When your children are grown, much of their long-term health will depend on what they ate as kids, nutrition experts reported at the July 1999 National Conference on Advances in Pediatric Nutrition at Stanford University. This includes their risks of obesity, cancer and heart disease. Osteoporosis is another vivid example. During childhood we build our bones. Throughout the rest of life they gradually decrease in bulk. How brittle they eventually become depends largely on how much calcium we got as children and teens. Osteoporosis is really a childhood disease!