Can you trust products that claim to prevent dementia?

Why stop at advertising? Perhaps we’d like political statements from the government and opposition to pass through an organisation to check their veracity, newspaper articles to go through some authority before they are published to ensure we are not being misled, Which? statements, campaign material and reports checked to ensure they are factual, unbiased and fair, comments on Convos filtered by the moderators before they are released to the rest of us?

Not a world I want to live in – having someone else (who are these super-knowledgeable people going to be – profit making companies who are less than competent probably) deciding what I cannot or can be told. I prefer to live in the real world where I use my common sense and experience to decide on the merits of what i’m told and a world where we all are given the benefit of the doubt until we have transgressed. Then penalise the transgressors to both punish them and deter others.

Apart from that, the size of organisations necessary to continually research and assess advertising, the host of experts that would be tied up doing this checking work instead of using their talents properly, is wholly impractical.

If we think we need to crack down harder on advertising then we need realistic ways. Perhaps someone could survey just how widespread real fraud is (not normal marketing) in advertising claims?

I haven’t tried to reduce my risk using products or services that claim to prevent dementia because, like all other dodgy investments out there, financial or otherwise, double-your-money or diet pills, if they sound too good to be true, it’s because they probably aren’t.

I agree with wavechange that it would be good to have products vetted before they are advertised, but malcolm r asks two good questions too. Who will do the vetting is an expensive but solvable problem in my view, an investment worth the return. To claim against the vetters or the manufacturers is more difficult to answer, an arguable ethical issue.

If Which? experts – including a dietitian, a GP and a professor of public health medicine – found one company’s dementia prevention claims to be so misleading that they have reported them to the Advertising Standards Authority, I want it to be named and shamed here and now please, and also elsewhere later, to try and protect the gullible vulnerable folk out there, not necessarily stupid but rather too trusting for their own good. If on balance they still want to try the product for themselves, so be it. Let us at least take the horses to water.

electronic healing have disappeared, so the ASA caused their demise, but I agree that it is not the best organisation for complaints, I have complained about MediFacts and since then it has been used for other products, the ASA rejected it. I believe it is misleading as most people would think it is a public service “Medical Facts” advertisement.
The brand name is actually owned by the advertising company and in my years in advertising we have never used our brand on a clients advertisement, it would have been unethical, yes I know that sounds like a joke for that business, but the client is paying for the ad for their products, not ours.

My feeling is that there’s too much emphasis on taking drugs to alleviate symptoms and not enough seems to being done to investigate why dementia occurs in the 1st place. There does appear to be evidence that it is linked to sugar and insulin and thus cutting carb intake and increasing fat intake is beneficial. Several books have been published that show references to studies that point to dementia being the 3rd type of diabetes.

Certainly there’s no harm in trying a low-carb, high-fat diet and more and more is being published that shows sugar could be a cause of many “modern” illnesses. Not that I’m an expert, but there’s a big Internet of information out there to study.