Football is in full swing. Basketball season is fully underway. That also means a full-court press from advertisers in one of the greatest ironies of public health: During actual games, the fittest people on the planet slice through defensive lines, soar above the rim and sear the memories of mere mortal fans with inconceivable contortions to catch passes and cut through lanes for layups.
During timeouts, sports celebrities sell mere mortals mortality.
Commercials of athletes selling salty chips, sugary drinks and fast foods saturated in salt and saturated fats is as American as obesity. The United States is the fattest nation on Earth among rich nations, with 42 percent of adults living with obesity. That’s more than triple the rate of the 1960s. The rate of youth obesity has quadrupled since the 1960s, to nearly 20 percent.
It is no small wonder given how the worst food is pitched as wonderful – and in no small part by celebrities and athletes.
A decade ago, a study published in the prestigious journal Pediatrics by university researchers at Yale, Stanford, Harvard, and Duke found that 79 percent of food products endorsed by star athletes were unhealthy. All the calories from more than 90 percent of advertised beverages came from added sugar. Back then, the leaders for helping the trash food industry market unhealthy burgers, pizza, soda, and cookies were football’s Peyton Manning, basketball’s LeBron James and tennis champion Serena Williams.
Today, James sells potato chips in a commercial along with current basketball stars A’ja Wilson, Jayson Tatum and Hall of Famer Charles Barkley. Another basketball hall of famer, Reggie Miller, leaps out of his diner seat in commercials to cheer for burgers. Yet another, Shaquille O’Neal, hawks pizza. Bonding over fried chicken is the family of Deion Sanders, the Hall of Fame football player and University of Colorado head coach.
Football legends Dan Marino, Randy Moss, Jerry Rice, Emmitt Smith and Tom Brady spoof for a soda and chip commercial on coming out of retirement. NFL star wide receiver Davante Adams endorses tacos. A host of other current and past football players are shilling this season for pizza (I am purposely not naming specific companies so as to not give their campaigns even more publicity.)
I wish that these athletes would stop to consider the beast they feed. They are pawns in a playbook straight out of the mid 20th century, when cigarette companies scored endorsements from baseball legends such as Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Ted Williams, Yogi Berra and Willie Mays. Back then, the players really did smoke the products, as ads boasted how “mild” and “smooth” they were.
All the while, Big Tobacco knew their products caused cancer. Several of the aforementioned players did indeed die of lung cancer.
Smoking rates have dramatically dropped over the decades with public health messaging, high taxes and major restrictions on where people can smoke. But 480,000 people a year still die from smoking-related causes. Now along comes salty, sugary and highly processed fast foods to rival tobacco as a grim reaper.
More than a third of adults and adolescents eat fast food on a given day in the U.S. Some single items at fast food joints can contain double the daily recommended sodium intake, more than a day’s worth of sugar and well over half a day’s recommended calories. Such foods are linked to obesity, which in turn is linked to chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, liver disease and some cancers – all contributors to a stunning drop in life expectancy in the U.S.
According to the Washington Post last month, chronic diseases “erase more than twice as many years of life among people younger than 65 as all the overdoses, homicides, suicides and car accidents combined.” A 2017 study by Tufts University, the University of Cambridge and Montefiore Medical Center in New York City estimated that poor diets with an excess in sodium and processed meats was associated with nearly 320,000 annual deaths from heart disease, stroke, or Type 2 diabetes in 2012 – a number exceeding the total deaths for U.S. soldiers in World War II.
From a 2019 study commissioned by The Lancet medical journal, “Unhealthy diets pose a greater risk to morbidity and mortality than does unsafe sex, and alcohol, drug, and tobacco use combined.”
Even newer data suggests that the toll may be far worse. A University of Colorado study this year says obesity may be linked to as many as 1 in 6 U.S. deaths. If true, the number of annual obesity-related deaths would equal or surpass deaths from smoking. The death could be enough to fill all 30 arenas in the NBA.
Study author Ryan Masters said the new data more accurately sizes up “the mortality consequences of living in a country where cheap, unhealthy food has grown increasingly accessible, and sedentary lifestyles have become the norm.”
Meanwhile, the head coach of the University of Colorado football team hawks fried chicken to the sedentary masses.
