“You want to promote healthful nutrition and lifestyle from the start, rather than try to change it once it’s ingrained,” says Glenys Phillips, director of clinical nutrition at Children’s Medical Center of Dallas.

Parents can start teaching healthy habits as soon as infants are ready for solid food, such as beans, peas and carrots, in baby-food form. “When you move to table foods, offer those same foods — and don’t doctor them up with ketchup, butter, salt or cheese,” she says.

All is not lost if a preschooler or grade-schooler already has a taste for chicken nuggets and “won’t” eat a baked chicken breast as a result. Phillips advises parents to place healthful foods on a child’s plate during meal and snack times, and let the child decide how much of what is offered he wants to eat.

“Don’t force them to eat the food,” she adds. “Even if they don’t eat it right away, they’re curious and may eventually try it the third or fourth time it is offered.”

Resist the temptation to prepare separate meals for children. “Everyone eats the same, or they don’t eat,” says Phillips. “If your 6-year-old chooses not to eat his vegetables, and finds himself hungry 30 minutes after the meal, he doesn’t get a bowl of cereal to tide him over to the next planned meal.”

Parents also should look at their own diets. It’s not fair, for example, to tell children they need to eat vegetables while mom and dad chow down on a pizza.

Encouraging healthful habits means more than serving healthful foods — it means healthful lifestyle changes as well. Phillips recommends all meals, including snacks, be eaten at the table, with the television and computer turned off. The TV and computer time should be limited to a maximum of one to two hours per day. Planning for less TV and computer time encourages a less sedentary lifestyle.

Phillips acknowledges that parents have little influence over a teenager’s eating habits. “But if you bring them up in a home where they are offered the healthy foods and they have an active lifestyle modeled to them, the habits are likely to stay with them when they leave the home,” she says.