ENERGY DRINKS should be banned for children and teenagers, a conference on sport and exercise medicine has been told by an expert in the field of childhood obesity.
The drinks are helpful only to about 2 per cent of elite athletes, according to Prof Donal O’Shea, and are not necessary for children playing sport.
“It is a very sinister way into a market to promote what is supposed to be a performance-enhancing product, but they [the drinks] are not. You have 15-year-olds drinking these and putting on calories while playing sport,” said Prof O’Shea, consultant endocrinologist at Dublin’s St Vincent’s and Loughlinstown hospitals.
Addressing the eighth annual conference of the Faculty of Sports and Exercise Medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons and Royal College of Physicians in Dublin, he said rates of obesity for children aged between 7 and 11 have increased from 5 per cent 20 years ago to 23 per cent today.
“The energy drink industry use their elite performing clients very well, but give entirely the wrong message to children,” he said.
“The medical profession need to make sure the lessons learnt from Olympic achievement are used to make us healthier, not fatter,” he added.
Olympic team medical officer Dr Rod McLoughlin told the conference a new online system for storing information on athletes, who often train at facilities abroad as well as in Ireland, is making treatment more effective.
“Details for any athletes treated at the [Irish] Institute of Sport are now put online for people with a password to access. This makes the transfer of information easier,” he said.
The medical team has limited direct contact with athletes before the games so this system and a proposed system of blood profiling can improve treatment, according to Dr McLoughlin.
Dean of the faculty Dr Philip Carolan said Ireland is facing an obesity pandemic.
“The big problem is we don’t have the education department and the health department working in unison on this.
“We would suggest a strategy of giving school dinners to kids to eat their main meal when they can burn off the calories,” Dr Carolan said.
Addressing the absence of funding for specialist training, Dr Carolan said his faculty had never been able to offer training.
“If you put 10 training positions across the range of specialisms it would address the current problem. We are graduating more and more doctors but there is no further training, so there is an exodus. And they don’t generally come back,” he said.