Building H #89: Measuring the 'Product Environment'

Steve and our longtime collaborator (and member of our advisory group) Sara Singer have a new paper out in the American Journal of Health Promotion. In “The ‘Product Environment’ is an Important Driver of Health. It’s Time to Measure It,” Sara and Steve introduce the term “product environment” into the academic literature, defining it as the “the constellation of products and services with which people regularly interact.” The breadth of this definition is important because public health and efforts to improve it can often be siloed: we target, for example, specific ingredients in the food supply; we advocate for greater automobile safety; we regulate the sale and marketing of cigarettes. These targeted efforts are, of course, necessary and, in some cases, highly successful. Yet it’s also important to see the many products and services that influence health behaviors as a part of a whole, with characteristics in common, and that can be addressed holistically, with approaches that can be applied across industries and across different health concerns.

The paper makes a number of arguments with which many Building H readers will likely be familiar. Sara and Steve point out the long history of technology, from electric lights and automobiles to social media and smartphones, which has changed everyday behaviors and norms and note that with new technologies, such as AI, AR and VR, emerging, the application of them to daily life will shape it in new ways. As we have argued many times in this newsletter, if we are not clear about how we want these technologies to change our lives, we run the risk of applying them in ways that will further erode public health. Sara and Steve also argue that the traditional approach of product regulation, which typically focuses on preventing severe harms, is insufficient in a behavior-driven chronic disease epidemic. When products don’t necessarily, by themselves, cause unacceptable harm to individuals, but rather each contribute to behaviors that, when aggregated with changes induced by similar products, across the population, lead to widespread chronic disease, we need a different approach. We need to be able to measure the impact that these products have and use those measurements to create accountability for the companies that produce them. The paper goes on to introduce the Building H Index as an early example of an approach that demonstrates the possibility of such measurement.

Please check out the paper and help us spark some discussion around it. Let us know what you think about these arguments – and what needs to come next. Comments are open below and on LinkedIn.

Read the full newsletter.