Fizzy drinks are the new tobacco for young people... that's why I believe that Coca-Cola should be banned from sponsoring the Olympics
The evidence for this claim is very poor. The Results section for the academic study they cite is below:
Results During an average of 18.5 years of follow-up, 3447 (22.3%) participants with incident CVD and 7638 (49.3%) deaths were documented. After multivariable adjustment, when comparing the categories of lowest intake of beverages with the highest intake, the pooled hazard ratios for all cause mortality were 1.20 (95% confidence interval 1.04 to 1.37) for sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs), 0.96 (0.86 to 1.07) for artificially sweetened beverages (ASBs), 0.98 (0.90 to 1.06) for fruit juice, 0.74 (0.63 to 0.86) for coffee, 0.79 (0.71 to 0.89) for tea, 0.77 (0.70 to 0.85) for plain water, 0.88 (0.80 to 0.96) for low fat milk, and 1.20 (0.99 to 1.44) for full fat milk. Similar associations were observed between the individual beverages and CVD incidence and mortality. In particular, SSB intake was associated with a higher risk of incident CVD (hazard ratio 1.25, 95% confidence interval 1.03 to 1.51) and CVD mortality (1.29, 1.02 to 1.63), whereas significant inverse associations were observed between intake of coffee and low fat milk and CVD incidence. Additionally, compared with those who did not change their consumption of coffee in the period after a diabetes diagnosis, a lower all cause mortality was observed in those who increased their consumption of coffee. A similar pattern of association with all cause mortality was also observed for tea, and low fat milk. Replacing SSBs with ABSs was significantly associated with lower all cause mortality and CVD mortality, and replacing SSBs, ASBs, fruit juice, or full fat milk with coffee, tea, or plain water was consistently associated with lower all cause mortality.
For start, it was a study of DIABETICS so may not generalize beyond that. And it can be seen that all the HRs were very low and were achieved only by discarding the middle ranges of their data. And there appears to have been no control for the big confounder in such studies: income. Nothing firm can be conluded from this study but the safest conclusion seems to be that Coke causes you no harm
Link for thestudy:
https://www.bmj.com/content/381/bmj-2022-073406
Because Coke is so popular, the superior people WANT it to be bad for you, but the evidence is not very co-operativeIf you were watching the Paris Olympics and saw a winning athlete cross the finish line, light a cigarette and boast about the health-boosting benefits of their favourite tobacco brand, you'd be as surprised as you were disgusted.
Yet it's startlingly true that tobacco companies were major Olympic sponsors right up until 1988, when cigarette brands were finally banned from advertising at the Games.
For the previous 60 years, tobacco-funded Olympic medal-winners had lined up to extol the virtues of smoking and push the now bizarre claim that it enabled athletes to lead healthy lives — among them, the iconic Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals for sprinting, relay and long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, but who died from lung cancer aged 66 in 1980, after decades of heavy smoking.
The biggest earner of tobacco funding, though, was the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which took millions of pounds every four years from cigarette-brand sponsorship, from 1920 until it was banned.
But you may be shocked to learn that today the IOC still takes similarly vast sums from another major industry — one that, I believe, when it comes to damaging the health of young people may now have overtaken cigarettes.
That industry is soft drinks — and that money comes from the global beverage giant Coca-Cola, which has sponsored the Olympics Games since 1928.
Sources estimate that Coca-Cola nowadays pays the Olympics around £70 million a year in sponsorship. In exchange, Coca-Cola can use the Olympic Games' five rings on all its products.
As an investigation in the French newspaper Le Monde said in May, this huge money deal enables Coca-Cola to 'promote the world's most talked-about sporting event, all over the world, while generating priceless advertising opportunities for itself'.
Indeed, Le Monde said of Coca-Cola's tie-up with the Olympics: 'The partnership has become so close that it's hard to say who runs the Games.'
Across the Olympics, wherever you look, Coca-Cola branding is ubiquitous. Even before the Games began, the drinks giant had sponsored the Olympic torch relay, so that a Coca-Cola van constantly flanked the torch's two-month tour.
