In what surely must be seen as a triumph of hope over experience, the government's official obesity campaign is turning to cartoon capers in a move to persuade everyone – if they haven't realised already – that we should do more to get the kids to take up healthier eating and exercise.

In these harrowing financial times where almost everything else is being cut back, the Department of Health has decided it's worthwhile forking out £640,000 from its Change4Life kitty to sponsor The Simpsons. Gillian Merron, the public health minister, feels Homer and co provide a "popular and engaging way to get the message to real-life families about simple ways of improving their diet and activity for a healthier lifestyle".

What the Change4Life campaign and its supporters seem to overlook at times is that the complexity of obesity cannot be addressed by delivering media messages that pin the blame on the individual for failing to adopt a "healthy lifestyle", no matter how you try to flip the message into a positive one.

Obesity is symptomatic of some fundamental and structural changes in society that have gone on over many decades and have had a quite marked adverse impact. Inevitably it is easier to promulgate a "public health announcement" than to address those multiple causes of obesity, which were laid out in such remarkable detail by government scientists in their expansive Foresight report.

Anyone who has ever watched The Simpsons (and it seems it is assumed that we all do) will probably realise that The Simpsons is now what The Archers used to be – a medium in which not so subliminal messages on contemporary issues are often embedded for a mass audience. It's not a new idea. In fact when it comes to obesity Homer has been there and done that.

Back in the mid-90s one of most popular episodes of The Simpsons ever involved the hapless Homer gorging himself in order to become obese (that should be even more obese) in order to evade an obligatory employees' health and exercise campaign in the nuclear power plant where he worked, and to obtain a disability dispensation to work from home. Woven into the plot were stark messages – warnings from Marge and Lisa that he was seriously endangering his health. The "King-size Homer" was even shown succumbing to ill-health due to his weight, and being a victim of the all too familiar discrimination suffered by obese people.

There are no statistics to show how many viewers in the US were motivated to tackle their weight after watching the programme. In fact obesity rates have probably risen by 50% in the years since the programme first went out. So what is the take home message?

I well remember being addicted as a child to one of the most popular children's cartoons of all time. It contained frequent episodes of violence, depicted women – well, one in particular – as sex objects and rammed home a health message embedded in every episode. I don't think Popeye had any more success in promoting spinach sales than Homer achieved in the US in preventing obesity. But Homer's dumb expression will take on a new meaning from now on – DoH!