The dietary choices of parents may not have a significant influence on children's eating habits, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Their challenge to the age-old belief is based on an examination of dietary intakes and patterns among U.S. families, which found that the resemblance between children's and their parents' eating habits was weak.

"Child-parent dietary resemblance in the U.S. is relatively weak, and varies by nutrients and food groups and by the types of parent-child dyads and social demographic characteristics such as age, gender and family income," said Dr. Youfa Wang, senior author of the study and associate professor with the Bloomberg School's Center for Human Nutrition.

"When looking at overall diet quality, parent-child correlation in healthy eating index score was similar for both younger and older children. To our knowledge, this is the first such study that examined the similarities between children's and their parents' dietary intakes in the United States based on nationally representative data.

Our findings indicate that factors other than family and parental eating behaviors may play an important role in affecting American children's dietary intakes," Dr. Wang added.

The research team examined data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals, a nationally representative multi-stage sample of 16,103 people containing information about dietary intake, socio-economic, demographic and health parameters surveyed from 1994 to 1996.