Halloween and the Modern Sweet Tooth

Halloween used to be about costumes, neighbourhood walks, and a little mischief. Now it’s hard to imagine the holiday without heaps of candy at the center of it.

Costumes, neighborhood walks, and spooky stories make Halloween memorable. Somewhere along the way, it became about bringing home the biggest haul of candy you can carry.

This year alone, Halloween candy spending in the US is projected to reach $4.1 billion with 96% of consumers planning to buy. Walk through any grocery store in October and it’s easy to see why. Candy is stacked by the entrance, dominating the seasonal displays and sold in bags big enough for every trick-or-treater on your street.

That kind of abundance makes candy feel like the price of admission to Halloween. It isn’t. Candy isn’t nourishment, and we don’t need it to celebrate. One piece of candy isn’t a crisis, but the expectation that children should collect bags of it and eat it for days deserves some scrutiny. The good news is that we can decide what comes into our homes and what we want our kids to associate with celebration.

Our Sweet Food Environment

People have always enjoyed sweet foods. Fruit and honey are two familiar examples. But these days, sweetness also comes from an abundance of added sugars in packaged foods and drinks, not just a seasonal opportunity.

In the 1960s, scientists were debating whether sugar played a role in heart disease. A 2016 analysis of internal documents found that the Sugar Research Foundation funded and influenced a 1967 review by Harvard researchers. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the review emphasized saturated fat and cholesterol as risks while discounting evidence about sugar. Because the funding was hidden, the review appeared independent. By emphasizing saturated fat and cholesterol while downplaying sugar, it helped deflect attention from further study of sugar’s potential harms.

A decade later, the U.S. Senate’s 1977 Dietary Goals called for reducing refined and processed sugars to 10% of calories. But when the federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans began in 1980, they back-pedaled and advised people to just “avoid too much sugar”. For years, the guidance stayed vague, calling for moderation instead of setting a clear limit. The first numerical limit for added sugars (less than 10% of daily calories) didn’t arrive until 2015.

Industry-funded research helped shift attention away from sugar and toward saturated fat and cholesterol. Meanwhile, official advice remained non-specific, and the amount of caloric sweetener in the U.S. food supply kept rising, peaking in 1999 at about 153.6 pounds per person. The USDA estimated that added sweeteners supplied about 429 calories per person per day in 1999; roughly 22% of average calorie intake.

The current dietary guidelines are more direct: they say no amount of added sugar is recommended as part of a healthy diet and advise no more than 10 grams per meal for people ages 11 and older. For children under 11, the current guidelines say to avoid added sugar. The guidance is finally catching up to a concern that has been part of the public debate for decades.

Although the amount of caloric sweetener available in the U.S. food supply has fallen about 20% since its 1999 peak, added sugar remains deeply woven into how Americans eat.

The CDC reports that 3 in 5 Americans age 2 and older consume more added sugar than recommended. In 2017-2018, average intake was 17 teaspoons a day for all age categories (children ages 2-19 and adults 20 and older). Adult men averaged 19 teaspoons; women averaged 15.

Food companies still fill store shelves with thousands of highly sweetened, nutrient-poor products and we keep buying them. The decline from the peak matters, but it hasn’t changed the larger pattern: sugar is still built into the everyday food environment, and changing that will take more than updated guidelines.

The history helps explain how added sugar became so common. But before we talk about reducing it, we need to be clear about what we mean by “sugar” and why the food it comes in matters.

Sugar Isn’t One Thing

It’s important to point out that sugar can mean different things on a food label. Total sugars include sugars found naturally in foods such as fruit and plain milk, as well as sugars added during processing or cooking.

Added sugars are different. The current Dietary Guidelines for Americans list ingredients such as cane sugar, corn syrup, honey, molasses and fruit juice concentrate as sources of added sugar. So honey or dates may be a part of a less-processed treat, but they don’t make it sugar-free. Here is a sample label of a yogurt product: 

This sample label shows 12 grams of total sugars in a ⅔-cup serving. Of that amount, 10 grams are added sugars, leaving 2 grams of naturally occurring sugars. “Includes” means those 10 grams are already counted in the 12 grams of total sugars. The Nutrition Facts panel shown here can tell you how much added sugar is in a serving; the ingredient list can tell you which sweetener was used.

