Life's Pleasures Quote by Gro Harlem Brundtland

The bureaucratic calm of this sentence is the tell: it’s a politician’s way of describing a fight without naming the combatants. Brundtland isn’t talking about “diet and physical activity” in the abstract; she’s pointing at the industrial reality that chronic disease is not only a personal health issue but a market outcome. “Defining how best to work together” sounds cooperative, even soothing, yet it quietly stakes out a power struggle over who gets to shape the food environment: governments, public health agencies, or the companies whose profits depend on selling what public health wants people to eat less of.

The intent is coalition-building with guardrails. Brundtland signals a shift from the old model of health education (“make better choices”) toward structural prevention, where policy nudges, regulation, labeling, marketing restrictions, and product reformulation sit on the table. But she can’t say “regulation” outright without triggering the predictable backlash: nanny-state accusations, trade concerns, and industry lobbying. So the language does the diplomatic work, making collaboration seem inevitable while keeping leverage ambiguous.

Context matters: as a former prime minister and a major global health figure, Brundtland is speaking from the era when noncommunicable diseases were being reframed as a global governance problem, not just rich-world lifestyle drift. The subtext is accountability. If chronic diseases are preventable, then “companies” are no longer innocent bystanders; they’re implicated stakeholders. The sentence is an invitation - and a warning - wrapped in procedural phrasing.