AFC Urgent Care Paramus would like to wish you all a happy Halloween! However, this spooky season ghost & ghouls aren’t the only things you should be scared of when you are trick or treating, the candy is the real monster! On Average, a child eats about 7,000 calories on Halloween night, that comes out to about 675 grams of sugar! Of course, we don’t recommend parents to limit your kids to a couple of pieces of candy on Halloween night, all kids need to live. However, we do need to be aware of the danger of candy!

How can sugar dangerous?

Extra sugar for one night isn’t the worst thing you can do for the child, they might have trouble getting to bed at night but what child hasn’t gone through that. In the U.S we have a problem with children & high intakes of sugar that span way over just Halloween night. So we have to ask the question, what is so dangerous about eating high amounts of sugar all the time? To answer this we can just look at the stats of the young adults in the U.S today to see the dangers of sugar.

• 1 in 3 US adults are prediabetic
• Prediabetic adults can’t properly process sugar and carbohydrates
• Regular overindulgence at the prediabetic stage may lead to diabetes in just a few short years

Halloween is all about the costumes & candy but it also makes a great opportunity to teach your kids about portion control! Some methods you can teach them are as simple as cutting their candy up in little piles to eat one day at a time, or teaching them that they don’t have to each all of the candy at once in general. Making a note of explaining diabetic or pre-diabetic can also prove extremely useful. Kids are very smart &once they understand something they will know the dangers. Eventually, we hope they learn from our eating habits & have a healthy lifestyle. That is why it is so important for the parents to eat correctly too!