On 10 August 2026, Brazil’s Ministry of Health placed Modera Brasil inside Meu SUS Digital, the app used by tens of millions of Brazilians to access the public health system. The Ministry’s own announcement records that the tool “was originally created by USP with the support of Auíri and CRBS/SA” – and CRBS S/A is the corporate vehicle of Ambev, AB InBev’s Brazilian arm. Three months before the national launch, the president of the AB InBev Foundation and four of its senior executives sat down at the University of São Paulo to discuss Modera Brasil and how to expand it.
THE WORLDS LARGEST BREWER BEHIND a Federal Health App
Modera Brasil asks users to complete the WHO’s AUDIT questionnaire, returns a risk classification – low risk, moderate risk, or problematic use – and routes people towards educational content, behaviour-change exercises and, where indicated, basic health units and psychosocial care centres. The Ministry cites 2025 Vigitel data showing that 20.4% of Brazilian adults consume at least six units of alcohol on a single occasion, and that primary care visits linked to alcohol rose 157% in a decade, from 326,200 in 2016 to 840,000 in 2025.
Those numbers describe a public health emergency – but the response Brazil has just scaled to national level was built with money and institutional backing from on of the companies that profits from the product causing it.
The Financial Conflict of Interest
CRBS S/A appears in Brazilian corporate records as Empresa Incorporadora da Cia de Bebidas das Américas – Ambev. Ambev is the Brazilian arm of AB InBev, the largest beer producer in the world.
The University of São Paulo is more explicit than the Ministry. Its Institute of International Relations records that Professor Leandro Piquet Carneiro, who coordinates the Modera SP scientific committee, also sits on the scientific committee of the AB InBev Foundation, with which USP maintains a cooperation agreement covering courses run jointly with São Paulo’s municipal health department. It was inside that course that the committee developed the Modera platform. USP press material describes the result as a public-private partnership backed by the “global AB InBev Foundation”.
From Front Group to Federal App
One of the three USP professors credited with creating Modera SP is Arthur Guerra de Andrade, associate professor of psychiatry at USP’s medical faculty. He is also the founder and president of CISA, the Centre for Information on Health and Alcohol – an alcohol industry front group funded by Ambev since at least 2005 and by Heineken since 2018, whose deliberative council has been chaired by Ambev’s vice-president of corporate relations.
CISA is the body that defines a standard unit of alcohol as 14 grams, 40% above the World Health Organization’s 10 grams – a definition that lets far higher levels of alcohol use pass as unremarkable.
The Moderation Myth
The programme is called Modera. USP’s own material states its purpose as promoting “conscious consumption of alcoholic beverages, using technology and tested protocols”. This is the same framing the alcohol industry has spent decades building, and it does specific work: it relocates the problem from the product and its availability to the judgement of the individual using it.
Screening and brief intervention is a recognised clinical instrument, and Brazil’s health workers should have it. But a systematic review by Melissa Mialon and Jim McCambridge found “no robust evidence that alcohol industry CSR initiatives reduce harmful drinking”, and found instead that they shape how alcohol problems are framed in line with industry interests.
An App Is Not a Brief Intervention
Brief intervention has an evidence base because it is delivered by a trained health worker inside a clinical encounter. Modera Brasil removes the health worker. It is self-assessment followed by automated content, and the evidence for that is thinner and more contested than the evidence it borrows from.
Health Minister Alexandre Padilha folded the two together at the launch, describing “our studies of the use of this app, of so-called brief interventions” and saying they have shown “a very positive impact on improving people’s quality of life”.
A Playbook Movendi Documented Four Years Ago
This is not new. Movendi International documented in 2022 that AB InBev was funding screening and brief intervention in Brasília – 17 public primary care units and 200 trained health workers – as well as in Zacatecas, Mexico, and Alexandra, South Africa, under its Global Smart Drinking Goals.
Modera followed the identical route: a pilot in 17 primary care units and two psychosocial care centres in São Paulo, then citywide, now national. In May 2026, AB InBev Foundation president Sam Stephens and four senior executives met USP’s School of Multidimensional Security to review Modera SP and Modera Brasil and discuss integrating the tools into SUS. The associated training programme has reached around 3,000 health workers across Brazil, Mexico and South Africa since 2023, with the strategy now running in five countries.
Brazil Wrote the Rulebook, Then Ignored It
In April 2026, at the Global Alcohol Policy Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s Ministry of Health presented a reference framework on conflict of interest in health policymaking. It covers alcohol alongside tobacco and ultra-processed products, sets out rules on transparency and public-private interactions, and treats conflict of interest as a threat to the public interest rather than a paperwork exercise. It draws directly on the institutional habits Brazil built implementing the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
Four months later, the same Ministry took national a tool developed under a cooperation agreement with the foundation of the world’s largest beer producer. Brazil has written one of the strongest conflict of interest frameworks in global alcohol policy and, within the same year season, distributed the exact arrangement it was written to prevent.
Sources:
Ministério da Saúde. “Em novo aplicativo do Meu SUS Digital, população poderá medir o seu consumo de álcool e verificar riscos para a saúde.” Brasília, 10 August 2026.
Escola de Segurança Multidimensional, Instituto de Relações Internacionais, Universidade de São Paulo. “ESEM-USP recebe representantes da AB InBev Foundation para discutir expansão internacional do Programa Saúde e Álcool.” São Paulo, May 2026.
Mialon, M., and McCambridge, J. (2018). “Alcohol industry corporate social responsibility initiatives and harmful drinking: a systematic review.” European Journal of Public Health, 28(4), 664–673. doi: 10.1093/eurpub/cky065