Halloween is almost here, and with that comes an overload of candy. While we still want our children to enjoy this holiday, the gluttony of candy is nearly inevitable. Do you ever wonder what a candy binge eating can do to your child? Here is what our resident dietician Teresa Anderson, CDE has to say.
“Certainly eating handfuls of Halloween candy for three days straight is really not something I’m happy with, but if your kids are healthy it’s not my biggest concern. They are probably going to be fine the one time. Let’s face it – we all did this when we were six and most of us turned out just fine. The larger concern is the precedent you might set by letting your kids gorge through a large bag-full of candy and making candy/food the objective of the holiday. Really, it’s not. Socio-cultural binge eating can create an emotional attachment with holidays that can continue on into adulthood. I have some patients who believe the holidays begin on Halloween and don’t stop until the Superbowl. For this reason, parents should be cautious about what habits are acceptable with children and encourage a healthy relationship with food – food is nourishment. Other moods, e.g. being sad, angry or anxious, need to be dealt with in healthy, non-food appropriate ways.”
Luckily, there are some things you can do as parents to help stave off both the sugar spike and the binge eating:
Feed your kids before trick-or-treating. It’s the same concept as not going to the grocery store hungry — if you do, you’ll have a higher chance of buying more food than you need. If the kids are well fed before going out on Halloween night, they will be less likely to want to binge on all that candy when they get home.
Use a smaller container for collecting candy. Using a king-sized pillow case to go trick-or-treating seems like a great, economical way to collect candy, but in reality, the bigger it is, the more candy they’ll get. Instead, use a smaller container that will not hold as much, so that when it’s full, you are not up to your eyeballs in Milk Duds and M&Ms.
Supervise their route and give them a time or distance limit. Teach your kids that it’s not a marathon to see how much candy they can collect. This helps them learn to set limits and enjoy the activity and not just the prize. Halloween etiquette suggests visiting homes in your near neighborhood, or your grandparents’ neighborhood – where people know you, instead of hitting ‘where the good stuff is’. Adults generally want to see the costumes of kids they know, not kids from miles away.
Provide some entertainment at home. If you really want to keep trick-or-treating to a short timeline, you can get an age-appropriate Halloween movie for your kids and their friends to look forward to watching when they come home. This way, the kids who are ready to go from 6pm to 9pm may only go until 7:30 - 8:00pm and come home to watch the movie instead.
Put the candy away. Most parents know it’s best to keep the candy out of reach of the kids when you don’t want them to be eating it, but it’s also a good idea to keep it out of your reach as well. The harder it is to access, the easier it will be to resist the temptation to eat it.
Provide healthy snacks in easy-to-reach places. This is a good trick to learn for the whole year. We all eat Halloween candy mindlessly because it’s readily available. If there were healthy snacks that were just as easy to access — say, for example, peanut butter and apples, cheese and crackers or mixed nuts — there would be less temptation to overindulge on unhealthy sweets.
Set an expiration date. Give yourself a “get rid of by” date for all Halloween candy, and follow through on that. This will help prevent you and your kids from snacking on it long after the holiday has passed. Be careful about telling your kids about an expiration date though; you don’t want to incentivize them to just to fill up while they can.
Halloween is a lot of fun for those who get into it, but the fun doesn’t have to be associated only with mindless eating of sweets. There are plenty of fun things you can do that do not run the risk of starting bad habits too young. Have lots of fun, tell ghost stories, visit a haunted house, watch a spooky movie and while you are at it, eat some fun treats -- it’s Halloween for goodness sake!