The Halloween sugar rush is on, so go out and stock up on sweets. We want to see the neighborhood children not only look like zombies but act like them too.
Let’s see if this year’s tonnage of Candy Corn can ‘end to end’ circle the earth more times than the International Space Station. The actual amount according to maker Brach’s Confections is about 35 million pounds—or roughly 9 billion individual kernels. They’re small, so we can cram a month’s supply of them into our mouth
Thank goodness ‘fun’ or snack size was created by candy companies. In these days of paring back, regular size candy bars, although very prized by trick or treaters in the know, have become rarer than a voter with no opinion.
When you buy candy for the trick or treaters, you are really buying it for yourself. They get what they want, and you’ve got a convenient excuse to load up on the candy you crave in the ‘snack’ or ‘fun size’. Snack size means you eat as many at once because you rationalize that ‘it’s only a snack’, of course, when you eat too many snack sized bars is when it stops being fun.
Snacking is a national pastime, and Halloween is a national holiday; the two go together like February’s National Snack Food Month and ‘Take a Teen to the Dentist Day’.
Last year we slipped up and bought a 4-pound bag of ‘Smarties’. We still have three pounds. That wasn’t smart, but it was the value bag. Who knew we’d get sick of them after only a week. They have 85.7 grams of sugar per 100 grams. The sugar rush wasn’t worth it. Note to self: please don’t open the bag until the day prior to Halloween.
Also, they were made in Canada. Canada? Do they make good candy up there? I looked at the ingredients on the bag and found that they ‘May contain corn syrup solids and/or maltodextrin.’ What do they mean ‘May contain’? Didn’t they know what they put into it when they made it? Did someone accidentally turn on the ‘maltodextrin pipe’ and not tell the factory until later?
Next time we’ll just buy a big box of wax lips. We won’t gain weight; they’re a nice conversation starter and just the right accent for that Mick Jagger or Kylie Jenner costume in the closet.
If you give out nutritious treats for Halloween, you’ll feel better about not contributing to the sugar rush and probably not get as many treaters next time. If you’d like to see the trick or treaters jumping around like a kangaroo, Pixy Stix is widely considered the candy with the highest sugar content in the world, containing approximately 95 grams of sugar per 100 grams, almost pure sugar by weight. Warning: they may come back for more on November 1st.
