Opinion: Business must play a positive role in the nation’s health

Sir Michael Marmot - The private sector has been conspicuously absent from efforts to make the UK healthier and more productive, says Professor Sir Michael Marmot (UCL Epidemiology & Health). Relations between public health and industry have always been uneasy. The former tends to see the latter as pursuing profit at the expense of people's health and the environment - but they have ways of fighting back. The food industry is a case in point. When I chaired a UK government committee on diet and heart disease, we were beaten up, figuratively, for representing the public health cause. Even before our report was published, headlines attacked "the nanny state". Food industry representatives boasted that they were behind it.