Never too early to watch what you eat

As if the threat of zits, bad body image and hip-huggers weren't enough to encourage a girl to watch her diet, here's a report indicating that a low-fat diet for pre-teens may offer some protection against breast cancer in later years. The research is pretty speculative, based on the assumption that it would be good to lower blood levels in puberty of hormones that have been linked to breast cancer in adults. And as incentives go, telling your daughter that "if you eat that potato chip now, in twenty or thirty years you might be very, very sick" is pretty weak. But maybe it'll give us moms more rationale to push healthier diets. And eat all the snack food and chocolate before they can get to it.