Dude, thank you for making all of those excellent points about "fat". I can't tell you the anger I felt when I saw a picture on the cover of my then ill 4th grade DD's periodical from school illustrating a healthy school lunch- fat-free milk, steamed vegetables and a baked chicken breast. There was almost no fat in that meal, not to mention complex carbs. Children are receiving many messages about food that can be frightening to a perfectionist who is always trying to be their best.
Yeah, I find that particularly outrageous. Children on the Atkins diet?
In our home we don't say "healthy food" or "junk food", but stress food variety and foods you should try to include daily.
We find it particularly useful to delineate between foods with poor nutritional value and those with high nutritional value. We do allow DD to have some junk food each day, but she knows this is limited, whereas her access to foods we define as healthy is not limited. So if she's asking for a snack after dinner, and she'd been to a birthday party earlier that day, when we tell her she's had enough junk food she knows that we're not going to make s'mores, but she can have all the yogurt with blueberries she wants.
Plus, when she was four, she drew a picture of an ice cream cone, a cupcake, and a candy bar, taped it to a yardstick like it was a flagpole, and marched through the living room chanting, "I love junk food, junk food is good for you..." So there's that.
