Junk meals ‘avoids promoting regulation’ with high stage UK sports activities sponsorship

Junk meals corporations have greater than 90 present sponsorship offers inside high UK sports activities amid rising issues over their influence on public well being, finds an investigation printed by The BMJ.

Manufacturers together with Cadbury, Pepsi, KP Snacks, Walkers, Kellogg’s, Crimson Bull, and Monster are amongst these with ongoing partnerships with sporting stars, high flight groups, or official governing our bodies.

They embrace offers with high males’s and girls’s soccer stars Cole Palmer, Bukayo Saka, Leah Williamson, and Lauren James, England cricket captain Ben Stokes, bike owner Tom Pidcock, and Components 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 may function prominently on LED boards beside pitches, and on interview backdrops throughout press conferences.

Whereas the meals trade has a protracted historical past of sponsoring sports activities, specialists say the adverts have grow to be extra “pervasive” and “outstanding” than ever, now with big digital advertising campaigns within the run-up to occasions and types with the ability to goal followers by way of sports activities stars’ social media.

Beth Bradshaw, coverage and advocacy supervisor at Meals Energetic, a part of the public well being charity Well being Equalities Group, says, “It is so necessary as a result of it is youngsters. A few of these sports activities personalities, these soccer stars, these rugby stars…They’re youngsters’ idols.”

In January 2026, the federal government is due to herald laws banning adverts for merchandise which can be excessive in fats, salt, or sugar (HFSS) earlier than the 9pm TV watershed, however this regulation has been repeatedly delayed as a consequence of lobbying by the meals trade.

The BMJ‘s findings display “real sportswashing,” argues Labor MP and GP Simon Opher, who tabled a parliamentary query to ask the well being secretary “whether or not he plans to deliver ahead legislative proposals to ban sponsorship of sports activities occasions by unhealthy meals manufacturers.”

The federal government responded that it had “no present plans to ban the sponsorship of sports activities occasions by meals manufacturers related to much less wholesome meals or drink merchandise or ban the promoting of much less wholesome meals or drink merchandise at sports activities occasions.”

It added, “We proceed to evaluation the proof of the impacts on youngsters of much less wholesome meals or drink product promoting and can contemplate the place additional motion is required.”

The BMJ investigation additionally exposes the extent to which sports activities sponsorship offers will swerve these new rules, permitting unhealthy merchandise to seem on daytime TV, together with Hula Hoops on England cricket shirts, Crimson Bull logos beside soccer pitches, and Package Kat branding alongside Components 1 race tracks.

Consultants say sports activities sponsorship offers 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 exhibits it improves youngsters’s opinions of unhealthy manufacturers.

“These gamers are in absolute peak bodily situation, and they’re sadly selling merchandise that simply don’t usually function in athletes’ diets,” says Meals Energetic’s Bradshaw.

Some public well being specialists are calling for junk meals’ sponsorship of sports activities to be banned as a result of ranges of publicity it offers to manufacturers and the potential influence on youngsters’s well being.

“We have to have some morals and ethics in regards to the kinds of merchandise we affiliate with sport,” argues Robin Eire at Glasgow College’s faculty of well being and well-being.

“We shouldn’t be permitting meals manufacturers to be utilizing sport to advertise consumption of their unhealthy merchandise to younger folks. It merely needs to be banned.”