Chronic disease now constitutes the greatest burden of human suffering worldwide, yet its origins are systematically misrepresented as matters of individual choice or biological inevitability. This paper reframes the global rise of non-communicable diseases through the lens of the Commercial Determinants of Health: the systems, practices, and environments shaped by commercial interests whose profitability depends on patterns of consumption that undermine human wellbeing. Drawing on John McMurtry’s life-value framework, the analysis demonstrates that present health crises arise not from ignorance or failure of personal responsibility, but from a structural misalignment in which economic value is defined by profit-growth rather than the conditions that sustain life. The resulting architecture affects biology, psychology, social order, political capacity, cultural meaning, and human self-orientation. Health sovereignty — the capacity of societies to protect and enable the conditions of human flourishing — is shown to be eroded through epistemic, legal, economic, institutional, cultural, and existential constraints. The paper concludes by outlining a coherent, three-layered framework for restoring health sovereignty through the re-grounding of value in life itself, the reassertion of public governance capacity, and the renewal of cultural orientation toward sufficiency, relation, and coherence.
