If you were watching the Paris Olympics and saw a winning athlete cross the finish line, light a cigarette and boast about the health-boosting benefits of their favourite tobacco brand, you'd be as surprised as you were disgusted.

Yet it's startlingly true that tobacco companies were major Olympic sponsors right up until 1988, when cigarette brands were finally banned from advertising at the Games.

For the previous 60 years, tobacco-funded Olympic medal-winners had lined up to extol the virtues of smoking and push the now bizarre claim that it enabled athletes to lead healthy lives — among them, the iconic Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals for sprinting, relay and long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, but who died from lung cancer aged 66 in 1980, after decades of heavy smoking.

The biggest earner of tobacco funding, though, was the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which took millions of pounds every four years from cigarette-brand sponsorship, from 1920 until it was banned.

But you may be shocked to learn that today the IOC still takes similarly vast sums from another major industry — one that, I believe, when it comes to damaging the health of young people may now have overtaken cigarettes.

That industry is soft drinks — and that money comes from the global beverage giant Coca-Cola, which has sponsored the Olympics Games since 1928.

Sources estimate that Coca-Cola nowadays pays the Olympics around £70 million a year in sponsorship. In exchange, Coca-Cola can use the Olympic Games' five rings on all its products.

As an investigation in the French newspaper Le Monde said in May, this huge money deal enables Coca-Cola to 'promote the world's most talked-about sporting event, all over the world, while generating priceless advertising opportunities for itself'.

Indeed, Le Monde said of Coca-Cola's tie-up with the Olympics: 'The partnership has become so close that it's hard to say who runs the Games.'

Across the Olympics, wherever you look, Coca-Cola branding is ubiquitous. Even before the Games began, the drinks giant had sponsored the Olympic torch relay, so that a Coca-Cola van constantly flanked the torch's two-month tour.

It is time that all this Coca-Cola sponsorship stopped. For good. Because, beyond tobacco, as a doctor who advocates for public health, I fear the health-destroying power of fizzy drinks more than anything else. Soft drinks damage people's bodies, and the bodies of children in particular.

And what's more frightening is that these products are so friendly-looking, so familiar and so pervasive that we've become accustomed to them and have forgotten the damage they wreak.

The harms of soft drinks are extremely well documented over hundreds of scientific papers.

As a 2022 report by the University of North Carolina's Global Food Research Programme warned, they are 'a key driver of modern surges in nutrition-related diseases worldwide, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease — the leading causes of disability and death in the world'.

Furthermore, fizzy drinks have no real nutritional benefit. In fact, they contribute to under-nutrition when consumed in place of foods containing essential nutrients. A major review by Yale University of 88 studies showed that consumption of soft drinks meant lower intakes of milk, calcium and other nutrients.

In a large multinational European study published in the BMJ last year, higher levels of consumption of sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened soft drinks was associated with increased risk of death from all causes. And in the shorter term, there's tooth decay — a national catastrophe in the UK that causes unbelievable suffering.

The link with soda was demonstrated last year when researchers at the universities of Cambridge and Glasgow reported how the sugar tax on soft drinks, introduced in 2018, has helped prevent more than 5,600 hospital admissions for children having to have their teeth pulled out under general anaesthetic.

Part of the problem is a chronic shortage of dentists, but this study underlined how closely sugary drinks also play a key role.

Nor is it just sodas with sugar: low or no-sugar 'diet' versions often contain the enamel-rotting likes of phosphoric, citric and tartaric acids. There is concerning evidence that these acids don't just rot teeth: the phosphoric acid may also dissolve your bones from the inside.

Beyond the sugar tax, these harmful products remain basically unregulated. My seven-year-old can use the money from the Tooth Fairy to go into any corner shop and buy a fizzy drink without it carrying any health warning either for her or her parents.

The idea that the Olympics would partner with brands that market such products is appalling. The Games are effectively the strongest health brand in the world — and sponsorship by the likes of Coca-Cola cements in the minds of children and adults that soft drinks are deeply associated with healthiness, athleticism and building strong bodies.

Indeed, Australian researchers reported in the journal Public Health Nutrition in 2011 that parents perceive food products as healthier when endorsed by a professional athlete, making them more likely to buy them for their children.

