According to a survey published this week by the British Heart Foundation, 73% of 8-15 year olds are apparently unaware that a junk food diet could potentially shorten their lives - furthermore, 45% thought the most dangerous side effects were "to make them put on weight, cause their teeth to rot, give them spots or make them unpopular."

So, first things first, let's kick off with one thundering, monumental WTF?

It's my job to consume popular media - if only so you don't have to - and I can tell you that there's no shortage of opportunities to learn that bad food will do you in. In fact pretty much every part of the media not covering celebrities in the jungle seems devoted to informing us that everything we eat will kill us. Our government, indeed, uses our own money to tell us that everything is unhealthy and we should jolly well cut it out before it turns blue and drops off. But somehow, this survey implies, the 8-15 age cohort isn't getting it. We thought junk food only made you fat but apparently, if you're in this age bracket it makes you deaf, blind and insensitive to media as well.

But we should be serious. This is an important message. Lets pretend that we accept the staggeringly counterintuitive idea that young teens just don't hear what the mass media won't shut up about. How should we communicate with them?

You're ahead of me here aren't you? You know exactly what any decerebrate marketeer automatically does when briefed to 'engage' with 'yoof' - yes, they've commissioned a website with an entertaining interactive game. Oh, sweet Jesus, take me now.

The British Heart Foundation's answer to obese kids is a sub-tamagotchi flash application in which they can create online avatars or 'Yoobots', experimentally feed them healthy or unhealthy food and then watch how their lifespan is affected by their choice. Do you see what they did there? Grown-ups don't need avatars to work out how their lifestyle will affect their health over time, they just look at how unhealthy their parents are, but obviously 8-15 year-olds need it demonstrated by a cartoon character.

I'll gloss over the awful manga/graffiti graphics, the 'wacky' Professor character and the dismal pop music - all the doomed queasiness of any attempt by adult marketeers to be 'hip' - and merely question how they expect any kid too bone-dumb to know that junk food is bad is going to have the intellectual curiosity to experimentally feed their own avatar.

Attempting to communicate ideas to young people through this kind of ill-conceived and patronising nonsense is, to my mind at least, part of the problem rather than the solution.

Do you believe that kids don't know junk food is bad or that they simply don't care? Is there a more effective way to get the message across?