If you blame your dad for passing onto you a love of takeaway food, you’re not alone. If you’re a dad, your eating habits may be influencing your children more than you think.

Research has found children as young as 20 months old already share dietary associations with their fathers, eating sugary snacks, takeaway foods and sugar-sweetened drinks based on their dad’s intake.

In this epsiode we discuss the research by Adam Walsh, lecturer in nutrition and dietetics at Deakin University, which indicates that fathers have little understanding of the ways their behaviours can impact their children’s dietary choices in their formative years.

Adam is an accredited practising dietitian, graduating from the Master of Nutrition and Dietetics at Sydney University in 2000. Adam commenced his dietetic career at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne where he worked for seven years before moving to academia. Currently Adam is a lecturer at Deakin University where he has taught undergraduate nutrition and post-graduate dietetics for the last 10 years. Adam is completing his PhD into the influence of fathers of the diets and physical activity behaviours of young children. In his spare time, Adam tries to cook and keep fit while chasing after his two sons.

For more information on Adam's research go here: Deakin Research - Adam Walsh