Commercial Determinants of Health
In partnership with:
Objectives
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By the end of this course, students should be able to identify the commercial determinants of health and their causal mechanisms, as well as their interaction with social and political determinants. They should be able to describe strategies to protect health from exposure to unhealthy products and discuss how these industries influence policies through framing and action. Students are also expected to reflect on challenges and opportunities for public health, identify the conditions for effective and resilient regulation, and be able to recognise and industry arguments.
Programme
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Class 1
1 July 2026, 12:30-14:00 (GMT), Online
An introduction to the commercial determinants of health: concepts and interactions with social and political determinants. Corporate political activities. An epidemiological approach: production, distribution, and marketing.
Teresa Leão, Sofia da Costa
Class 2
2 July 2026, 12:30-14:00 (GMT), Online
A health economics approach to the commercial determinants of health: market failures and economic evaluation of health interventions.
Julian Perelman
Class 3
3 July 2026, 12:30-14:00 (GMT), Online
A political science approach to the commercial determinants of health. Conditions for adoption, successful implementation and resilience of Regulation. The health policy cycle, policy process.
Catherine Moury
Class 4
6 July 2026, 12:30-14:00 (GMT), Online
Methodological issues in analysing the commercial determinants of health: qualitative and quantitative methods.
Christopher Millett
Commercial determinants of health walking tour
9 July 2026, 16:30-19:30 (GMT), Lisbon, FCSH
Identification of the commercial determinants of health in the urban context and of their influence in health behaviours of the Lisbon population.
Christopher Millett, Catherine Moury, Julian Perelman, Teresa Leão
Workshop
10 July 2026, 9:00-13:00 (GMT), Lisbon, FCSH
Role play: pro-con debate around the implementation of a health policy regulation on an unhealthy commodity.
Christopher Millett, Catherine Moury, Julian Perelman, Teresa Leão, Sofia da Costa
Seminar
10 July 2026, 14:30-16:30 (GMT), Lisbon, FCSH
Keynote speaker: Melissa Mialon
Bibliography
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- Chan, M. (2013). Global efforts to promote health face serious challenges from ‘big business’ – UN official. Available from https://news.un.org/en/story/2013/06/441852
- Mialon, M., Bertscher, A., Bero, L., & Vandevijvere, S. (2022). Methods for evaluating efforts made by governments to prevent and mitigate corporate influence and conflicts of interest in public health policy. HRB Open Research, 5.
- Theine, H., Bartsch, J., & Tröger, M. (2025). Does media ownership matter for journalistic content? A systematic scoping review of empirical studies. International Journal of Communication, 19 (2025): 865-887.
- West, R., & Marteau, T. (2013). Commentary on Casswell (2013): the commercial determinants of health. Addiction, 108(4).
language of instruction
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The course will be taught in English.
Prerequisites
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Proficiency in English is required for the adequate understanding of the course content and supporting materials.
tuition fee
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See the fee table under “Useful Information.”
Note: For this course, ISPUP students benefit from the same tuition fee applicable to NOVA FCSH students, upon presentation of valid proof of enrolment.
teaching staff
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Catherine Moury – Associate Professor of Political Science, and the vice-director of the Department of Political Studies at the NOVA University of Lisbon (Portugal). Catherine’s research currently focuses on the regulation of the prices of pharmaceuticals. Her latest book – ‘Capitalising on Constraint: Bailout politics in Eurozone countries’ was shortlisted for the best book prize by the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES), and has been translated into Greek and Portuguese.
Christopher Millett – Invited Full Professor at the NOVA NSPH. He has published studies on a variety of topics, including tobacco control, active travel, nutrition, health system performance and health inequalities. His main research interest is the evaluation of public health policies, with a particular focus on the impacts of health inequality. This includes the evaluation of benefit strategies to prevent non communicable diseases and limit environmental degradation in middle-income country settings. Researcher at the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) School of Public Health Research and co-principal investigator of the NIHR Global Health Research Centre dedicated to the study of “NCDs and Environmental Change” in Bangladesh, India and Indonesia. He sits on funding committees (NIHR, Medical Research Council, Wellcome Trust) and is an expert member of Action on Salt, a leading NGO for improving nutrition in the UK and worldwide, he holds a PhD from Imperial College London and a Degree from the University of Sydney. He was a Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice (2008/2009) and was awarded a 5-year NIHR Research Chair (2014). He is currently a fellow at the UK Faculty of Public Health.
Julian Perelman – PhD in Economics from Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). He is currently full professor at the Portuguese National School of Public Health (NOVA University of Lisbon), and member of the Executive Board of the Portuguese Commission for Health Technology Evaluation (CATS). He authored more than 100 publications in indexed scientific journals and one book; he was the first author of the Portuguese guidelines for economic evaluation of health technologies (published in 2019). His research interest lies at the frontier between health economics and public health, with research related to health lifestyle and its socioeconomic determinants, inequalities in health and access to health, the role of economic incentives on healthcare providers, and economic evaluation of health interventions, technologies, and policies.
Mélissa Mialon – Mélissa Mialon holds an Inserm Chair in Health Services Research at Université Paris Cité and is a Research Fellow at the Health Research Board, as well as a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin. She is a specialist in the commercial determinants of health, particularly corporate political activity in public health, and co‑coordinator of the Global Commercial Determinants of Health Action Network (G‑CAN, formerly GECI‑PH). She has published extensively on this topic in leading scientific journals, including The Lancet, and is the author of the book Big Food & Co. (2021).
Sofia da Costa – She has developed a research profile at the intersection of the commercial determinants of health, corporate political activity, and public health governance. Trained in Nutrition and currently completing a PhD in Public Health at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto, she combines disciplinary expertise in nutrition with a structural analysis of policy and governance processes. Her doctoral research provided the first systematic assessment of corporate political activity by the food industry in Portugal. Building on this work, she expanded the application of concept mapping methodology to analyse influence strategies across multiple unhealthy commodity industries, including the food, tobacco, alcohol, gambling, pharmaceutical, and fossil fuel sectors. This cross-sectoral approach strengthens the comparative understanding of how commercial actors operate within public health policymaking contexts.
Teresa Leão – Medical doctor and specialist in Public Health, she holds both a Master’s and a PhD in Public Health. She is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto. She was a researcher in the SILNE-R project (Horizon 2020), conducting economic evaluations of tobacco control policies, an expert at the National Health Council, and a consultant at the WHO European Office for Investment for Health and Development in the area of health equity. Her research has focused on social and commercial determinants of health, as well as social and health policies, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. She coordinates the Health and Policy Laboratory at EPIUnit-ITR.