Parents, take heart: You can teach your child to eat healthier. A study of preadolescent children found that those who attended a behaviorally oriented nutrition education program and were taught to follow a diet low in saturated fat and dietary cholesterol adopted significantly better dietary habits over several years compared to their peers who received only general nutritional information.

The study showed that after three years, children in the intervention group consumed more than 67 percent of their total calories on average from heart-healthy foods, compared to less than 57 percent for children in the usual care group.

The results, published in the June issue of "Pediatrics", are from a new ancillary study of the Dietary Intervention Study in Children (DISC). Scientists reviewed dietary recalls from 595 children who were ages 8 to 10 and who had high blood cholesterol levels at the start of the study. The researchers analyzed dietary information by food groups and measured adherence to recommended food patterns and changes over time.

"These new findings offer valuable lessons for finding effective ways to help children develop healthier eating habits -- a critical need in light of the rising rates of obesity and related conditions among children," said Elizabeth G. Nabel, MD, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), which sponsored the study. NHLBI is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The study provides glimpses of real-world eating behavior and reveals the challenges of trying to eat a healthy diet in a fast-paced world. For example, the study documents a long-suspected phenomenon of modern society: approximately one-third of the total daily calories consumed by the children in both groups came from snack foods, desserts, and pizza.

The main DISC trial is the first long-term clinical trial of the effects of a fat-reduced dietary intervention on growing children. Over the seven years of the original study, children who adopted a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet decreased their intake of total fat, saturated fat and cholesterol within the first year of the study and maintained lower levels for several more years. Those selected for the intervention group participated in a nutrition education program which included a behavioral component to promote healthier eating. Parents of the children in the intervention group participated in a similar program. Researchers previously reported that the dietary changes made by children in the intervention group did not adversely affect the children's nutritional status, growth, or development.

In the latest analysis, researchers analyzed the dietary recalls collected over three days at the beginning of the study and again after three years. They found that the dairy food group and the desserts/snacks/pizza group had the greatest impact on the children's body mass index (BMI) and their levels of LDL, or "bad," cholesterol. Girls and boys who consumed more dairy products were more likely to have a lower BMI. In addition, boys who consumed more desserts, snacks, and pizza were more likely to have higher BMI and LDL levels. Specific foods within each food group were also classified based on the ingredients or preparation methods as either "Whoa" foods -- those that were high in saturated fat and dietary cholesterol -- or heart-healthy "Go" foods -- those that were low in saturated fat and dietary cholesterol.