We cook chips about once a week - we get some potatoes, peel them, chop them, put them in sunflower oil and fry them. The kids love them, I love them and everybody eats them. You may disagree with my chip eating method of child rearing, but I have considered what I am doing and believe that it is a good thing.

When I was single and living my excellent bachelor life, I almost never ate chips. I think it was probably less than once a month and then, when I did, I always wished I was eating rice. But now I have young children, my chip eating has increased quite a bit.

As an adult, the eating of chips on a daily basis probably isn't a good idea. Adults don't need lots of saturated fat in their diet, they give us heart disease, make us fat, cause diabetes and generally make us die young. Unlike young children we have long digestive tracts which absorb fat very well and have a tendency to blockages, needing help to keep things moving - roughage as the old folks say, but to us more modern types - dietary fibre. We middle aged types, trying to keep our bodies healthy, need a low fat diet with a good mix of protein (and all the 21 essential amino acids that let us build them), unsaturated fat and fibre. Steady, boring, slow. Just like us.

Young children are somewhat different. Their dietary requirements are not the same as those of an adult. I'm now going to misuse and misquote some academic references to support this in the best traditions of science journalists who report this stuff:

Firstly, young children don't need loads of dietary fibre - about Age +5g per day is probably enough and too much isn't good for them (for Isis who is 4 - an apple, some potatoes/pasta and a bowl of cereal is easily enough - a slice of white bread contains almost 1g). Secondly, young children need quite a bit of fat in their diet - Human milk provides a fat-energy ratio (FER) of 50%. Most of the fat is provided as saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids and a relatively high cholesterol intake of 100–150 mg/d. - human milk is higher in fat than most other mammalian milk and lower in protein - it's saturated, cholesterol rich fat and not good for adults - but the World Health Organisation is recommending that children are breast fed as long as possible. Even after weaning, it takes quite a few years before their bodies are designed to have what might be considered a healthy adult, low fat, diet.

Children, even my eldest, aren't ready for an adult diet - read about lactase production if you want to see a stark contrast between how children are different from adults in this respect.

We are not the same - and as such, chips are the order of the day.

And if you think I would be better off giving them oven chips, ask yourself who told you these were healthier? Was it an advert for oven chips "McCcraps oven chips only contain 5% fat"?

In the 70s, before the invention of processed food, everybody, from the lowliest street sweeper, to the prime minister, ate fish and chips. Chips cooked in fat. Potatoes that had been peeled, chopped and fried there and then (or possibly peeled and chopped the night before, due to the invention of DryWhite but that's still less chemical processing than the modern alternatives). Did you see any fat people in the 1970s? Were people who regularly ate deep fried battered cod and chips obese? Until mass produced, processed food, almost nobody called the fire brigade to help them out of bed to use the toilet. The people who told you oven chips were better than making your own had only one motive - and it wasn't your good health. 5% Fat... what bollocks. They may be 5% fat by weight but they are pre fried in that fat and then sit around in it for weeks while the fat slowly saturates (even while deep frozen) and absorbs deep into the potato, binding with the other fats and proteins and doing who knows what*.

As I said: We cook chips about once a week - we get some potatoes, peel them, chop them, put them in sunflower oil and fry them.

And they are quicker to cook than oven chips too.

Burger chains pre-fry their chips (fries) and then freeze them, much like oven chips and then deep fry them again