Move. Sweat. Play. Enjoy. Now would you like fries with that?
Junk food attached itself, sucker-like, to sport a couple of generations ago.
I well recall getting McDonald’s vouchers at Little Athletics, ice block vouchers at netball and saving up enough Milo labels to earn a chocolate-brown and green tracksuit.
But the parasitic attachment has gone too far, with rubbish food and physical activity so intertwined in the public mind, they are like hugs and kisses: best enjoyed together. Hogwash!
Our children are fat, our adults are sedentary. We have to be reminded what healthy food tastes like and that moving until we puff and pant will not kill us.
Never has high-calorie, low-nutrient food and drink been so available and so cheap.
So, as we watch our best athletes do their thing on the fields of play, spare us the shiny, slick presentation of food and drink that has nothing whatsoever to do with it.
It is tough enough for us to stay healthy without all that teasing and tempting.
Take your deep-fried chicken, your drippy, cheesy burger and that lurid-coloured icy drink and put it where it’s wanted: somewhere that is not here.
Junk-food companies are the biggest sponsors of Australian sport. Cricket Australia’s partnership with KFC means cricket players and viewers are slapped in the face repeatedly with ads and sneaky marketing.
KFC is also in on the NRL (soon to fill our autumn and winter weekends), along with their old frenemy Maccas.
Shapes might have flavour you can see, but a healthy food they are not. Coca-Cola is not the real thing – not really.
Surveys find the public don’t want what we are being served up.
Cancer Council WA last year found 81 per cent of people felt sport was no place for promoting junk food to children and that three-in-four parents felt promoting junk food in sport made it harder to get their children to eat well.
In July last year, new research into Facebook ads by Melbourne Law School and the Australian Ad Observatory found online junk-food advertisements were specifically targeting young men and parents by linking junk foods with athletic activities.
Junk-food companies do it because they are allowed to and our eating habits have made them big bucks.
But just because they can, doesn’t mean they should.
Dr Jane Stephens is a UniSC journalism lecturer, media commentator and writer.
