Food has become a social issue. Developing a healthy relationship with food is a complex process as it implies a behaviour change. At first sight, recent advances in recommender system domain ensure personalised service and assistance of a user in decision-making process. However, traditional recommender systems lack the consideration of health-related factors (e.g., healthy diet guidelines, food allergies, etc.). Moreover, instead of recommending a new item (recipe), an effective system should apply persuasion strategies to accompany a user in a long process, a little step at a time. Furthermore, most of existing recommender models do not take privacy preservation into account. In this position paper, we outline the challenges faced by a persuasive system for promoting eating habits and discuss our vision on the implementation of adaptive and privacy-aware persuasive strategies for healthy food promotion.