When Lisa Bero, PhD, began her career in neuroscience and addiction research, she didn’t expect to spend the next 30 years unraveling the ways corporate interests shape public health. Her fascination with the science of addiction quickly led her to one of the most important questions in healthcare today: how do we know which evidence to trust?
Now a faculty member at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities and a Research Professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Bero is internationally recognized for her expertise on conflicts of interest and the commercial determinants of health.
At the heart of her research is a simple goal: to ensure that public health decisions are based on honest, unbiased evidence.
“I became very, very interested in how to basically use evidence better for health policy decisions,” Bero said. “And before we could even do that, I realized we had to worry about how corporate interests were influencing the evidence itself.”
A Career Shift That Changed Everything
After earning her PhD in Pharmacology at Duke University, Bero initially pursued a postdoc in pharmacology at University of California San Francisco. While she was working in addiction treatment centers, she noticed that scientific research wasn’t always making its way into real-world care, and policies often ignored what the data actually said.
“I realized that the policy issues were so much bigger than what was being developed in the lab,” she explained. That realization led her to transition into health policy research.
Since then, she has dedicated her career to understanding how industries like tobacco, pharmaceuticals, and chemical manufacturers influence the science that policymakers rely on.
How Industry Shapes Science
Through decades of research, Bero and her teams have shown that corporate funding doesn’t just nudge science—it can deeply distort it. Companies can influence what questions get asked, how studies are designed, whether negative results are published, and even the standards used to evaluate research.
“Corporate interests have worked to try to influence the standards by which research is judged,” she explained. “So not only are they funding the research, but they’re also shaping the criteria for what ‘good evidence’ looks like.”
This influence can have a direct impact on our health. Bero cited examples like tobacco companies hiding evidence of harm from secondhand smoke and chemical manufacturers delaying publication of studies linking their products to cancer.
Community Impact and Lessons for Colorado
Distorting research is just one strategy that corporations use to minimize harms of their products. There is also marketing, lobbying, lawsuits against states, and public campaigning for favorable legislation. Several of these commercial pressures have played a role in recent health policy proposals and regulations in Colorado.
“There’s been heavy marketing of unhealthy products here,” she said. “We've seen lobbying around issues like e-cigarettes and sugar taxes. These are all ways corporations try to minimize regulation of harmful products.”
For example, lobbying on behalf of companies who produce e-cigarettes can weaken restrictions on marketing, allowing companies to target younger audiences which increases the risk of nicotine addiction among teens and young adults, especially if e-cigarettes are presented as a “safer” alternative to smoking when long-term health effects are still being studied.
Colorado voters passed Proposition EE in 2020. This proposition raised taxes on cigarettes, tobacco, and nicotine products to fund early childhood education, healthcare, and other state programs. It was actively opposed by discount cigarette manufacturers like Liggett Vector Brands, who sued the state saying the tax unfairly favored larger tobacco companies.
In 2024, Denver City Council passed a citywide ban on the sale of flavored tobacco products, including flavored e-cigarettes. The Council expressed concerns that flavored tobacco products are marketed to young people, increasing their risk of nicotine addiction. On November 4, Denver voters will vote on Referendum 310, which aims to either uphold or repeal the ban after opponents in the vaping and tobacco industries gathered enough signatures to put the veto referendum on the ballot. A "yes" vote will uphold the ban while a "no" vote will repeal it. "Citizen Power," which has received funding from large corporate interests like Altria and Philip Morris is actively marketing for "no" votes in hope of making a repeal a reality. If "CitizenPower" succeeds, this would be an example of corporate interests overturning local health legislation by an elected municipal governing body.
The American Beverage Association (ABA) funded campaigns against sugar taxes that have been proposed in some Colorado cities as ballot initiatives and the Colorado Beverage Association has also lobbied against these initiatives. Boulder, CO still passed a sugar tax in 2016, which one study concluded did cut down on consumer sales by 33%. A similar initiative failed in Telluride in 2013, and efforts to propose one in Denver have not been successful. When sugary products remain cheap and widely consumed, they can contribute to health problems like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and even increase risk of getting some cancers.
Empowering Policymakers and the Public
Community members, students, and healthcare professionals alike can become more informed consumers of health information by asking simple but powerful questions: Who funded this study? Who is behind this message?
Despite growing challenges, including shifting federal funding priorities, Bero remains hopeful. One of the most encouraging developments in her field, she says, is the growing use of systematic reviews and evidence synthesis.
“These tools give policymakers a trusted overview of the entire body of evidence on a topic,” she said. When conducted by researchers independent of industry funding, “They help cut through the noise and highlight what we actually know.”
She also points to the progress made in transparency around conflicts of interest in research, including tools for journalists and new standards in academic publishing. She believes that raising awareness and asking critical questions is more important than ever.
What You Can Do
Bero offers simple advice for those who want to make more informed health choices:
- Be skeptical of health claims on social media—especially when they promote products.
- Ask who funded the research or guideline being cited.
- Pay attention to who is commenting publicly on research—are they affiliated with industry?
- Support public health policies that aim for transparency and regulation of harmful products.
Her dream? A healthcare system where science is used honestly, where policies reflect unbiased evidence, and where the public can trust that their health decisions are not quietly shaped by industry agendas.
“I love this work,” Bero said. “It’s challenging, but so important to the health of the public. Health policy decisions may be grounded in years of precise research, but when these decisions are based on good evidence, they can improve the health of millions. I believe we can keep making progress—if we keep asking the right questions.”
