Indoctrination, Indoctrination, Indoctrination….

One in three parents say their children know more about healthy eating campaigns than they do, a poll shows.

And most told the Department of Health survey that rising food prices put five portions of fruit and vegetables a day out of their reach.

The survey of 1,000 parents in England also revealed three-quarters of them were unaware that frozen and canned varieties counted towards the total. Food experts said school campaigns were improving children's knowledge.

So far so good, though you wish they’d have as much success teaching kids to read and write. But this line in the article betrays a worrying attitude:

School campaigns mean that many children are aware of what they can and cannot eat, but the surveyed suggests that many parents are not.

One mother, Debbie Hussey, told the survey that she had to be told by her daughter to swap baked potato for broccoli to reach the target.

I didn’t realise that some food was verboten in Brown’s Britain, or that we’d swapped the natural order of parents telling their children what to eat!

Azmina Govindji, from the British Dietetic Association, said that getting children involved in shopping or cooking made them more likely to eat healthier food.

She added: "If healthy eating messages can get through to children, then they have a lot of power in the home, and can ask their parents for the kind of food they need to be eating."

Yup, more power in the home. That’s what children need!

I used to regularly ask for the kind of food I felt I should be eating too, when I was six. Funnily enough, the answer was always ‘Shut up and eat the vegetables on your plate, or go hungry…’