Instead, they ate more snack foods, fried foods, fast food, sugar-sweetened beverages and foods containing trans-fats. To get children to eat healthier, parents need to play a more active role -- limiting TV watching and instilling healthful eating habits, Barr-Anderson said.

Too much time spent watching ads for fast food restaurants, snacks and other unhealthy food choices, University of Minnesota researchers say. The report was published in the online edition of the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. The team examined survey data on the number of hours the students watched TV each day and what they ate five years later as young adults. Barr-Anderson also speculates that eating while watching TV makes children more likely to consume the foods they see advertised. "Television watching impacts diet choices adolescents make five years later," said lead researcher Daheia Barr-Anderson, an assistant professor of kinesiology. Five years out, high-school students who had watched more than five hours of TV a day and were now young adults ate less fruit, vegetables, whole grains and calcium-rich foods.

For the study, Barr-Anderson and colleagues collected data on 564 middle school students and 1,366 high school students.