Halloween is not too far away and we’re sure that while you are coordinating last-minute costume requests that your kiddos have one thing on their mind: candy! While sweets and sugar do seem to be the epicenter of this spooky holiday season, we have some ideas to share that will help encourage healthy snacking.
And psssttt: we promise that we are not trying to enforce a candy-free holiday because there is no fun in that! Letting your little ones enjoy everything in moderation as we move forward through the holiday season will help keep their teeth and body healthy and probably keep your dental bill low.
Healthy Halloween Candy Swaps For Kiddos
We have 5 suggestions that are still delicious, but healthy halloween candy swaps that your kids won’t notice are any different than their sugar loaded counterparts.
Why swap your candy?
First, let's look at some facts directly from State Food Safety:
- On Halloween, the average child consumes about three cups of sugar, which is about 144 teaspoons of sugar.
- Although all of that sugar is bound to give your child a stomach ache, the real concern is the increasing amount that the average American consumes per day.
- Most Americans generally eat more than twice the amount of sugar than they should each day.
- The average adult consumes about 22 teaspoons of added sugar a day, and the average child consumes about 32 teaspoons of added sugar a day.
That is too much sugar!
Swapping your Halloween candy, while also allowing your children to have a few favorite sweets will teach them how to eat in moderation all year long. This is such an important skill for kiddos to have - especially since sugar is hidden in more foods than we realize!
Now, onto the candy swaps...
Below are 5 of our team's favorite healthy Halloween candy swaps that can easily be found at your favorite local grocery store. We promise: once you turn those packages over and look at the nutrition information you will see the difference.
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We hope that today's post has given you some inspiration for looking at food labels with your whole family and introducing some new foods with much less sugar into your regular diets.
Have the NozeBot handy for a stress-free Halloween.
