Making Halloween Healthy: Tips from your YMCA

Halloween is a once a year chance to dress up in costume and stock up on sweets. But for parents who encourage healthy choices and minimal junk food, this day can be a struggle with your little monsters.

Kids in America consume an average 60-100 grams of sugar a day, and our nation’s childhood diabetes and obesity rates are scarier than any ghoulish costume.

On the one hand, you want to let kids indulge and enjoy the holiday. On the other, you don't want to undermine all the work you do the rest of the year maintaining a balanced diet and a healthy lifestyle, not to mention the harm candy can do to kids’ dental health. And you don't want to confuse kids with mixed messages.

Try keeping the candy indulgence down to one night, on Halloween. Then take the rest of the candy and find a way to diminish the supply. You can let your kids pick a handful of their favorite treats to keep, and to keep it somewhere so they can have one piece a day until it’s gone.

Halloween often signals the start of Halloween season, but Halloween is only one day. Keep the indulgence down to only one day, not the week or month of October (as many stores would have you believe it should be). This way if you indulge, you still do so minimally. It also helps to look for products that are sweetened naturally, with fruit juice or another organic sweetener.

Another helpful tip is to make sure to take a walk on Halloween! Instead of driving from place to place, make sure you do your trick-or-treating or Halloween visits by foot or on bike. A healthy activity can help to counteract the candy indulgence and to teach good habits everyday. If you host a Halloween party yourself, look up some extra healthy snacks to cook up to balance out the less healthy choices.

Parents can also set up the leftover candy as a payment system. Kids can trade in their candy for a small toy or some extra allowance. This way the treats are gone, and replaced with something more useful or healthy.

Lastly, hand out alternatives to Halloween candies, such as stickers, temporary tattoos, plastic Halloween jewelry, dried fruit, crayons or mini bags of pretzels.

We hope your Halloween is a fun-filled, healthy and happy, ghoulishly good time! Let us know your healthy Halloween tips below, and how you deal with leftover candy!

Here are 15 ways to use leftover candy from kidshealth.org.