In July 2025, Local Health and Global Profits (LHGP) responded to the UK Department of Health and Social Care’s call for evidence to inform a Men’s Health Strategy for England.
This page provides a summary the response. LHGP has drawn on their understanding of the commercial determinants of health, and the response addresses the key areas of harm that men face from unhealthy commodity industries.
Harm from unhealthy commodity industries
Men face disproportionate harm from products of unhealthy commodity industries.
The tobacco, alcohol, fossil fuel and ultra-processed food industries are examples of unhealthy commodity industries, which shape health both directly and indirectly because of their business practices.
Men are more likely to smoke, with around 13.7% of men being current smokers in 2023. Smoking is the largest cause of premature death, preventable illness and cancer in the UK, as well as being attributed to 20% of all deaths from cardiovascular disease.
Men are more likely to participate in gambling, with 4.4% of men compared to 1.1% of women identified as engaging in at-risk or problem gambling. Gambling addiction is highly correlated with suicide and the risk of suicide disproportionately affects those under 30, particularly men.
The prevalence of overweight, including obesity, was higher in men between 2022 to 2023. Overweight and obesity are associated with life-limiting conditions, such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some cancers.
Men are more likely to drink alcohol than women. In 2022, 32% of men, compared to 15% of women, had drunk at levels that put them at increasing or higher risk of alcohol related harms. These harms include increased risk of 7 different types of cancers, including bowel cancer, of which 56% of cases in the UK are in men, as well as a rapid rise in alcohol-related liver disease (ARLD).
The commercial determinants of health
The activities of the unhealthy commodity industries which shape our health are referred to as the commercial determinants of health (CDOH). These activities can be direct, such as the marketing and sale of unhealthy products. Indirect activities include industry lobbying against duty increases, donating to political campaigns, funding research, and generating doubt in relation to product harms.
Another indirect yet influential activity is norm shaping. Commercial organisations work to shape norms, ideas, beliefs and values in their own interest to ensure the continued high levels of use of their health-harming products. They use norm shaping to frame public health problems, possible solutions, and their role within these solutions, leading to outcomes that favour commercial shareholder interests but are detrimental to public health.
Prevention and awareness
These system-level actions require system-level solutions to protect people from harm, reduce health inequalities and facilitate healthier choices.
LHGP recommends the development of a men’s health strategy that looks beyond interventions related solely to behaviour change to achieve improvements in population health.
Well-funded public health interventions supporting those facing health harms heightened by unhealthy commodity industries, need to be funded alongside action to enforce systemic change and address systemic inequalities.
Population-level approaches to prevention – those that tackle the underlying social and systemic causes of ill-health rather than clinical interventions – are more effective at improving health outcomes and are more cost effective.
There is broad public support for a bolder approach to public health policymaking - voters of all parties want bolder action on health. 65% of people back a ban on junk food advertising in public spaces and 81% believing companies put profit ahead of public health. As outlined in the Darzi review, there needs to be a shift away from hospitals to communities, and from treatment to prevention, so that we can “lock in the shift of care closer to home”.
Recommendations to improve men’s health
LHGP recommends the following interventions to support improvement in men’s health:
Restricted marketing of unhealthy foods to children, mandatory reformulation of unhealthy foods and front-of-pack nutrition labelling, and the restriction of fast-food outlets near to children’s education settings and playgrounds.
A new alcohol strategy to include increased excise duties and policies focused on prevention.
Increasing excise duties on alcohol reduces cases of new alcohol-attributable cancers and increases government revenue, despite claims by the alcohol industry that the opposite is true.
Alcohol policies should move their focus from treatment to prevention to reduce the affordability, availability and appeal of alcohol. Minimum unit pricing (MUP), which is already in place in Scotland and Wales, should be introduced in England as part of a wider strategy to tackle alcohol harm.
Reducing the affordability of tobacco and implementation of accessible and well-resources cessation services alongside price interventions.
Ring fenced funding for the support services needs to be guaranteed in the public health grant for local authorities to deliver vital services which support their populations and reduce health inequalities.
These recommendations highlight the need for the national men’s health strategy to focus on prevention and the wider determinants of health to effect a step-change in the health and wellbeing of men in England.