Just one extraordinary new fact emerged from the government's new obesity strategy, published earlier today by health secretary Alan Johnson. Children are to be the primary focus because it is easier to prevent weight gain than to reverse it.
But who buys and feeds children and influences what they eat and drink? Duh, their mummies and daddies, of course.
Brooding on the sidelines is the powerful and influential food industry, and the glaring problem with this flawed new strategy is that the government has been too weak to take it on in its fight against obesity. Mr Johnson may try and talk tough by talking about the need for one, easy-to-understand, consistent food labelling system, which would help people to better understand the nutritional content value of what they are consuming. But he needs to get real.
How many people - including parents, of course - do you see obsessively checking labels, as they pile high the goods in their supermarket trolley? The reality is that most people do not read food labels, and those who need to read them are those least likely to.
This time last year, we had the farcical situation of millions of pounds being spent on competing advertising campaigns - one by the government's Food Standards Agency, promoting its preferred "traffic lights" option - and one on behalf of the food industry singing the praises of "guideline daily amounts".
What happened was that the industry - with some exceptions, such as Sainsbury's - worried that people would shriek with horror and shove their ready meal back on the shelf when they saw the offending front-of-packet "wheel", with segments of red and orange indicating that it wasn't terribly healthy. It opted instead for the baffling "guideline daily amounts" system, which assumes the shopper has at least A-level maths (sorry, I exaggerate a bit) in order to be able to calculate and understand percentages.
The Food and Drink Federation has mounted a vigorous campaign through the pages of downmarket womens' magazines. Oh, and we have also had hybrid schemes, combining both, adopted by the likes of Asda. Meanwhile, the Food Standards Agency has appointed an agency to carry out research into the effectiveness of signpost labelling system. Does it really expect the industry to roll over and agree to adopt whichever is found to be the easiest to use and understand?
As Sue Davies, chief policy adviser of Which?, commented today, the government needs to take more responsibility and leadership in areas where the industry has been dragging its heels. The supposed new "strategy" is a rehash of several proposals that were on the table three years ago which have not been pushed through. It's also interesting to see the government's cowardice after failing to press ahead with a ban on all junk food advertising before the 9pm watershed.
Incidentally, have you seen the Food Standards Agency's current TV advert? It features some baffling "painting" scenes where the letters in "FOOD" are filled in with red, green and amber. The voiceover is by actress Dawn French, which is a choice of actor that (correct me if I'm being rude) sends out some rather conflicting signals.
"Obesity strategy? My arse," as Royle Family father actor Ricky Tomlinson would mutter into his plate of chips ...
