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Does moving treats away from supermarket tills help you make better snack choices?

A new study by the University of Southampton says that customers do choose healthier foods if sweets and snacks are removed from checkouts and the ends of aisles.

The university teamed up with supermarket chain Iceland to experiment with different layouts. For example placing fruit and vegetables near store entrances.

The results of the research, published in the PLOS Medicine journal, showed that after they did this, the amount of sweets and chocolate people bought went down while sales of fruit and vegetables went up.

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Over the past 10 years this is an idea that has been talked about a lot. There have been other similar studies in the past, but this one has gone further.

Previous studies for example, only looked at the impact in a single location or by placing healthy and unhealthy products together.

The reason is that many snacks picked up at the checkout may be unplanned, impulse buys.

Supermarkets have also been accused of using "pester power" to sell food high in fat, salt or sugar by putting crisps, sweets and chocolates at the checkout for young children to see and then want.

Back into 2014, Tesco announced plans to ban sweets and chocolate from the checkouts at its stores. Although other supermarkets took a more gradual approach, allowing sales of sweets to continue in smaller stores, many have now taken steps to offer a wider range of non-food products at checkouts.

The new study is aimed at reducing the amount that customers come into contact with high calorie products by placing non-food items at checkouts and at the ends of aisles.

The plan was to measure the effects on store sales, customer loyalty card purchasing patterns, and the diets of more than one household member.

Expert in public health nutrition Dr Christina Vogel said that altering the layouts of supermarkets could "help people make healthier food choices and shift population diet towards the Government's dietary recommendations".

She added: "The findings of our study suggest that a healthier store layout could lead to nearly 10,000 extra portions of fruit and vegetables and approximately 1,500 fewer portions of confectionery being sold on a weekly basis in each store."

Janis Baird, professor of public health at the university also thinks the results back the UK Government's plan to ban unhealthy foods being places in obvious places in shops and show that it "could be beneficial for population diet".

The government has introduced a number of measures in recent years to try and reduce the amount of unhealthy food people, especially children, eat.

An extra payment often known as the sugar tax, was introduced by the government back in April 2018, which requires soft drinks manufacturers to pay a fee to the government for all soft drinks they produce which contain more than five grams of sugar per 100 millilitres.