Look, I’ll just be honest with you: I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around a new research study.

A new study published in Social Science & Medicine says that parents who are trying to eat healthily as good role models may as well pack it in.

That’s my interpretation, anyway. To be more precise, the study looked at 2,291 parents (aged 20 to 65) and 2,692 children (aged 2 to 18) in the U.S., and found little similarities between their diets.

Well, they found that children’s diets were slightly more likely to resemble their mother’s.

In other words: your kids are less likely to follow your example, and more likely to follow the example set by “community and school, food environment, peer influence (and) television viewing,” says May A. Beydoun, a co-author of the study. Other factors include self-image and self-esteem, she adds.

Part of this isn’t a surprise: haven’t children (and some adults) always been influenced by these things? Even at the small Catholic school I attended as a child, enough students wastefully threw out uneaten food and we were encouraged to leave what we didn’t want on a back table in the gymnasium-come-cafeteria.At the end of every lunch period, the table would be cluttered with bags of celery sticks and apple slices, all set to be donated to some worthy charity—or whoever wanted to eat celery sticks and apple slices for lunch, like me, ahem. Maybe if I had eaten more cookies I would have been more popular? Are even snacks not immune to classroom-dictated coolness?

Back to the study. Does this mean you should abandon healthy eating since your kid is just going to eat a bunch of junk anyway?

I say: no. This is why.

• You need to be healthy for your own sake.

• There are important reasons to model healthy eating. At last year’s The Obesity Society’s Annual Meeting, findings were presented that said children ate more food when larger portions were given to them.

• Setting good eating habits can also mean better social bonding time, which has positive results. Children who eat dinner with their families are more likely to get better grades in school and are at 70 percent lower risk for substance abuse, according to the The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.

• Your example can teach children to think about food differently. Last year, celebrated chef Alice Waters spoke to the New York Times about the importance of showing children that food should be meaningful, connected to nature. She also mentioned that children who grew their own food were more likely to eat it—even kale and chard.

And remember—If you keep only good food choices in the house, that is what your children will eat by default, since there isn’t anything else!