'There is a growing amount of evidence," an all-party parliamentary group found this week, "that body image dissatisfaction is high and on the increase and is associated with a number of damaging consequences for health and wellbeing." The top lines of their report ran from the banal to the bizarre. "Wiping out dieting," they state, "could stop 70% of eating disorders."

Since all eating disorders could be characterised as very extreme, dangerous diets, then of course they'd be stopped if you "wiped out" diets. It's a statement of the bleeding obvious, on a preposterous premise. Not one of these MPs, nor anyone else, could wipe out dieting even in their own household, let alone the nation. "More than 95% of people on diets regain the weight they lose," the report continues, which I remember reading in a Judy annual in about 1986.

"Up to one in five cosmetic surgery patients could suffer from body dysmorphic disorder" – again, the definition is sloppy. Body dysmorphic disorder is the irrational hatred of your body. You could easily argue that everybody having cosmetic surgery for reasons other than physical comfort has body dysmorphic disorder, just because it's irrational to hate yourself so much that you'd ask anyone to slice into you. Or you could argue that hating yourself that much is a maladaptive but understandable response to the pressures of your cultural environment.

What you can't do is pluck a figure out of the air, "up to one in five", to give an arguable statement the ballast of statistics. "One in three men would sacrifice a year of life to achieve their ideal body." I don't think this is at all unreasonable: if you have an ideal body now – which under this weird, Mephistopheles meets Rosemary Conley pact, I imagine will be age-adjusted to be relatively perfect for the rest of your life – you'll probably have better health in your later years. Everybody would rather have 10 years of good health than 11 of poor health. Who would read this as a sign of problematic body dissatisfaction?

What I do find problematic is most of their solutions. First, they recommend "mandatory body-image and self-esteem lessons for children at primary and secondary schools". One thing the report curiously doesn't mention is the reason why five-year-olds are fixated with their weight: it is because of the high-risk, catastrophising way they're taught about nutrition. My son and his friends are constantly worrying about sugar, how it makes you fat, how you can find it even in places you don't expect: there is absolutely no nuance to their understanding of nutritional good and evil – in part because they're five, and in part because these are the demands of the curriculum. Presenting kids with these stark risk-scenarios about things they don't control gives them anxieties they're not old enough to process or evaluate. The suggestion of "self-esteem lessons" – let's teach you how to ignore all the anxiety we've just planted – is absurd. We should just stop transferring adult responsibilities to kids, stop flogging off their playing fields, and wait 10 years; see how that works out.

And then of course we move on to that grand culprit, the media – its "unrealistic" imagery, its airbrushing, its size zero models, its lack of authenticity. I'm not averse to bringing pressure to bear on magazines on matters of diversity – if, from the pages of a glossy, an alien might assume that beautiful people who were black or Asian didn't exist, then that is a false impression in which reality has been perverted by racism. However, it's quite a different thing to demand that their images authentically reflect what the average human looks like when the whole purpose of magazines is to present ideals.

Models may not set "realistic" standards: we stare at them because they're extraordinary. It is one of many galling parts of growing up to realise that not everybody will be beautiful. This is not to say that the media hasn't changed, and doesn't have an effect, but it is a much more complicated one than just holding up pictures of thin, beautiful people, with the effect that we all feel fat and ugly. The American journalist Lisa Bloom, in How to Stay Smart in a Dumbed Down World, essayed the idea of "mirroring" – that celebrities are narcissists, and we mirror both the practices (plastic surgery) and the impact (neurotic self-examination) of their narcissism.

But I'm not attacking celebrities – far from it, it is very hard to be scrutinised the way they are and not become narcissistic – so the more we scrutinise them, the more narcissistic they become, the more we mirror their narcissism, the less restraint we show in our scrutiny. It's an ever-decreasing circle, or what economist Paul Krugman would call a "death spiral", which won't be complete until absolutely everybody hates themselves. I'm not sure how you arrest it, but I can tell you for no money that it's not with a Dove campaign.

This body image question never goes beneath the surface – so, if children are worried, tell them not to be worried; don't ask why they started worrying or, indeed, if they have anything to worry about. If young women feel under pressure from magazines, reprimand the magazines – don't ask why this pressure is suddenly so unbearable, when physical perfection has always been the preserve of the few. It's all very cosmetic. If this report were a person, it would be worrying about its cellulite. It should be worrying more about its IQ.

Twitter: @zoesqwilliams