You can lead some folk to the salad bar, but you can’t force them to graze.

OK, that’s a topsy-turvy mangling of a well-known saying, but it serves its purpose.

Salad should have been upper most in the mind this week as we learnt that some 13,000 people in Hampshire are meeting an untimely end each year, in some cases through shunning the stuff. Or if not salad, then eating too much of what damages their bodies and not enough of the food that leads to longer lives.

In fact, the cottage cheese dodgers are in bad company it seems with the smokers, the boozers and the sofa-lovers.

Bad diet was just one of the ills, according to a government report into the worst areas in the country for four killer diseases – diseases that could in many cases be prevented: cancer, heart disease and strokes, lung disease and liver disease.

Southampton and Portsmouth were themselves in bad company, scoring highly – or poorly – on the scale of worst areas in the country for avoidable premature deaths. The remainder of Hampshire faired a lot better, but there were still causes for concern.

It’s poverty, of course, came the almost knee-jerk response to the question of why Southampton is there with the likes of Liverpool and Manchester. Which is true, but that doesn’t always mean the a lack of cash to buy decent food, join sports centres and dieting clubs and splash out on fancy electronic ciggies to help kick the habit is the problem. Junk food often costs more than meals cooked fresh at home – although energy poverty comes into play – and jogging around the streets costs nothing. The ability to cut back on drinking and smoking and pump the cash into a healthier lifestyle would seem to counter the argument that it is just a low income that causes these diseases to flourish.

Then there is the issue of education poverty. Growing up where the message of healthy living is preached in schools from an early age would teach the dangers of avoiding healthy choices to receptive minds. But this is already the case. I doubt if there is a school child in Southampton who doesn’t learn that apples are better than cheesy fries in Year One. Is it all down to parental influence then? Are we saying that it is what takes place in the family home that sets each generation on the road to an early grave? Perhaps. Denuded of other arguments it would seem to be the most likely, the most obvious explanation.

What is needed then is a campaign to get the message across to more people that grease is bad, exercise is good and salad saves lives. Surely it is because people don’t understand that too much boozing destroys livers and smokers rarely enjoy a long retirement.

And indeed, that is just what the government is doing, again. It’s what this paper is doing, with the launch today of our Staying Alive campaign. It is just what everyone – local authorities, health services, charities, - have been doing for decades. And while we won’t give up – nor should – you have to ask yourself if there is anyone alive in Britain today that hasn’t got the message: that good health can be a personal choice.

So I’m forced to ask, what’s the point? How many times can you tell someone that if they smoke they will most likely die, before you wave your hands in the air and decided that all the money being spent on endless anti-smoking, anti-drugs, anti-booze, pro-exercise and healthy eating campaigns would be better spent helping those who are ill through no lifestyle choice of their own?

Or put another way, why should a child born with a disease or ailment or disability have to suffer in this rich country when funds that could ease their pain are frittered away on those who have munched their way through too many fitters?

But to make such a plan work then certainly there would need to be changes at the end of the cycle. The NHS would have to decide whether it is there to help everyone no matter how large a part they played in creating their own health problems. Turn away the obese? Deny treatment to couch-huggers? Shut the door on boozers? It makes sense – a tough nanny approach to health education: live healthy lives or pay for your care. It won’t happen of course. We will go on spending vast amounts asking people, politely, to make the right choices while spending substantially more of our national wealth coping with the consequences when they do the opposite.

In the end such an approach betrays everyone. Those who are allowed the freedom to make the wrong choices ruin their lives. Those who truly have no choice over poor health suffer from diminished care.

It is a mad world that must leave those aliens watching us from outer space shaking their green heads.