One of my favourite contacts is Dr Vash Mungal-Singh, a haematologist who is CEO of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of SA. She is a thoughtful, caring doctor, one who sees medicine as a calling, not a profit-making machine. She emailed me yesterday about a bee in her bonnet: retailers who target children at point of sale queues and till points with junk food.

Dr Vash, as she is affectionately known, has put together an open letter to retailers asking them, as she diplomatically puts it, “to take cognisance of the dangers of this practice and find possible solutions”.

She speaks of the familiar refrain of children begging their parents in supermarket and food store queues for dangerous items.

“We’re not talking about drugs.  We’re not talking about alcohol,” Dr Vash writes.

“We are talking about a more insidious danger – sweets and chocolates crammed along the aisles leading up to till points in the majority of South African retail outlets.  Seems harmless?  It’s not.”

Dr Vash says a colleague calls these aisles “suicide gorges’’, and every  parent  she  knows hates being caught in one of them  when they are with their children.

“Our children’s health is, or at least should be, of national concern.  Childhood obesity is a growing (excuse the pun) problem, not only in SA, but worldwide,” she writes in the open letter.

In SA, she says, almost 20% of our children are overweight and 5% are already obese. Obesity, in turn, can contribute to heart, stroke and blood vessel diseases in later life.

Of course parents can simply refuse to buy sweets, chocolates, crisps and other junk food items that retailers deliberately place in the aisles leading up to till points, she says. But many find the constant demands too much to bear and succumb more often than they should.

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She poses the moral question: “Can retailers simply shirk their responsibility to act fairly?”

She thinks not.

Retailers are entitled to make their displays as appealing as possible, and  to try and maximise sales and profits. When they target children with harmful goods, that’s a whole different ballgame.

One of the dangers of our fast-paced society is that grabbing a quick snack on the run usually means sacrificing nutritional value, says Dr Vash.  By making low-fat, low-sugar, and healthier snacks available to consumers, retailers could help to reverse this trend.

“Vegetable sticks, raw nuts, dried fruit and whole wheat biscuits are all healthy alternatives and while some retailers do offer these items in the till-point aisles, their worthy efforts are undermined by the chocolate and crisps most often placed alongside them.”

The  WHO is actively recommending the control of food marketing to children, Dr Vash says.  So is another global coalition, The Global NCD (non-communicable diseases) Alliance. It was created to motivate the UN Assembly to address the growing problem of NCDs, an estimated 80% of which are as a result of lifestyle and therefore preventable. Dr Vash gives an excerpt from an alliance document looking at the need to “…eliminate all forms of marketing, particularly those aimed at children, for foods high in saturated fats, trans-fats, salt and refined sugars…”

She challenges   retailers to buck the trend of profit at the cost of our children’s health, and place only healthy alternatives in the till-point aisles.

All comments received from retailers will be published on the foundation’s website  and any retailer taking up the challenge will be acknowledged on the site, she says.

I hope she isn’t disappointed.