OUR grandson loved his new cereal. 'Meowbix' he called it, because it had what looked to him like a cat on the packet. It was actually a koala bear, but never mind. The cereal advertised itself as being good for you and good for the planet, so his health-conscious parents had bought it as a change from the daily Weetabix.

It was only when they poured it into his bowl that they realised their son was about to eat what looked remarkably like that chocolate-flavoured rice cereal mass-produced by one of the leading brand names. The one they never bought because it was full of sugar and lacking in goodness.

It's tough for parents who want to give their children the healthiest possible food.

'Check the labels for salt and sugar,' advised my daughter-in-law, whenever I set out to stock up on foods for the baby during the six months that I was caring for him. So I'd wander round the supermarket with my glasses on the end of my nose peering at microscopic lists of ingredients.

When our children were small, you either fed them mashed-up versions of adult foods or something out of a jar, just as modern parents do. I used to feel a bit guilty about resorting to jars, but they were convenient at busy times and you just assumed that anyone supplying baby foods would only put in healthy stuff. I suppose we were naive. We were certainly wrong. By the time our two had moved on to normal food, newspapers and consumer programmes were full of exposes about the excessive salt and sugar content of jars of baby foods.

Nowadays, though suspicious mothers check every label, it would be hard to find a baby food with salt added, or even sugar. It's when they get older that the trouble really begins. You can control what he eats at home, but not what he discovers outside it.

Once, when Jonah was in our care, a shopkeeper gave him a lollipop. He'd never seen one before and had no idea what to do with it. He didn't even know you had to take the wrapper off it. But the moment it went into his mouth he was hooked. He sucked at it all the way home and refused to be parted from it, even when it came to dinner time. We were in charge of him that day and dreaded to think what his parents would say if they came home and found all he'd had to eat was a tooth-rotting lollipop.

In the end, we got it off him by assuring him he could have it back later, then quickly distracting him with a toy. By the time he'd had his dinner he seemed to have forgotten all about it.

But that won't always work. And in this world where children are endlessly bombarded with invitations to eat the most rubbishy of foods it's impossible to keep them always on the straight and narrow. Go into any cafe and you find the 'children's menu' is nearly always something with chips, like sausages or burgers; the nearest you get to healthy food is a spoonful of baked beans.

There are exceptions, like the cafe at London Zoo, which must be the most child-centred on earth. Wherever we looked, people were heaving high chairs over the heads of fellow customers or steering push chairs among the crowded tables.

All right, they did serve pizza and burgers, if that was what you really wanted, but they had healthy food too and they'd done their best to make it appeal to children. The salad counter was labelled, 'Wild Greens'. I'm not sure that would fool the most green-hating infant, but at least they'd tried. Our grandson - still too young to read menus - happily tucked into cauliflower cheese and mashed potato with leeks. We felt rather pleased with ourselves. Then Grandad - who's always had mixed feelings about healthy eating - went to get himself a piece of raspberry cheesecake. He carried it to the table. Jonah's eyes lit up. "Where's my spoon?" he demanded. Oh well - we tried!

In fact by chance, his parents hit on the very best way to get him to eat the healthy foods that were put before him. They decided to go on one of these detox diets. A whole month with no dairy foods, no meat, no alcohol, no coffee, no wheat-based cereals; just fruit juice, vegetables, beans and lentils.

But you can't put a toddler on such meagre fare. His mum continued to serve him the food she lovingly prepared - lamb casserole, cottage pie, pasta with tomato sauce. And then she and his dad would sit and hungrily watch as he ate up every scrap of the tempting forbidden food.

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