Farmer 'N The Dell

My eleven-year old son brought home an astounding seventeen pounds of Halloween candy after trick or treating this year. I know, because we weighed it. I immediately formulated an eating plan, not because I thought the matter out, but rather because I was reflexively parroting what another parent had said.

“Jack,” I said. “You can have three pieces of candy a day. That’s it.”

At that rate, it would take a year to get through all that candy, so my son helpfully offered up some other options. “You could buy it from me so I don’t eat it. Or you could just let me sell it to my friends.”

I love that he’s at the age where his greatest vice is eating candy, but as a doctor I didn’t like either of his offered solutions. I bought two bags of candy to hand out myself. Why should I buy more candy from my son? And if I did buy it from him, what would I do with it? Throw it away? Or eat three pieces a day myself for the next ten months?

It turns out that I was a bit of a candy under-buyer this year. I did an informal poll with my neighbors to see how many bags of candy they bought to hand out. The going range seemed to be about six to eight bags of candy. Naturally with so much candy, these friendly people were giving out two to three little snack-sized bars to each little goblin and witch who came to their door. No wonder my son, who views trick or treating as a sort of acquisition sport, was able to gather seventeen pounds in a little less than two hours.

Which brings up a health issue: too much sugar is bad for you. The American Heart Association took the bold step this year of actually making specific sugar intake guidelines. I say this is bold because there is an enormous amount of industry pressure to stop such guidelines. It could cost our multi-billion dollar food industry millions in lost revenue if people cut the amount of sugar in our diet.

So what exactly are the guidelines? Women should eat no more than 25 grams of added sugar each day. Men should limit it to 37.5 grams. Admittedly these aren’t guidelines for children, but if you crudely extrapolate you can figure out that kids should eat even less.

So what are added sugars? They are sugars that are added to foods, not the naturally occurring sugars like fructose in fruit or lactose in milk.  Unfortunately our food labeling system doesn’t distinguish naturally occurring sugars from added sugars. They all fall under ‘Sugar’ on the nutrition facts label. To distinguish between the two requires a little detective work. Look at the ingredients list. Any product that has syrups (corn, high fructose corn, or malt), sugar, honey, molasses, evaporated cane juice, or fruit juice concentrate has added sugar. That includes a lot of products.

To get back to our Halloween candy, I decided to investigate exactly how much added sugar there is in a snack-sized candy bar. Each candy differs, but here are some examples to consider: one Snickers fun size candy bar has 7 grams of sugar; one Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup has 8 grams of sugar; a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate fun size candy bar has 7.6 grams of sugar.

So, if my son eats one of each of the above he will have 22 grams of added sugar right there. His three fun-sized candy bars a day nearly equal the recommended daily limit advised for grown women.  There’s no additional room for the added sugar in his yogurt or applesauce or peanut butter or ketchup. He’s blowing his sugar limit just with his Halloween candy. 

I worry about our country. 64% of Americans are either overweight or obese. The data available doesn’t implicate added sugar as the sole culprit for our runaway obesity rates. But with added sugar in so many products now, it’s hard to deny that sugar doesn’t play a role in the fattening of America.

Maybe that three pieces a day rule isn’t such a good one after all.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 10:16 am and is filed under Health, Nutrition and Diet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.