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.

Girls eat better when food stops being something forbidden.

Boys eat better when their parents continue to expect them to eat vegetables and include them in home-cooked meals as they get older. Or - better still - get them to prepare the home-cooked meals themselves.

Japan has somehow managed to achieve the ideal attitude to eating: an obsession with culinary pleasure that is actually conductive to health.

Part of eating well is making friends with hunger.

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.

The first step in recovering from an eating disorder is recognising that there is a problem.

Structured meals, at which a wide range of foods is offered in a firm but loving way, are a key part of the cure for any eating disorder.

For people with eating disorders, food is both a poison and the remedy, but this is true for the rest of us as well. Food is an inescapable fact of life and the task for each of us is to find a way to make out peace with it.