Are you re planning on passing out sugar-filled candies for Halloween tomorrow night?
If so, you should know that every time you hand out candies, you’re tricking kids into sugar overload.
Halloween isn’t just one night. It paves the way for bad eating habits year-round.
Read more about this in our opinion piece in today’s Newark Star-Ledger.
Halloween can be a harrowing time for both kids and their parents, because on this holiday and the days or even weeks that follow, kids will often face major blood sugar highs and lows after pigging out on dozens of sugar-laden candies.
In other words, they’ll be hurled into sugar shock.
Let’s face it, no matter what kind of limits their parents may try to place on their children’s candy consumption, youngsters will often overdose on sweets, even if they have to do it in secret.
Unfortunately, that’s what Halloween means these days. It’s a nationally sanctioned “Sugar Overload Day.”
So how can you help your young trick-or-treaters not get wiped out, cranky, depressed, headachy or charged up from having too many candies?
The way to soften the blood-sugar-bouncing whammy and lessen sugar shock is to make sure that your children eat a healthy meal before they cavort aroundthe neighborhood trick-or-treating for candies.
For instance, before they head for the streets, give your children:
Special thanks to Mike Adams and NewsTarget.com for this cartoon, which cleverly illustrates the dangers of trick-or-treating for candies on Halloween.
Consuming too much sugar can harm your kids in many ways, including causing them to gain weight, develop type 2 diabetes, and beven become more violent, according to a recent study in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Halloween is a spooky time and not because of goblins, ghosts or ghouls. Oct. 31 is downright frightening because it is a nationally accepted Sugar Overload Day.
Around Halloween, just about everyone “forgets” the truly scary facts: Kids have been growing more and more obese, even developing type 2 diabetes—conditions that researchers attribute to such unhealthy activities as over-consuming sweets and refined carbs and lack of exercise.
Despite the dangers to our children’s health, every Halloween, it’s accepted—even encouraged—to pass out gobs of sugar-filled candies that could harm the health of our neighbors’ kids.
But every time you give candies to youngsters who come knocking on your door to playfully trick-or-treat, you’re tricking them, not treating them.
Indeed, the average child easily wolfs down about 20 to 40 teaspoons of sugar and more than 500 calories on that one night alone. Then, for days or weeks afterwards, the typical kid is still pigging out on leftover candies.
Research at Harvard, Yale and other institutions have discovered that eating fewer sweets and skipping the soda and other sugary drinks could help children and adults alike lose weight and reduce their risks of getting type 2 diabetes.
This Halloween, I invite you to quit encouraging sugar gorging and instead to begin to take some steps to make Halloween more healthy. Here are 6 tips to create a healthier holiday.