Here we go again. The government announces another anti-obesity campaign, worthy motives, sensible objectives, loads of interested bodies in support, blah, blah, blah. All very laudable and so on. But why?
It's not as if we hadn't heard it all before. For the last 20 years we've been lectured, hectored, browbeaten, chided and scolded.

We've had advice, admonition, instruction, rebuke, counsel and guidance through food columns, health columns, TV programmes, government initiatives, and local campaigns. There've been guidelines, targets, programmes and agendas, plans of action and series of measures.

Of course, health campaigners argue that they have the assembled marketing and advertising wizardry of the food industry ranged against them, bankrolled by untold millions, and there is some truth in that. But I don't suppose the combined total spent on such nefarious promotion is actually that much greater than that spent on putting the contrary case, if you factor in all the free columns, airtime and general pulpit bashing given to extolling the virtues of healthy eating.

So you have to ask, why don't we eat better? Why do so many of us continue to eat ourselves into an early grave? It's so clearly in our best interests not to become fat and die painfully of diet-related diseases before our time. Are we so stupid that we don't get the message? If we do get the message, why don't we do what we're told?

Could it be that we feel we have so little control over our lives as a whole – a feeling reinforced by the current economic chaos – that the only thing we can control is what we put in our mouths? Could be that because various goody two-shoes lecture us on our rotten habits we're inclined to give them two fingers and eat what we like and smoke what we like and drink what we like, and to hell with the consequences.

I'm not underestimating the seriousness of the situation. The government's Chief Medical Officer says he is presiding over the first generation that, on average, will die younger than the previous one, and obviously that's not a good thing. But in all likelihood another chunk of public money will be spent on a thoroughly worthy, pointless exercise. Can anyone suggest better ways of using it and actually getting somewhere?