How to Keep Halloween Healthy

No other holiday seems to embrace sweets and sugars quite the way Halloween does. It may be tough to find a child who doesn’t love to dress up and parade around the block collecting candy from neighbors, but for parents who work hard to make sure their children live a healthy lifestyle throughout the year, this blip on the holiday radar can really throw a wrench in an otherwise well-intentioned plan.

So what can you do this spooky season to keep the mother lode from taking a sugary toll on your family? Embrace two simple trick-or-treat tips—lead by example and manage the at-home stash—to keep your Halloween a relatively healthy one.

Lead by Example

If you don’t want your kids eating heaps of junk food, don’t offer the same when you work the front door. Give out small, bite-size treats rather than doling out handfuls of sugar. Some options are a bit healthier than others. Chocolate-covered raisins, for example, contain some fiber and other nutrients while Peppermint Patties are low in fat.

If you want to give out candy, look into purchasing organic chocolate. This can be a bit more expensive, but the health benefits may outweigh the costs. Likewise, lollipops, which are pure sugar, at least take a long time to eat. Some people try to give out dried fruit, Chex Mix or similar non-candy related food items, but these treats generally receive low ratings from kids. Of course, you can always redefine Halloween and give up the candy altogether. Consider giving out small toys, temporary tattoos or other non-candy items.

Manage the At-Home Stash

Giving out healthier alternatives from your doorstep on Halloween night is one thing, but how do you keep your kids from overindulging on what they’ve collected? One of the first things you might want to do is restrict how much candy they gather. Keep the trick-or-treating to a single street block or just within a contained part of the neighborhood. This simply results in less candy to deal with right away.

At home, sift through the sugar stash with your kids. Some parents find it helpful to ask their kids to give up what they don’t like or don’t want, which immediately reduces the amount of candy left to manage. Others set a specific limit on what their kids can keep—perhaps a quarter of what they’ve collected. You may even want to request that your child keep only seven pieces of candy, one for each of the days in the coming week, and then dispose of the rest.

Many people have found that it’s not the candy collecting but rather the other components of Halloween such as the costumes that their kids enjoy the most anyway, so capitalize on this. A growing number of parents have introduced a system in their homes where some sort of St. Nicholas-type figure—a “switch witch,” “The Great Pumpkin” or other imaginary creature—collects all the candy on Halloween night or shortly thereafter and replaces it with another small gift such as a DVD thus removing any sugary temptation at all.

During the month of October, The Specific Chiropractic is having a howling good time! Visit our EVENTS page to find out how you can celebrate Halloween with us!

RESOURCES

Parker-Pope, Tara. “Health Tricks for Your Halloween Treats.” Well.Blogs.NYTimes.com. (October 30, 2007) Retrieved October 6, 2011 from http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/health-tricks-for-your-halloween-treats/.

“Sweet and Spooky Facts about Halloween Candy.” Today.MSNBC.MSN.com. (October 2, 2007) Retrieved October 6, 2011 from http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/21098482/ns/today-today_health/t/sweet-spooky-facts-about-halloween-candy/#.To3Rf3GXsfE.