PHI’s Building H Ranks Companies on How They Impact Consumer Health

“Public health research group has ranked companies and their products by how they impact the health of their customers, finding that some of the most successful firms have some of the most negative impacts on the health of adults in the United States.

Building H, a nonprofit dedicated to re-engineering product design to improve health, released a health index on Monday which ranks and rates 76 consumer products, from the Culdesac real estate developer to the entertainment behemoth Netflix.

Stanford Health Policy’s Sara Singer, PhD, a professor of health policy and an advisor to the nonprofit group, said the index represents a relatively new field of medicine that is measuring the direct impact that products and companies have on our health.

“To turn the tide toward healthy behaviors, we need methods for holding companies accountable for the health impacts of their products and services yet evaluating externalities from company products and services on consumer health are woefully underdeveloped,” Singer said. “That’s the gap Building H is beginning to address.”

Singer helped create the Building H ranking system with the goal of quantifying how certain products and services affect human health and then encouraging company leaders and product designers to use the index as a guide for improving their environments and products.

The dramatic rise in chronic health conditions is due in part to the modernization of technology and the products and services now so readily available. We can watch what we’d like and order our favorite foods from the comfort of our couch. Forty-two percent of American adults are now obese, up from 30% in 2000. One-third of adults are not getting enough sleep and half of U.S. adults report experiencing loneliness—with some of the highest rates among young adults.

“The products and services we use in our daily lives have remarkable influence on behaviors that impact our health, yet we don’t ask companies to bear responsibility for encouraging us to stay inside, eat too much, sit too long, or sleep too little,” Singer said. “The Building H Index is a first step toward making the health costs of products transparent, letting people compare companies and consider how companies might promote healthier behavior.”

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Originally published by Stanford University