I can’t believe we didn’t realise it before. With the benefit of hindsight, of course, it is blindingly obvious when you walk around the streets of the UK that our obese toddlers simply must be eating too much fruit and veg.

Rarely can a nutritional study have come up with a less helpful catchline to garner publicity for itself. While I understand the premise that young children need a balanced diet, it is hard to believe that the nation’s infants are having fresh produce crammed down their necks. The research was carried out in an affluent area of the South East, so as our story suggests, should not be taken as typical of the entire country. But try telling that to the parents who read the headlines.

Fruit and vegetables are almost invariably used by the researchers’ PR machines to attract the headline writers to the story in the first place. We deal with products that stir emotions, and in many ways we should be thankful for that.

However, to say that children should have a balanced diet is one thing. To intimate that children are eating too much fresh produce, in a country which going by all official measurements is to say the least nutritionally challenged, surely borders on the scandalous.

I am not a parent myself, but I have a fair experience of just how vulnerable parents can be to these types of messages, and how they can over react. Let’s hope the next generation of toddlers are not the people who suffer.