National Hockey League
Are Sports Organizations Playing a Role in America’s Obesity Problem?
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Last September, the National Football League struck a deal with Frito-Lay that allowed the company to produce limited-edition bags of Tostitos tortilla chips, with each package bearing the logo of one of 19 featured NFL teams. Several months earlier, Major League Baseball announced that Nathan’s Famous would be its first-ever official hot dog. Now the first-ever comprehensive analysis of such food and beverage sponsorships by major sports organizations shows just how pervasive these deals are. The confusing messages they send about physical fitness and healthy eating habits can’t be helping our national problem with obesity [1].
Among the 10 sports organizations that young viewers watch most, from the NFL to Little League, the NIH-funded research team identified dozens of sponsors and hundreds of associated advertisements promoting food and beverage products. The vast majority of those ads touted unhealthy items, including chips, candies, sodas, and other foods high in fat, sodium, or sugar, and low in nutritional value.
Those findings are especially concerning in light of the latest figures from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), co-supported by NIH [2], It shows that, despite long-standing public health efforts to curb the obesity epidemic, more than 18 percent of young people in America remain obese. Among adults, the picture is even more discouraging: nearly 40 percent of American adults were obese in 2015-2016, up from about 34 percent in 2007-2008.
