Top-level sports should stop taking money from Big Soda... then we parents wouldn't feel such pressure to let our children guzzle fizzy drinks: DR CHRIS VAN TULLEKEN

Daily Mail​

10-06-2025

As a parent or grandparent, how can you tell a child that drinking fizzy pop is seriously bad for their health when it seems to them that the world's best athletes are guzzling down the stuff every day and still performing?
Because that's exactly what children see everywhere around them whenever there is a glitzy global sporting tournament – as athletics-related soft drink adverts, product placements and endorsements fill the media, shops and billboards.
The latest fizzy drink propaganda-fest starts this week. It's the month-long 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, a tournament that will pitch 32 of the planet's best football teams against each other and attract millions of eyeballs globally.
Coca-Cola is a main sponsor. We know what this will mean from the 2022 Fifa World Cup in Qatar.
The brand was ubiquitous, appearing on massive billboards, in half-time commercials and in front of athletes during press conferences.
This isn't conventional advertising. It's a calculated plan to integrate their products into the structure of professional sport, so that soft drinks appear healthy by association.
But doctors and public health advocates are 100 per cent sure that soda products – i.e. fizzy drinks or soda pop – are harmful, both in young people and throughout life.
The scientific case against fizzy drinks is so well established now that we should hardly need any new research to prove the point.
Yet a new study by Tufts University in the US – published in the highly reputed journal Nature Medicine in January – linked sugary drink consumption to millions of cases of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease across 184 countries.
And in March a study published in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery found that women who consumed one or more sugar-sweetened beverages daily had a 4.87 times higher risk of developing oral cavity cancer compared to those who drank less than one per month.
These are just two of many hundreds of studies showing unequivocally that fizzy drinks can cause disease.
These soda products are ultra-processed and offer no nutritional benefit, while fuelling diet-related diseases – key points that are emphasised in an upcoming editorial in the BMJ, which I co-authored with the renowned researcher Carlos Monteiro, an emeritus professor of nutrition and public health at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. Monteiro's group were the first to define what ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are – and it is their definition that's been used to show that rising rates of UPF consumption globally are causing a pandemic of diet-related disease and early death.
Nevertheless, Big Soda has a nuclear-sized weapon with which to blast away all this scientific evidence on a tidal wave of glamour, high emotion and athletic perfection. That weapon is global sports sponsorship.
In 2022, Coca-Cola had 233 active sponsorship agreements worldwide across 21 sports – in fact, it has enjoyed the most sports sponsorships of any brand ever – outranking the likes of genuine sports brands such as Nike or Adidas, according to research in BMJ Global Health last year.
We know how powerful this endorsement can be – not least by its reverse effect: at a press conference at the UEFA football championships in 2021, superstar Cristiano Ronaldo deliberately set aside two bottles of Coca-Cola (the tournament's official sponsor) and instead held up a bottle of water.
The company reportedly dropped more than $4billion (£2.9billion) in market value as the clip went viral.
But while it seemed like he had struck a powerful blow, the price drop was a blip – less than 2 per cent of the value of Coca-Cola. The share price fell from $56 to $55. As I write, it's $71.
All of this leaves responsible parents and grandparents in an impossible situation.
When my two eldest children go to schoolmates' birthday parties, which is pretty much a weekly occurrence, they have a straightforward choice.
They can be normal and drink what their friends are drinking – and there are often bottles of lemonade, Coca-Cola and other fizzy drinks on the table – or I can spend the whole party trying to stop them, embarrassing them, myself and other families in the process.
It's a horrible dilemma for me as someone who campaigns against fizzy drinks and other ultra-processed foods harming children's health.
Because even though I'm alarmed at the effect these products can have on my kids' health, I don't want to be that helicopter parent – and nor do I wish my children to feel like they are missing out.
It can't be up to parents, grandparents and other concerned individuals to regulate this massive industry and its insidious advertising.
Sports authorities themselves have to live up to their responsibilities and kick Big Soda out of sport once and for all.
In the US, one man is making a stand – and it could help to make a massive difference.
Philadelphia teenager Bryce Martinez is suing several big food firms, including PepsiCo for deliberately making UPFs to be addictive, and particularly marketing them to children.
His lawsuit claims that the makers have used the same insidious marketing strategies used by tobacco companies in the 1980s.
He claims his consumption of their products caused him by the age of 16 to develop type 2 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, where fat builds up harmfully in the liver, which is associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and kidney disease.
Such legal action could ultimately tarnish the reputation of sport by association, so render Big Soda's sponsorship unacceptable. And it really should be unacceptable.
The healthy image that Big Soda's sports sponsorship presents is so at odds with reality that it would be laughable were its effects not so tragic.
It is absurd to associate soft drinks with athletic prowess.
I'm sure that in reality top football players are no more likely to consume fizzy drinks as a source of athletic energy than they are to light up a cigarette to calm their nerves at half-time.
That is why Professor Monteiro and I are supporting a global campaign, Kick Big Soda Out Of Sport, to put a stop to this. You can do the same (see below).
It's clear that banning Big Soda sponsorship would not harm sport. It's nearly 20 years since Formula One banished the lucrative tobacco advertising that had once emblazoned its cars. Motor racing still thrives.
We've become so accustomed to Big Soda's constant health-washing that we don't realise its absurdity.
But as this year's FIFA Club World Cup kicks off, it's time to finally bring a halt to Big Soda's ludicrous sponsorship of sport. Let's kick it out.