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Junk meals corporations have greater than 90 present sponsorship offers inside prime UK sports activities amid rising issues over their influence on public well being, finds an investigation revealed by The BMJ.
Manufacturers together with Cadbury, Pepsi, KP Snacks, Walkers, Kellogg’s, Purple Bull, and Monster are amongst these with ongoing partnerships with sporting stars, prime flight groups, or official governing our bodies.
They embrace offers with prime males’s and girls’s soccer stars Cole Palmer, Bukayo Saka, Leah Williamson, and Lauren James, England cricket captain Ben Stokes, bicycle owner Tom Pidcock, and System 1 driver Lando Norris.
The findings come amid the ladies’s Euro 2025 soccer event in Switzerland, with an anticipated viewers of 500 million folks all over the world. Official sponsors embrace Simply Eat Takeaway, Hellmann’s mayonnaise and PepsiCo—manufacturers that can characteristic prominently on LED boards beside pitches, and on interview backdrops throughout press conferences.
Whereas the meals business has a protracted historical past of sponsoring sports activities, consultants say the adverts have develop into extra “pervasive” and “prominent” than ever, now with big digital advertising campaigns within the run-up to occasions and types having the ability to goal followers by way of sports activities stars’ social media.
Beth Bradshaw, coverage and advocacy supervisor at Meals Lively, a part of the general public well being charity Well being Equalities Group, says, “It’s so important because it’s kids. Some of these sports personalities, these football stars, these rugby stars…They are kids’ idols.”
In January 2026, the federal government is due to usher in laws banning adverts for merchandise which might be excessive in fats, salt, or sugar (HFSS) earlier than the 9pm TV watershed, however this regulation has been repeatedly delayed as a result of lobbying by the meals business.
The BMJ’s findings display “genuine sportswashing,” argues Labor MP and GP Simon Opher, who tabled a parliamentary query to ask the well being secretary “whether he plans to bring forward legislative proposals to ban sponsorship of sports events by unhealthy food brands.”
The federal government responded that it had “no current plans to ban the sponsorship of sports events by food brands associated with less healthy food or drink products or ban the advertising of less healthy food or drink products at sports events.”
It added, “We continue to review the evidence of the impacts on children of less healthy food or drink product advertising and will consider where further action is needed.”
The BMJ investigation additionally exposes the extent to which sports activities sponsorship offers will swerve these new laws, permitting unhealthy merchandise to seem on daytime TV, together with Hula Hoops on England cricket shirts, Purple Bull logos beside soccer pitches, and Equipment Kat branding alongside System 1 race tracks.
Specialists say sports activities sponsorship provides junk meals corporations a ‘well being halo impact’ by making their merchandise appear extra acceptable and fewer dangerous to shoppers. That is supported by analysis that reveals it improves youngsters’s opinions of unhealthy manufacturers.
“These players are in absolute peak physical condition, and they are unfortunately promoting products that just do not generally feature in athletes’ diets,” says Meals Lively’s Bradshaw.
Some public well being consultants are calling for junk meals’ sponsorship of sports activities to be banned because of the ranges of publicity it provides to manufacturers and the potential influence on youngsters’s well being.
“We need to have some morals and ethics about the types of products we associate with sport,” argues Robin Eire at Glasgow College’s college of well being and well-being.
“We should not be allowing food brands to be using sport to promote consumption of their unhealthy products to young people. It simply should be banned.”
Extra data:
Junk meals ‘avoids promoting regulation’ with prime degree UK sports activities sponsorship, BMJ (2025). DOI: 10.1136/bmj.r1363
Offered by
British Medical Journal
Quotation:
Junk meals ‘avoids promoting regulation’ with prime degree UK sports activities sponsorship (2025, July 9)
retrieved 9 July 2025
from https://medicalxpress.com/information/2025-07-junk-food-advertising-uk-sports.html
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