The British Heart Foundation has added a feature to their homepage showing how ‘junk food manufacturers manipulate children online to tempt them to eat foods loaded with salt, fat and sugar.’

By revealing the standard methods used to persuade kids to annoy their parents into making the ‘right’ purchase (think free-gifts, heavily branded online games, social networking), the charity aims to highlight the lengths to which the food industry will go to get the little darlings hooked on their products.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this accusation of online culinary grooming has not been well received by an industry body called the Advertising Association.

Taking time out from snorting enormous piles of cocaine, they have hit back stating:

‘Nobody wants a marketing free-for-all, but demands for bans based on hyperbole threaten people’s jobs, affordable media, a choice of foods we all enjoy and the inalienable right of a child to grow to the size of a medium-sized dirigible before the onset of puberty.’

Now, quite obviously, that last bit isn’t entirely accurate.

After all, who’s going to try pronouncing ‘dirigible’ after hoovering a line of cocaine the length of Hadrian’s Wall?

They used the word ‘blimp’ instead.