimum-unit-pricing-for-alcohol-in-scotland-a-synthesis-of-the-evidence/ -Latest data release from National Records of Scotland on drug and alcohol deaths in Scotland: https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/publications/drug-related-deaths-in-scotland-2024/ -Link to a resource hub on tools and approaches to addressing commercial drivers of ill-health hosted by our UKRI Population Health Improvement Local Health Global Profits consortium: https://www.bath.ac.uk/campaigns/commercial-determinants-of-health-resource-hub/
Hello everyone and welcome back to Money Power Health. Before we delve into this episode, you will also see that we have launched a substack with essays on the themes of money power and health. You can sign up to that and read them, for free and ad free, in the link in the show notes. Today’s episode is about the quiet but profound transformation of the UKs national health service. This has been less through a single piece of legislation, but through decades of contracting, outsourcing, and creeping privatisation that often escapes public scrutiny. My guest is David Rowland, Executive Director of the Centre for Health and the Public Interest, an independent non-party think tank prmoting a vision of health focused on accountability and the public interest. CHPI has done some of the most rigorous work in the UK tracking how private companies have become embedded within the NHS, from clinical services to back-office functions, and what that means for cost, accountability, transparency, and ultimately, patient care. In this conversation, we talk about how privatisation actually happens in practice using examples from CHPIs work, and why headline debates about “selling off the NHS” miss the more important question: how market logics and profit-seeking reshape public institutions from the inside out. He discusses what it is like to work with with people who have been harmed through such arrangements and discuss why the impacts of privatisation are not evenly distributed. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
Hello and welcome back to Money Power Health. This week we are discussing business schools with Dr. Nora Campbell, Associate Professor of Marketing at Trinity Business School, Dublin, where she teaches in management theory, and science and technology studies. We delve into the historical role of business schools, the evolution of management theories, and the demands of current students. Norah shares her unique journey from studying French and German to marketing and eventually focusing on the commercial determinants of health. We also touch upon the shift from productivity and efficiency to sustainability and the potential future of education in business schools, how such institutions might reinvent themselves in response to ecological and health imperatives, and what the place is of critical scholarship in such spaces. We end with forward looking reflections, as Norah considers the importance of maintaining a balanced life and critically analyzing the structures within which we all work. If you would like to find out more about Norah's research, which spans nano-bio-info-cogno markets, climate change, and the food industry, here are some links to recent articles: The corporate political activity of the food industry in Ireland: an analysis and proposed solutions https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/34/Supplement_3/ckae144.1511/7843367 Ultra-Processed Food: The Tragedy of the Biological Commons https://www.ijhpm.com/article_4359.html Here are some examples of her public writing: https://www.irishtimes.com/health/your-wellness/2023/01/30/it-delivers-a-taste-bomb-of-pure-pleasure-but-ultraprocessed-food-is-killing-us/ https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-41626909.html And here is a link to her university profile: https://www.tcd.ie/business/people/faculty-professors/ncampbe/ The music in this podcast was by Daniel Maani. You can find out more about his music and poetry here: https://www.danielmaani.com
Hello and welcome back to Money Power Health. Justice and health are deeply intertwined, as the same social and economic factors that can significantly impact individual and population health, can also influence a person's likelihood of interacting with the justice system. Prisons are places with some of the most profound inequalities in health outcomes, and if we care about the ways in which gaps in money, power and health overlap, the wellbeing of all those touched by the justice system needs to be part of the conversation. In order to discuss health and justice in the UK I am joined today by two inspiring public health practitioners with a central interest in this area. Dr Nicola Dennis is acting consultant in public health working in the West Midlands, with a particular interest in health inequalities. Dr Chantal Edge is the National Lead for Health and Justice at the UK Health Security Agency and a Public Health Consultant by background. Both have been working together on the Chief Medical Officers upcoming report on the health of people in prison and probation in England. In this podcast, they help me understand who the justice system affects in the context of health, in what ways, how these intersect with wider social inequalities and childhood experiences, the importance of improving health in custody as part of wider rehabilitation, the challenges faced by inmates who seek healthcare in terms of access and stigma, and what efforts are underway to consider and mitigate these challenges. If you are interested in reading more about these issues, I include some links below. Here is a short animation produced based on work by Dr Edge and others on the experiences of prisoners seeking healthcare in their own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IDag_RFus8 Here is a paper by Dr Edge and colleagues (including past guest Prof Martin McKee) reviewing the evidence regarding prisoners co-infected with TB and HIV: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27852420/ In a global context, you can find out more about key facts and figures from Penal Reform Internationals Global Prison Trends (2025) here: https://cdn.penalreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/PRI_Global-prison-trends-2025.pdf Music in this podcast was by Daniel Maani. You can find out more about his music and poetry here: https://www.danielmaani.com/
Hello, and welcome back to Money, Power, Health. Today we’re talking about research and advocacy in tobacco and alcohol policy with someone seeking to hold the industries in question accountable—not just through research, but through advocacy and policy engagement. My guest is Dr. Gayle Amul, a researcher and advocate whose work focuses on alcohol and tobacco industry interference in public health policy. Gayle is currently a Senior Adviser for the Alcohol, Drugs and Development Programme at FORUT, a Norwegian NGO. She’s also deeply involved in alcohol policy research in the Philippines, working with the University of the Philippines National Institutes of Health through their Health Promotion Program. Gayle is one of the founding members of the Community of Practice on Alcohol and Substance Use in the Philippines and sits on the advisory board of a tobacco control researchfellowship focused on smoking cessation, led by the Ateneo School of Government. We also talk about Gayle’s journey from political science into global health, her reflections on navigating academia as a space for action, and what it means to be a pracademic—someone who bridges research and advocacy in meaningful ways. Whether you’re a student, researcher, policymaker, or advocate, her insight are helpful in thinking how we can use academic tools not just to describe the world, but to help change it. I hope you enjoy the conversation. You can find examples of her research below: Comparing tobacco and alcohol policies in the Philippines and Singapore: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9606809/ Analysis of flavor descriptors of tobacco products in the Philippines and implications for LMICs: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12992-024-01072-6 Cigarette packaging as a commercial determinant of smokking: Perceptions of graphic health warnings among Filipinos: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953624010700 Corporate social responsibility as a commercial determinant of health: Case study of the alcohol industry in the Philippines: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S027795362500499X