Austin Smith believes one day the sports world will view soda, energy drinks and fast food as it came to view tobacco: taboo.
Smith is a 26-year-old professional snowboarder who, fearing energy drinks were taking over his sport, joined colleague and friend Bryan Fox to start Drink Water in 2011. The logo is affixed to their snowboards, and the initiative holds a charity event every summer to promote the issue. The website, wedrinkwater.com, promotes drinking water over energy drinks.
“We obviously hope to start a trend in other sports,” he said. “It’s a bit contradictive to athletes’ lifestyles” to endorse food and drinks that are unhealthy choices, he said.
Obesity is clearly a major issue in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 35.1 percent of American adults are obese, and a stunning 69 percent are either obese or overweight.
Yet categories such as soft drinks and quick-service restaurants, which many experts blame for driving those obesity numbers up, account for some of the most lucrative sponsorships and endorsements in sports. For example, McDonald’s sponsors the NFL and NHL; Taco Bell sponsors the NBA. Each of the big four sports leagues counts a soda sponsorship.
According to SportsBusiness Journal’s Resource Guide Live, in fact, McDonald’s and Pepsi each sponsors nearly 200 sports teams, leagues, venues and governing bodies, in addition to dozens of athletes.
Many sports and individual athletes have taken up physical fitness as a message. The NFL itself is plowing millions of dollars into its Play 60 initiative, which encourages kids to get an hour of activity each day.
But to critics, because the NFL also has sponsorships with McDonald’s and Pepsi, this means they are sending the message that it’s OK to eat poorly, just work it off.
“It is ironic, some of these NFL sponsors alongside Play 60. It is an enormous contradiction,” said Marie Bragg, an assistant professor in the New York University Section on Health Choice, Policy and Evaluation.
Bragg is co-author of a 2013 study on athlete endorsements of soda and fast food in the official journal of the
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Drink Water challenges action sports to look beyond sponsorships with energy drinks.
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Academy of Pediatrics. According to that study, 69 percent of the food that the top 100 athletes endorsed was nutrient poor and energy dense, while 93.4 percent of the 46 advertised beverages got 100 percent of their calories from sugar.
Asked what the reaction was to the study from the athletes, Bragg replied she did not know because they or their agents declined to respond. Indeed, Alan Zucker, the marketing agent for Peyton Manning, who is called out in the study for what he endorses (Nabisco’s Oreo brand and Papa John’s among them), did not respond for comment on this story.
The area is clearly sensitive. When LeBron James, a McDonald’s endorser, told reporters in February that his health habits had improved since his first years in the NBA, in part by not eating McDonald’s, he soon quickly backtracked, saying in the same interview he ate there every day.
Bragg is in the midst of preparing a similar study on sports league sponsorships. She said she found it alarming that the new chief marketing officer of the NFL, Dawn Hudson, worked at Pepsi before her hire last year.
“She probably brings a tremendous amount of skills and expertise, and she also brings her company loyalty,” Bragg said. “The amount of money spent on marketing is just tremendous in contrast to the small program like Play 60.”
The NFL did not respond for comment.
