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LIVING off junk food increases your chances of ending up in a care home and dying early; while switching to a healthier eating pattern, even as late as in middle age, can improve your health prospects.

That is the groundbreaking finding of a recent report in the Journal of Gerontology.

It does seem a little obvious but in fact I believe it’s missing a crucial point.

It is all very well telling people to change their longingrained eating habits for healthier regimens, but in my experience this is no easier than trying to get them to lose weight. Achieving permanent change is almost impossible.

The only strategy that will work is prevention — and it needs to start when people are far younger.

We need a more refined approach in the teaching of home economics in schools: educate and convert the children, and they will inevitably, in turn, influence their parents to make better dietary choices.

Teaching children about the journey of food from the soil to the plate so that they understand how food is created through the process of agriculture, and setting the details of that education in a framework of human biology should be the key to giving them lasting insights.

By doing this, the over-salted, over-sugared manufactured foods we see in the form of popular breakfast cereal products are more likely to be rejected for healthier options.

This, along with a commitment to regular exercise, is the only way the worrying levels of obesity can be reduced.

To paraphrase Churchill: ‘give them the tools and they will finish the job’ — and giving them the tools means giving them the right education.