The degree to which unhealthiest of food companies seduce an empire dependent on the healthiest of athletes may seem too overwhelming to dare challenge. As the majority of first year college students gain an average of 7.5 pounds, schools themselves are bought off by junk food sports sponsorships. Among the official “Corporate Champions” of the NCAA: Coca Cola, Reese’s candy, Pizza Hut, Nabisco, Wendy’s and Buffalo Wild Wings.
What the junk food companies really champion is junk science. A 2016 “study” claiming that federal sugar intake guidelines are “untrustworthy” was published by an institute funded by, among others, Coca-Cola, Mars and Hershey.
Coca-Cola itself was exposed in the last decade for funding millions of dollars of “research” that miraculously found no connection to sugary drinks to obesity. Similarly, a 2016 study found a stark contrast between independent studies showing clear links between soda and obesity; studies from researchers with financial ties to the beverage industry showed no link to bad health.
That is all to maintain an image as innocuous as Joe DiMaggio puffing on a “milder” and “smoother” cigarette. A 2018 study in the journal Pediatrics found that 76 percent of foods promoted by the NCAA, the major professional sports leagues and Little League Baseball, were for “nutrient-poor” products. Completely disregarding pledges to not target kids for marketing, the Little League had the third-highest number of food and beverage sponsors…more than Major League Baseball and the NCAA. The Little League also had the highest percentage of sponsors that were food and beverage companies.
As if that’s not enough, this story also heavily involves patterns of systemic racism. Many Black athletes have refreshingly used their platform in recent years to protest police brutality and to get out the vote. It would be even better if they also realized that it is immoral to help companies push the worst of foods on populations already suffering the worst health, especially since the top targets of those companies are Black and Latino people. The marketing takes advantage of poor food environments baked into decades of residential segregation.
What do these companies want? For Black and Brown people to literally blow up? As bad as the 42 percent federal obesity rate is for the whole nation, the rate for Black adults is nearly 50 percent, including a 57 percent obesity rate for Black women. That compares to 40 percent for white women. Latino men and women respectively have rounded obesity rates of 46 percent and 44 percent.
Finally, Black athletes should look past their endorsement money to see where the political loyalties of the food and beverage industry lie. They sure don’t lay with Black Lives Matter.
In the 2020 elections, the American Beverage Association put aside four years of President Trump’s racism to give more than twice as much money to Republican candidates and political action committees than Democratic candidates. The National Restaurant Association spent three times more on Republican candidates than Democratic candidates. Agribusiness gave two-thirds of its campaign contributions to Republicans. Meat processors gave 85 percent of their cash to Republicans.
That is to ensure a Capitol Hill of minimal regulation and minimal interference with serving the most profitable processed foods to the most vulnerable populations. And it’s not like Black people truly want to eat and drink the human equivalent of pig slop: Surveys show that Black people want more options and an end to supermarket redlining that keeps stores with quality and value miles away.
In a 2021 focus-group survey led by researchers at Drexel, Black participants explicitly wished that Black celebrities promoted healthier products. “If you really thought about your family history and the diseases and stuff that this has caused, would you really be advertising this?” one participant asked. One thread of the focus groups was the hope that celebrities, especially once their reputations were established, “could be convinced to reconsider” endorsements for foods and beverages high in fats and sugar that harm “their own communities.”
This leaves the ball in the athletes’ court. In a 1938 ad for Camel cigarettes, Joe DiMaggio testified, “Camel is the cigarette that agrees with me in lots of ways. Good taste. Mildness. Easy on the throat. Camels don’t give me the feeling of having jumpy nerves.” In a 1935 ad for Camel, Lou Gehrig said the cigarettes were so mild, they “never get my wind,” a reference to aerobic capacity. The ad told readers: “It means you can smoke as many Camels as you please.”
DiMaggio would eventually die of lung cancer. Gehrig died of a disease named after him — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. Science today links smoking to a higher risk for ALS.
Nearly 90 years later, the fittest athletes in the world, and especially Black athletes, should have jumpy nerves when the burger and soda companies come running at them for endorsements. From this point on, it should be clear they are prostituting themselves at the expense of Black communities by urging fans to eat as many burgers and gulp as many sodas as they please.
For the good taste of a burger, fries, shake and soda, the results don’t lie: They can eventually put you six feet under.
Derrick Z. Jackson is a former Boston Globe columnist and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary.