NATION Doc out to ban sports drinks

LEADING sports doctor Professor Peter Brukner is heading an anti- sugar campaign and calling for clubs to ban sports drinks – just days after leaving the Gatorade- sponsored Australian cricket team.

After ending a five- year stint with Cricket Australia, Prof Brukner is now focusing on cutting the nation’s spiralling sugar consumption and related disease by heading the Sugar By Half campaign.

The campaign puts Prof Brukner at odds with his former employer, which has a lucrative contract with Gatorade that sees players drinking and surrounding themselves with the sugary sports drink.

“At sporting clubs we do not need to be guzzling Gatorade and Powerade and so on – and I can say that now I am not working for Cricket Australia anymore,” Prof Brukner said.

“The Government can help, but we have got to get rid of soft drinks in hospitals, schools and vending machines. There are a lot of things that we can do at a community level.

“We have these epidemics ( obesity and diabetes) going with a common cause and we don’t seem to do anything about it.

“There are a lot of vested interests in maintaining the status quo. The big food companies, obviously it is in their interests for us to buy processed foods rather than fruit, veg and dairy which they do not make money out of.

“It is a lot of parallels to the tobacco industry.”

Prof Brukner – who has previously been a physician for the Socceroos, Liverpool Football Club, national athletics, swimming, soccer and men’s hockey teams including Olympic and Commonwealth Games – left his role with Cricket Australia following their Champions Trophy exit.

Concerned at the spiralling rates of obesity and mixed dietary messages, Prof Brukner and other leading experts have launched their campaign to cut Australia’s sugar consumption in half.

He will further push the campaign at the Australian Health & Wellness Summit in Melbourne on July 2, outlining the crisis that now sees adults consuming 15 teaspoons of added sugar a day — and kids having a “crazy” 25 teaspoons daily.

“If we could cut the amount of sugar eaten from 15 teaspoons to seven, which is what the World Health Organisation recommends, it would have a massive impact on the health of Australians,” Prof Brukner said.

“There is no drug, nothing that would have such an impact on the health of Australians.”