ABSTRACT
Food, sport and media are contemporary vehicles for carrying multiple cultural messages (Frye & Bruner, 2012; Rowe, 2004), and sports nutrition lies at the nexus of all three. These foods, beverages and supplements represent a $23 billion a year world market (Nutrition Business Journal, 2011), with the United States accounting for over 70% of total global sales (Leatherhead Food Research, 2011). The market, however, is changing. Although over 90% of elite competitive athletes regularly use sports nutrition, they now represent only 5% of consumers (McArdle, Katch, & Katch, 2013). Instead, recreational users, who pursue sport as a hobby or for fitness, and lifestyle users, “non-sporty” consumers who enact concerns with health and fitness through consumption, rather than sports participation (Heller, 2010), are now the largest consumer groups. Sales of sports nutrition have continued to grow during a prolonged economic recession (International Markets Bureau, 2010), as these products are increasingly “mainstreamed” to appeal to non-athletes (Schultz, 2013). Sports nutrition is now culturally constructed as being for everyone, and the primary means by which this is accomplished is through marketing, aided by the addition of new retail outlets, new delivery formats, a focus on taste in
Joylin Namie and Russell Warne
addition to function and packaging directed at specific types of consumers rather than the one-size-fits-all approach of the past (Rosenberg, 2011).