(It's not just Coca-Cola: while it's the most active soft drink sponsor in global sports worldwide, other drinks companies have contracts with sporting events, such as PepsiCo's sponsorship of the National Football League in the U.S.)

Big-brand soda sponsorship of sport also effectively undermines the wealth of scientific evidence of the dangers of soft drinks. Consumers look at the Olympic branding and ask themselves: 'Well, how bad can these products be if they're linked with the most elite physical competition in the world?'

The reach of this kind of marketing is titanic. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics had a broadcast audience of more than three billion worldwide, with online videos of the event being watched more than 28 billion times. Such marketing power demolishes anything a doctor can tell their patients.

These brands don't even position themselves as 'health-neutral'. Coca-Cola and the rest trade on the idea that their products can provide 'sports nutrition' — supplying energy for people to do sports and live super-active fun lives.

These companies even fund medical studies. A team from Oxford and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine mapped the universe of Coca-Cola's research funding, which involves almost 1,500 different researchers (probably not all direct grant recipients), corresponding to 461 publications funded by the brand. Many of these promoted the idea that exercise and activities could help offset the excess calories from products such as Coca-Cola.

But we know from the research evidence that this isn't what happens. We know that physical inactivity is not actually a significant part of the obesity epidemic: it's down to calorie over-consumption from soft drinks and other junk foods.

Yet, as it stands, Coca-Cola will continue to peddle this 'health' message for the next two Olympics at least, as they have locked the Games' organisers into a contract that lasts until 2032.

Coca-Cola's global campaign for the Paris games focuses on hugs. The brand's adverts show competing swimmers hugging each other to celebrate the potential for cross-cultural connection during the Games.

This messaging is everywhere. Coca-Cola has also launched a novelty design for its 'Paris Olympics cans': when two cans of regular cola (nearly three times the World Heath Organisation maximum recommended adult daily sugar intake) are placed together, they create an image of two arms in an embrace.

This beguiling messaging will invade my own children's lives directly through watching the Games, and indirectly through seeing the Olympic-branded product in the playground, the shops and other kids' houses.

This is why I'm a supporter of the campaign kickbigsodaout.org, and I am urging people to sign its online petition.

Formed of leading global health experts and partnered with more than 60 organisations from over 20 countries, including the UK-based World Obesity Federation and World Cancer Research

Fund International, the campaign is urging the IOC to end Coca-Cola's sponsorship deal.

We need a culture where there's no soft drinks advertising — just like with the ban on tobacco advertising in sport in this country.

And the first step has to be the Olympics, because as long as the world's most famous sporting event is tangled up with soft drinks, then the fight is lost — at the cost of untold illness.

The Olympics could surely survive without soft drinks sponsorship, just as it did after banning tobacco money — and I cannot think of another single-issue health campaign that would have greater long-term benefit for the world.

Coca-Cola told the Mail: 'We have a Responsible Marketing Policy which includes not marketing any products to children under the age of 13 and in media where 30 per cent or more of the audience is composed of children under 13.

'Through its policies and practices, The Coca-Cola Company is taking a responsible approach to supporting athletes, their families, fans and others who take part in the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games.'

To sign the petition, visit kickbigsodaout.org

DO YOU REALLY NEED...

This week: Skin Tag Remover with LCD Display, £19.99, amazon.co.uk

CLAIM: This has a tiny heated needle that emits ‘plasma micro district discharge technology’ to heat and remove ‘skin tags, moles, warts, sun spots and small tattoos’ — with ‘no bleeding, pain or scarring’. 

EXPERT VERDICT: ‘Although the details are a bit vague, this pen seems to be a high frequency wave treatment that uses heat to destroy the skin tag tissue so it dies, shrivels up and fall off,’ explains Justine Hextall, a consultant dermatologist at Tarrant Street Clinic in Arundel, West Sussex. 

‘I’d need to see more data and research before recommending it — and haven’t been able to find any readily available.

‘More worrying is the large number of other skin problems it says it can treat, such as moles. Any darkening or changing skin lesion needs urgently checking: you should never attempt to remove it yourself. 

‘Even with an ordinary skin tag, it could be very easy to use this pen wrongly or for too long, which could lead to burning, scarring and pigmentation issues.’