The fact that millions of children every year can learn to like chilli offers hope to us all; that our next bite can be different from the first.

If you want your children to eat better, don’t tell them what to do; eat better yourself.

Most of our approaches to feeding children are too short term. We worry about the next five minutes when we should worry about the next five years.

Of all the foods that we could give a child a free rein over, cereal makes the least sense. Parents let children choose cereal but dictate which vegetables they eat; it should be the other way around.

It is possible for children to learn and improve their eating skills in ways that will automatically lead them to a healthier diet.

The way we reward children with food is based on folk memories of a food supply that has not existed in the West for decades, when white sugar was so rare it seemed to sparkle like snow.

Contrary to the impression given by the health pages of newspapers, the greatest single nutritional shortfall in our diets right now is not our failure to eat enough ‘superfoods’, whatever those might be. It is the iron deficiency of girls.

Up until the age of three, children have a remarkable ability to stop eating when they are full.

Parents and children resemble each other no more in the foods they like than couples do, suggesting that nurture - who you eat with - is more powerful than nature in determining our food habits. Whatever our innate dispositions, our experience with food can override them.