Did you know that Easter is the second biggest candy-eating day of the year for Americans?
We (certainly not I) consumed a whopping 7 billion pounds of candy in 2001, according to the National Confectioner’s Association. Yikes!
It’s very sad to me to think about how most Americans consider it politically correct to show love by giving all this blood-sugar-bouncing candy!
Just check out these alarming facts, which you can find on InfoPlease.com:
- Americans spent nearly $1.9 billion on Easter candy in 2000, just shy of Halloween’s sales of nearly $2 billion. Christmas brought in an estimated $1.4 billion, and Valentine’s Day forked in more than $1 billion.
Here’s another couple of quirky fact that won’t make you hop with glee:
- A total of 90 million chocolate Easter bunnies are produced each year.
Now for an absurd fact that makes you wonder — don’t these survey makers have anything else better to do?
- 76% of Americans think you should first eat the ears of the chocolate bunnies. On the other hand, 5% stood behind the idea of munching on feet first. And 4% said to go for the tail first.
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Each Easter, millions of Americans buy 700 million of the empty-calorie, sugar-laden, nutrient-lacking Marshmallow Peeps®. (shaped like chicks, bunnies and eggs).
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Americans gobble 16 billion jellybeans at Easter. If you lined Easter jellybeans end to end, they’d circle the globe nearly three times.
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Some supermarkets have doubled the space allotted to Easter candy in the past few years as the market has increased.
And we wonder why our nation is facing an obesity epidemic?
All this Easter talk makes me recall the days — when in the depth of my sugar addiction — I used to clamor after pastel-colored, chocolate malted milk balls. Oh goodness did I overdose on them, I’m saddened to remember! (All these Easter candies may have contributed to my getting hypoglycemia.)
Thank goodness this fact sheet contains some non-sugary ideas (tucked at the end of the stat sheet). For instance, it says, “some experts suggest adding non-edible items to Easter baskets: crayons, movie passes, jump rope, baseball cards, kids’ videos, stencils, markers, paperback books, chalk, Playdoh, stuffed animals or balls.”
Hey, why can’t Easter baskets contain only healthy edibles?
Thanks to Myra, my incredibly hard-working, assistant moderator for my free, online KickSugar support group for bringing these Easter candy facts to my attention. We’d love to have you join us there if your candy habit is getting the better of you.