MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA – MARCH 06: Junk food sits on a table as British Celebrity Chef Jamie Oliver announces a partnership to attack state-wide obesity on March 6, 2012 in Melbourne, Australia. The Victorian Government and the Good Foundation will pledge together over AUD5 million to bring Oliver’s ‘Ministry of Food’ to the state to help teach cooking techniques and nutrition to participants and help combat obesity as part of the Victorian Healthy Eating Enterprise. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

This is an excellent article by George Monbiot in the Guardian. Ir’s well worth reading. Check it out!

via Alzheimer’s could be the most catastrophic impact of junk food | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Personally, I have a good friend with Alzheimer’s and have watched him deteriorate  over a number of years. I do not know if he was fond of junk food in an earlier life but if there is a remote risk of causal relationship, then in my view the case for heavy regulation of the junk food industry is compelling.

George Monbiot concludes as follows:

A scarcely regulated food industry can engineer its products – loading them with fat, salt, sugar and high-fructose corn syrup – to bypass the neurological signals that would otherwise prompt people to stop eating. It can bombard both adults and children with advertising. It can (as we discovered yesterday) use the freedom granted to academy schools to sell the chocolate, sweets and fizzy drinks now banned from sale in maintained schools. It can kill off the only effective system (the traffic-light label) for informing people how much fat, sugar and salt their food contains. Then it can turn to the government and blame consumers for eating the products it sells. This is class war, a war against the poor fought by the executive class in government and industry.

We cannot yet state unequivocally that poor diet is a leading cause of Alzheimer’s disease, though we can say that the evidence is strong and growing. But if ever there was a case for the precautionary principle, here it is. It’s not as if we lose anything by eating less rubbish. Averting a possible epidemic of this devastating disease means taking on the bullies – both those who mock people for their pathology and those who spread the pathology by peddling a lethal diet.

What do you think?