One of the most interesting nuggets in the "critique" of our current health policy chaos by Royal College of General Practitioners president, Professor Steve Field, was his praise for Food Dudes. This is a scheme that shows you can get young children to eat and enjoy fruit and veg – if you use similar marketing techniques to those that major brands use to peddle junk food.

Several years ago, I showed a video of this scheme to an audience of food advertising industry marketeers and they paled. Until then the industry had almost a monopoly of the use of ethics-free food psychologists' tricks to lure children into making the "wrong choices". It doesn't take much to convince an impressionable child that they "need" sweets, or sugary cereals, or fizzy drinks. But as the World Health Organisation (WHO) recently recognised in adopting a global health ministers' resolution on marketing to children, the food and beverage industries have cynically preyed upon children's vulnerability for generations.

What began as an experiment by psychologist Professor Fergus Lowe at Bangor University won the WHO best-practice award in 2006 – a success story begging to be put into action as we agonise over childhood obesity.

Strangely, it is only in Ireland that children have benefited from an extensive roll out of the Food Dudes programme. Even though Food Dudes received a gold medal in public health awards made by the then Department of Health chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, this was only for the scheme adopted by Wolverhampton City primary care trust, which aims to see 20,000 children in 91 schools take part in the programme over three years.

Across the whole of England, only 2,500 children in 11 schools benefit from what are still termed pilot schemes. Yet California and Sicily have taken up the Food Dudes scheme, which won the accolade "exemplar case study for health behaviour change" by the National Social Marketing Centre in London.

Ironic then that Professor Field should be tempted to wag, if not point, his finger at blameworthy parents, when Food Dudes, with its well-recognised potential contribution to support our "Change4Life" has had such half-hearted support from government and little support from the food industry (with the honourable exception of Unilever and the fruit growers themselves). Much of his critique is well made, but probably goes right over the heads of the parents, politicians and even the Department of Health bureaucrats who have now been forced to hand control of the nation's dietary health campaign to the makers of crisps, pop and chocolate.

Parents do need to take responsibility, but this should start even before conception, says Professor Field, who notes that obesity in pregnancy is a worrying trend. For many years world leaders in research at Southampton University have proclaimed the critical role of pregnancy in conditioning an infant's life-long predisposition to obesity and its metabolic consequences, particularly cardiovascular disease. They even coined the term "foetal programming", which should be on the national curriculum to be drilled into every pubertal school child – most of whom sadly are already programmed. Can they help to "de-programme" the next generation?

The ultimate challenge that Professor Field did not quite articulate is that GPs themselves (and perhaps health ministers) need to catch up on their reading. They need to achieve a better understanding of some of the advances in scientific knowledge, particularly surrounding obesity, that sweep aside many of the ill-informed suppositions and prejudices that seem to form the basis for a new "homespun" public health philosophy, rather than evidence-based policy.

Given the evidence that marketing junk food is, at the very least, not helping to overcome our childhood obesity problem, and given the recognition that the Food Dudes approach offers, at the very least, a chance to wean small children onto healthier diets, then every responsible parent, GP and MP should be demanding to know why the Food Dudes scheme is not in every classroom now alongside the (thankfully retained) daily milk.

• This article was amended on 10 August 2010. The original referred to the National Social Marketing Research Centre. This has been corrected.