WE’VE ALL BEEN there, you’ve managed to get through your shop picking relatively healthy options.

You look with pride at your trolley stuffed with fruit, veg and salad and then you wait at the checkout …and find yourself slipping all sorts of goodies in your once-wholesome stash.

Well, Lidl customers in the UK will no longer have the seducing sweets laid out in front of them at the checkout.

The supermarket chain has announced it will ban sweets at the counters and replace them with healthy snacks.

According to the supermarket’s figures published in the Huffington Post:

52 per cent of parents found it hard to get their children to eat healthily due to the amount of snacks at supermarket checkouts, with most of them (68 per cent) pestered by their children for chocolates at checkout.

Lidl has 130 stores in Ireland and there have been calls for them to bring in the same system here.

Fine Gael Dublin Senator, Catherine Noone, has not only called for Lidl to bring in the ban but she’s calling on all supermarkets to take a stand.

I would call on other supermarket chains to follow this lead and consider doing the same. Self-regulation could go a long way in this field and, with one in four schoolchildren now classified as overweight or obese, it’s clear that this is a problem that we cannot ignore.

We’ve asked Lidl for a comment on whether the ban will be coming into Irish stores but they haven’t got back to us at this stage. So your treats are safe for now…but your New Year’s resolutions are not!

Have your say in the comments box below. Do we need the sweets to be put away or should we be able to decide for ourselves if we want a sweet snack?

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