Q: I'm trying to get my girls to develop healthy eating habits, but one of them has a very strong sweet tooth and, I suspect, a genetic tendency toward a calorie-storing body type).

A: First, devour the Yummm! section of this website.

Second, check out Dr. Joel Fuhrman's excellent book, Disease-Proof Your Child, which will give you the scientific information and motivation you need to guide your daughters in a healthy direction.

And now, a couple of reframes:

Sweet Tooth Good

1. We are all predisposed to have a sweet tooth. It's how humans survived for hundreds of thousands of years. Sweet means more calories, and in our ancestral environment, calories were often in short supply. The urge to gorge on a honeycomb, and the ability to distinguish between ripe and not-quite-ripe fruit, often meant the difference between survival and starvation. Today, our sweet tooth translates into trouble in a world of chemical concoctions and very little real food.

But please don't see a sweet tooth as anything other than a sign of health. Many of the FitFam.com recipes for children target the

sweet tooth in healthy ways - fruit smoothies, whole-foods cookies, etc.

Slow Metabolism Good

2. Similar the to the first reframe, a genetic predisposition to calorie storing is a good thing. Only in this crazy environment of pop-tarts and white pasta and trans-fats and soda has our ability to efficiently turn the sun's energy into our own energy reserves become a problem.

Be a Prius

Try this metaphor: think of your daughter as a car who has been engineered to get a high MPG. What does that mean? It means she doesn't need to fill up as often as the cars that rev and run faster and less efficiently. It means that she'll run longer, with a smaller environmental footprint, and that her engine will last longer because it's more efficient and isn't racking up the RPM.

If your daughter, like most of us, has been brought up eating nutrient-barren foods that add calories but few other nutrients, then she's overeating partly out of nutrient-starvation. Like eating a 2-pound bag of M&Ms looking for some fiber. We just ain't gonna find it, and as some sage said, "We can never have enough of what we don't need."

Most of us are addicted to nutritionally empty, body-compromising non-foods, so it takes some motivation and knowledge and family support to break that addiction and get us back to where all other animals are - eating what naturally pleases us out of the universe of real foods.