In the past six months the government has finally started to widen the remit of public health minister Caroline Flint, so that exercise as well as diet is considered in the ongoing obesity obsession. Two years on from the government White Paper, this has come not a moment too soon. Over the next few pages, in this special health issue of The Grocer, we explore the many angles and issues that have emerged. But it's still a lot easier to put the blame on food manufacturers than to make people get off their lazy, fat derrières, or for the government to dip into its own pocket for that matter (a mooted free gym membership scheme was quickly abandoned).

So here are ten groups Ms Flint and the Department of Health may care to go after:

1. The Tories - for selling off our school playing fields.

2. TV manufacturers/broadcasters - for turning us into a nation of couch potatoes.

3. Capitalists - in the modern rat race, we plump for convenience foods because we're starved of time.

4. Microsoft/Google/Sony Playstation - work or play, we're glued to our computer screens day and night.

5. The PC brigade - for getting rid of competitive sport in so many schools.

6. The media/the police -for scaring the living daylights out of parents.

7. Restaurants - it's not Ronald McDonald that makes us fat; it's burgers, chips and pizza.

8. Car manufacturers/Otis - dang, cars are so comfortable and lifts so darned convenient.

9. Local councils/schools - isn't it about time we reintroduced school buses? (It would get rid of most traffic jams, too.)

10. The Tories again - for putting cost, not nutrition, at the top of the school dinners agenda in the early 1990s.

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