It is time that all this Coca-Cola sponsorship stopped. For good. Because, beyond tobacco, as a doctor who advocates for public health, I fear the health-destroying power of fizzy drinks more than anything else. Soft drinks damage people's bodies, and the bodies of children in particular.
And what's more frightening is that these products are so friendly-looking, so familiar and so pervasive that we've become accustomed to them and have forgotten the damage they wreak.
The harms of soft drinks are extremely well documented over hundreds of scientific papers.
As a 2022 report by the University of North Carolina's Global Food Research Programme warned, they are 'a key driver of modern surges in nutrition-related diseases worldwide, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease — the leading causes of disability and death in the world'.
Furthermore, fizzy drinks have no real nutritional benefit. In fact, they contribute to under-nutrition when consumed in place of foods containing essential nutrients. A major review by Yale University of 88 studies showed that consumption of soft drinks meant lower intakes of milk, calcium and other nutrients.
In a large multinational European study published in the BMJ last year, higher levels of consumption of sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened soft drinks was associated with increased risk of death from all causes. And in the shorter term, there's tooth decay — a national catastrophe in the UK that causes unbelievable suffering.
The link with soda was demonstrated last year when researchers at the universities of Cambridge and Glasgow reported how the sugar tax on soft drinks, introduced in 2018, has helped prevent more than 5,600 hospital admissions for children having to have their teeth pulled out under general anaesthetic.
Part of the problem is a chronic shortage of dentists, but this study underlined how closely sugary drinks also play a key role.
Nor is it just sodas with sugar: low or no-sugar 'diet' versions often contain the enamel-rotting likes of phosphoric, citric and tartaric acids. There is concerning evidence that these acids don't just rot teeth: the phosphoric acid may also dissolve your bones from the inside.
Beyond the sugar tax, these harmful products remain basically unregulated. My seven-year-old can use the money from the Tooth Fairy to go into any corner shop and buy a fizzy drink without it carrying any health warning either for her or her parents.
The idea that the Olympics would partner with brands that market such products is appalling. The Games are effectively the strongest health brand in the world — and sponsorship by the likes of Coca-Cola cements in the minds of children and adults that soft drinks are deeply associated with healthiness, athleticism and building strong bodies.
Indeed, Australian researchers reported in the journal Public Health Nutrition in 2011 that parents perceive food products as healthier when endorsed by a professional athlete, making them more likely to buy them for their children.
(It's not just Coca-Cola: while it's the most active soft drink sponsor in global sports worldwide, other drinks companies have contracts with sporting events, such as PepsiCo's sponsorship of the National Football League in the U.S.)
Big-brand soda sponsorship of sport also effectively undermines the wealth of scientific evidence of the dangers of soft drinks. Consumers look at the Olympic branding and ask themselves: 'Well, how bad can these products be if they're linked with the most elite physical competition in the world?'
The reach of this kind of marketing is titanic. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics had a broadcast audience of more than three billion worldwide, with online videos of the event being watched more than 28 billion times. Such marketing power demolishes anything a doctor can tell their patients.
These brands don't even position themselves as 'health-neutral'. Coca-Cola and the rest trade on the idea that their products can provide 'sports nutrition' — supplying energy for people to do sports and live super-active fun lives.
These companies even fund medical studies. A team from Oxford and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine mapped the universe of Coca-Cola's research funding, which involves almost 1,500 different researchers (probably not all direct grant recipients), corresponding to 461 publications funded by the brand. Many of these promoted the idea that exercise and activities could help offset the excess calories from products such as Coca-Cola.
But we know from the research evidence that this isn't what happens. We know that physical inactivity is not actually a significant part of the obesity epidemic: it's down to calorie over-consumption from soft drinks and other junk foods.
Yet, as it stands, Coca-Cola will continue to peddle this 'health' message for the next two Olympics at least, as they have locked the Games' organisers into a contract that lasts until 2032.
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