© Randy Faris/Corbis
There is a long-standing love affair between sports and alcohol, and the mementos of this relationship abound at football stadiums, baseball parks, and of course, in TV advertising. (As of 2003, some 60% of the advertising budget for the American alcohol industry was dedicated to commercials during televised games, according to data from the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth. ) Yet, for all its interwoven history and cultural traction—after all, what’s a ball game without cold beer and hot dogs?—a growing group of researchers suggest that the relationship between sports and alcohol is an increasingly dangerous one. A 2008 study of more than 1,200 amateur athletes in New Zealand analyzed the relationship between club team sponsorships by venues selling beer, wine and liquor, and alcohol abuse by players. Writing in the journal Addiction researchers Kerry S. O’Brien, a psychologist from the U.K.’s University of Manchester ,and Kypros Kipri, from the University of Medicine and Public Health at Australia’s University of Newcastle, wrote that, “[r]espondents receiving free or discounted alcohol and those who felt they should drink their sponsor’s product and/or go to the sponsor’s premises after practice, games or events reported higher levels of drinking.”
While that finding may surprise few—heading to a pub for a few drinks after practice is often part of the culture of club sports, regardless of whether the venue offers a discount or even free drinks—researchers say it indicates a troublesome association between sport and excessive drinking, and have now followed up the initial research with an editorial calling for an outright ban on alcohol sponsored sports teams and events. (Several movements to minimize the presence of alcohol in sporting events already exist, including the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s 2006 initiative calling for an end to alcohol promotion in world cup events.) In an opinion piece, published this week in Addiction, O’Brien and Kypri team up with Australian psychologist Peter Miller to argue that the link between unhealthy drinking habits and promoting alcohol to both players and spectators is insidious, and needs to be more closely analyzed. They concede that one small study isn’t enough to condemn Big Booze outright, but point to the historic relationship between sports and cigarettes as an example of why public health officials should tackle the problem now, instead of waiting for proof to trickle in. The argument from the alcohol industry that there’s no substantial link between alcohol abuse and alcohol promotion through sports, they say, is similar to the position “held until well into the 1990s by the tobacco industry about the link between smoking and lung cancer,” they write, “despite extensive evidence from case control and cohort studies over several decades.”
What’s more, the researchers argue, taking a lesson from the missteps in the battle against tobacco, they say the onus should be on the alcohol industry to prove that booze sponsorships don’t drive unhealthy drinking, instead of waiting for the research community to prove that they do. “It should not be left to the public to demonstrate that alcohol industry sponsorship is harmful but, rather, it should be up to the proponents of the activity, i.e. the alcohol industry, to show that the practice is harmless,” they write.
What do you think? Is the culture of sports and booze dangerous? And, if it is in the best interest of public health to disentangle the the two, how realistic is it that that will happen anytime soon? What types of changes would you be willing to see in the name of more healthy alcohol consumption?