That was easy, then. A TV ad featuring Frank Lampard shows the Chelsea and England midfielder playing keepie-uppie with a cauliflower, and sales of the nobbly vegetable double overnight.

Need to boost sales of fruit? Get Freddie Flintoff to bowl a few bouncing apples. And Jonny Wilkinson could boot some marrows between the posts.

I'm actually being serious. The nation's sporting heroes can and should be employed to make the nation sit up (sorry: stand up, run around etc) and take note. The message would certainly be credible. Today's athletes aren't living off crisps and doughnuts and burgers, but a diet of pasta, fruit, veg, chicken, fish. There is no reason why the government couldn't follow Tesco's lead.

We should also give credit to food and drink manufacturers, too. As well as mass product reformulations in the three years since the government published its Health White Paper, a new report from the Advertising Association shows TV ad spend on fruit and veg increased by 35% between 2003 and 2006, while spend in other media soared by 327%. In the meantime, spend on 'scrutiny' products - sweets, crisps, snacks, carbonated full-sugar drinks and breakfast cereals - fell by £42m. And that was before Ofcom's ban kicked in (see 'Has The Industry Done Enough?', p26).

Now that the ban is in place, one has to wonder why the government is spending almost £0.5m to confirm the impact on TV ads to kids. What's surely needed is a little bit more scrutiny of the government's own response to its White Paper proposals. Three of these concerned advertising; the remaining 88 have received rather less media attention.

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