Who’s afraid of a little Halloween candy? A few facts about added sugar

Some things are impossible to escape at Halloween: “Monster Mash” on the radio, skeleton decorations in the yard and gobs of sugary candy in plastic pumpkins.

That last one may be scariest for people concerned about their family’s health. What sorts of nasty tricks can those sweet treats pull?

Dr. Morgana Mongraw-Chaffin can address the concerns from a couple of perspectives. Most of the time, she’s an epidemiologist whose focus is on prevention of obesity and cardiometabolic disease. She’s also a parent to two young children – and the family lives on what she calls a “Halloween street,” where more than a thousand children stop by each year.

Concerns about excess sugar are legitimate, said Mongraw-Chaffin, who is both the scientific director of population health research at MedStar Health Research Institute in Columbia, Maryland, and the head of the Obesity Committee of the American Heart Association’s Council on Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health. But that doesn’t mean she’ll be handing out carrots, either.

“Halloween is like a lot of things,” she said. “You have to balance evidence-based health choices with celebration and tradition – and having excited kids.”

Why is sugar in Halloween candy a concern?

The specific issue is added sugars, with their “calories that come without other types of nutrition,” Mongraw-Chaffin said.

Sugar appears naturally in foods such as fruit. Added sugars sweeten most of your Halloween candy stash.

“There’s a lot of extra added sugar hiding in the standard American diet today,” Mongraw-Chaffin said. It goes by many names, including raw sugar, dextrose, molasses and high fructose corn syrup. On nutrition labels, the amount is spelled out. A couple of “fun size” candy bars might have 18 grams of added sugars – about 4 teaspoons.

The American Heart Association recommends adults limit added sugar to no more than 6% of calories each day. For most women, that’s no more than 100 calories a day, or about 6 teaspoons. For men, it’s 150 calories a day, or about 9 teaspoons.

Most adults and teens eat two to three times that amount.

The American Heart Association says kids younger than 2 should avoid added sugar entirely. Kids over 2 should limit it to about 6 teaspoons a day.

What happens when you eat sugar?

With fruit, fiber helps slow down how quickly sugar gets digested. That fruit also is probably a source of vitamins and minerals.

“Your Halloween candy? Not so much,” Mongraw-Chaffin said.

In the short term, your body will burn some of the calories from those added sugars and store the excess as fat. That can lead to obesity, which is linked to both diabetes and heart disease.

Mongraw-Chaffin said the added sugars in candy can also raise levels of blood sugar, or glucose. When blood glucose levels are high, the pancreas produces insulin to bring them down.

“It resolves pretty quickly if you’re metabolically healthy,” said Mongraw-Chaffin, who studies how the body maintains glucose levels. But over time, problems can arise.

If blood sugar spikes too often, she said, it takes more and more insulin to balance things out. “And that’s what’s called insulin resistance.”

Insulin resistance can lead to Type 2 diabetes, which eventually can lead to “all kinds of problems,” Mongraw-Chaffin said, including heart disease.

Are the risks of added sugar different for kids?

“I think the research is still being done to understand, physically, if there’s a difference” in how added sugars affect children, Mongraw-Chaffin said.

But research has shown that taste preferences form young, she said. “So it’s really important to set kids up for healthy patterns and trajectories when they’re little.”

There’s also the issue of what kids are not eating when they’re filling up on sweets. That candy displaces things that would have come with more nutrition.

That’s important for kids when they’re growing, because kids eat smaller meals and fewer calories, Mongraw-Chaffin said. “It can add up much faster to be a bigger proportion of the foods that they’re eating.”

Does that mean no candy at all?

Every family makes different choices, Mongraw-Chaffin said. But in general, special occasions alone – Halloween, a birthday party – “are probably unlikely to be the reason someone develops diabetes or heart disease.”

It's the choices we make every day – what we have for lunch, what we snack on every night – that matter most, she said. Bit by bit, those add up over the years and eventually have more of an effect than what we do on any one holiday.

How should a parent manage Halloween?

Parents can find ideas on how to manage Halloween in the Healthy Living section of heart.org. Tips include:

• Send kids out with smaller containers instead of monster-sized bags.
• Hand out healthier options, such as packets of pumpkin seeds or sugar-free gum, or toys instead of candy.
• Let your kids eat one or two pieces of candy a day for one or two weeks, then toss the rest.

Mongraw-Chaffin emphasized that her research does not extend to managing trick-or-treating. “I’m only an expert in that I live on a Halloween street and have lived on other Halloween streets before,” she said.

That said, she’ll be letting her kids, ages 2 and 5, take part in the neighborhood festivities. They’ll get to select a “fairly small” basket, bucket or bag and fill it up. “We plan ahead and discuss what the limits are going to be before the pile of candy is sitting in front of them,” she said. “My older kid actually likes giving out candy more, I think, than he likes trick-or-treating. He likes to see all the costumes.”

And yes, they’ll be handing out actual candy, from a giant warehouse store-sized bag, one piece at a time to make sure it lasts, Mongraw-Chaffin said. “We want to show up and support our community and our neighborhood.”

Nutrition is important every day throughout the year, she said. But “having these occasional special sweet treats for a celebration are likely not to be a huge problem – as long as what happens in the day-to-day is a reasonably healthy set of choices.”