Tu Salud ¡Si Cuenta! (Your Health Matters!), Halloween Treat Control: How to have a healthy holiday
When I was a kid, the loot from the Trick-or-Treat run at Halloween often included home-made cookies or candied apples. These days, concerns about hygiene and general safety prevent us from accepting or handing out anything that isn’t prepackaged and sealed. This has narrowed down the Trick-or-Treat fare to straight-up candy, and the kids come back in with bags that look like someone up-ended a piñata over top of them. While the kids don’t complain, most parents have some method to prevent the sugar overload from setting in. Here are a few ideas for managing the Halloween treats so that your family can enjoy the fun without getting a monster stomach-ache!
Begin with some ground rules about the sweets. Decide on whether you will allow your children to eat the candy as they go, or whether they must bring it home for you to inspect it first. (Inspection is recommended for safety, to ensure that the candy is unopened). Then, decide how much you will allow them to eat that evening, and how much you want them to save for later. This will depend on if your child tends to handle sugar well, versus becoming crabby or hyperactive, or getting a stomach ache. If your child is old enough, it is a good idea to talk this over with your child a few days before Halloween, to include her in the process — there will be less fighting about it at the last minute!
If your goal is to reduce the amount of candy your child will consume on Halloween, but you don’t want to ruin the party, try making something homemade with your child the day before. My dad’s favorite Halloween special was caramel popcorn balls. We would all help with the process of buttering up our hands to roll the sticky popcorn "dough" into round balls to dry on waxed paper. After making and decorating his homemade Halloween desserts, have your child trade some of his collected candy from Trick-or Treating for an extra dessert. Though he is still eating sweets, he is eating something that you made together and it’s better than pure candy.
Finally, the most radical approach to reducing the kids’ candy intake at Halloween is practiced by some friends of mine in San Antonio. They have a pretty healthy lifestyle in general and bake some fabulous desserts, but candy is not on the menu for their kids. So, as their children reached Trick-or-Treating age, the parents began offering to buy the candy back from the kids. The kids think this is great: they get to go out and have fun with friends Trick-or-Treating, then come home and get cash for their candy haul- cash to buy other things that they want. For the parents, it offers a way to allow their kids to have the fun, but not fight about the candy.
This Halloween, no matter what your family’s candy management strategy is, remember to Trick-or-Treat safely, enjoy your sweets, and brush your teeth before bed because, ¡Tu Salud, Si Cuenta!
Tu Salud ¡Si Cuenta! (Your Health Matters!) is produced by the University of Texas, School of Public Health, Brownsville Regional Campus. You can watch our Spanish language Tu Salud ¡Si Cuenta! segments on T.V. Channel 7 (Buenos Dias) every Thursday morning from 8 and 9 a.m.; weekdays listen on radio FM105.9 at 6:45 a.m.; AM1450 at 10:50 a.m.; and FM1490 at 5:45 a.m. Visit our Web site at
