More than 60 percent of Americans celebrate Halloween. Tricks for making it a safer, healthier holiday can benefit your children, grandchildren, and those who come to your door.
Keep Them Safe
- Feed your children or grandchildren a meal or snack before they head out.This will help keep them from munching on the treats they collect as they go door-to-door. Tell them that it’s important that you inspect their goodies at home before they pop anything into their mouths.
- Discard all homemade candy or baked goods when the kids get home. Parents of toddlers should remove choking hazards such as gum, peanuts, hard candies, and the like.
- Inspect commercially wrapped treats for indications of tampering. Look for an unusual appearance or discoloration, tiny pinholes, or tears in wrappers.
- Read ingredient labels with extra care if your child has food allergies.
Keep Them Healthy
Some treats are healthier than others. To focus on those:
- Opt for chocolate. Research has determined dark chocolate in particular is a rich source of antioxidants that has been linked to a reduced risk for heart disease and some cancers.
- Read labels with an eye toward lower fat, calories, sugar, sodium, and trans fat totals.
- Consider alternatives to candy. Choices to consider include single servings of breakfast cereal, fruit rolls, mini boxes of raisins, microwave popcorn, string cheese, pretzels, peanuts, trail mix, juice boxes, ginger snaps, graham crackers, crackers and cheese, vanilla wafers, or animal crackers.
Treat Yourself
Halloween treats don’t have to be sugary and covered in chocolate to be delicious. There are plenty of healthy alternatives that you can make before the trick-or-treaters arrive at your door. Check out these healthy Halloween recipes from CNN.
Happy Halloween from Age Well CT!
This post was adapted from an article by the Western Connecticut Health Network.
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