With snow blanketing most of Germany and blizzards forecast in a day or two, a nutritionist assured worried parents Thursday that it was safe for children to eat clean snow, DPA reported.
"It won't hurt them if they just taste a little bit," said Silke Willms, a nutritionist employed by the DAK health-insurance company in Hamburg. As a form of distilled water, snow can drain minerals from the body, but these are soon replaced by eating other food.
She said children should not eat roadside slush contaminated with dog urine or the salt used to melt the snow lying on roads.
Rock salt quarries were meanwhile working 24 hours a day to meet enormous demand for the salt, which is being spread on main highways.
One German town, Oberhausen, said it had run out of salt, but the sanitation department in the German capital Berlin said it had plenty of salt reserves to cope with the heavy falls and high winds forecast in Germany this Saturday and Sunday.
Berlin department store Galeria Kaufhof said it had sold right out of children's sleds and was running short of fleece-lined shoes as residents of the capital rush to buy snow-season footwear.