But sugar grams alone don’t tell the whole story. The food around the sugar changes how it’s eaten and digested. In an apple, sugars are held within the structure of the fruit, alongside water and fiber. Chewing and digestion break that structure down. In a randomized trial, whole apples emptied from the stomach more slowly than apple puree or juice and produced greater fullness. In the puree and juice arms of the study, the apples were processed. Puree breaks down the apple’s intact structure, while juicing removes much of the pulp and fiber. In the trial, both puree and juice left the stomach faster than whole apples. The clearest takeaway is that processing changes how the food moves through digestion and how full people feel afterward.

Candy’s structure varies; chocolate bars, gummies, hard candy, and sweet drinks don’t all digest the same but it’s safe to say that all candy foods are highly processed and deliver concentrated sugar with little to nothing else.

Halloween Can Take It to the Extreme

There’s no reliable national estimate of how much candy the average child eats on Halloween night. But even a few pieces can add up quickly: the American Heart Association notes that just a couple of fun-size candy bars may contain twice the current federal limit of 10 grams per meal for people ages 11 and older.

Halloween candy makes it easy to graze all day or start eating as soon as trick-or-treating begins. We entered ten small chocolate bars into a nutrition tracker: together, they had nearly 80 grams of sugar and 859 calories. That’s about as much sugar as you’d find in two 12-ounce cans of Coca-Cola. And ten small bars can be easy to eat one after another without much thought.

Added sugars provide calories with little nutritional value, and too much can contribute to weight gain, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. Sugar also contributes to tooth decay: bacteria in dental plaque turn sugars into acids that damage teeth.

One Halloween night is unlikely to cause a chronic disease. The concern is what high sugar intake can do over time. But when Halloween encourages large candy hauls, it can easily turn into a sweet treat every day for several weeks or months. The everyday pattern matters more than one holiday. The issue is that Halloween normalizes this type of eating behavior and makes that pattern easy to slip into.

An Ancestral Approach to Halloween

An ancestral approach to Halloween can be simple: share a good meal, get outside, and enjoy the night together. Candy can be part of it without taking over.

We use the Ancestral Tenets to guide everyday choices: what we eat, how we move, and how we spend time with family and community. Halloween gives us a chance to put a few of them into practice:

Eat

Make a family dinner before the costumes go on. Bison or beef burgers with potatoes, meatballs with rice, or taco bowls are all good options. Keep the meal simple enough that kids will actually sit down and eat before the excitement starts. When you get home, let them choose 1 treat to enjoy, then put the rest away.

Move

Trick-or-treating gets kids outside and moving, often for longer than they realize. Let them choose the route, add a few extra blocks, or take the long way home. An excited kid may run between houses; another may want to walk and check out everyone’s decorations. Either way, they’re moving and spending time outdoors. Activity after eating can also help muscles take up glucose and blunt the rise in blood sugar, so the walk is a welcome part of the evening.

Bond

Make Halloween a shared evening. Carve pumpkins, invite another family to trick-or-treat with you, or take time to talk with neighbors along the route. When you get home, play a spooky game, read a Halloween book, or make up a ghost story together. Those are the kinds of traditions kids can look forward to year after year.

Connect

Cooler temperatures and fall colours give families a reason to get outside together. Make a habit of taking walks to look at the changing leaves, play in the yard, or rake leaves with the kids. When the weather and ground allow, take off your shoes and let the kids spend a few minutes barefoot on the grass or soil.

Shield

Set a clear boundary around candy. Decide before Halloween what you’re willing to buy, hand out, and bring home. When the kids return, let them choose a piece they truly want; the rest doesn’t need to stay in the house. You don’t have to keep a giant stash just because it was collected.

Carry the Intention Into Everyday Life

Halloween is one night. The everyday pattern is where small changes can add up. Here are a couple easy wins for when it’s not Halloween to reduce added sugar intake:

• Start with sweet drinks, a leading source of added sugar in the American diet. Make water or an unsweetened drink the usual choice, and check labels for added sugars in the drinks and snacks you buy often.
  

• Make satisfying, recognizable foods easy to reach: eggs, meat, plain yogurt, cheese, fruit, and leftovers. Whole fruit belongs in a different category from candy. The goal is to make nourishing food the everyday foundation and let sweets be something you choose and enjoy on occasion.
  

It is possible to keep the traditions we love, add a few new ones, and make candy one part of the celebration instead of the whole point.