Halloween Candy: Best and Worst Choices

From the highly successful, Eat This, Not That!, David Zinczenko reveals the best and WORST choices of Halloween candy:

5. Worst “Fun Size” Candy Bar

Butterfinger Bar (fun size bar)
100 calories
4 g fat (2 g saturated)
10 g sugars
Aren’t food marketers clever? By calling it “fun,” they’ve pulled your attention away from the fact that candy bars are flab-inducing logs of concentrated fats and sugars. There’s nothing fun about that.

INSTEAD, try:

3 Musketeers (fun size bar)
63 calories
2 g fat (1.5 g saturated)
10 g sugars

 

4. Worst Classic Fruit Candy

Brach’s Airheads (3 pieces)
140 calories
1.5 g fat (1 g saturated)
19 g sugars
Here’s the basic formula for an Airhead: Sugar and filler carbohydrates, artificial colors and flavors, and partially hydrogenated oils—the source of trans fat.

INSTEAD, try:

Spangler Dum Dum Pops (3 pops)
77 calories
0 g fat
105g sugars

 

3. Worst Miniature Candy Bars

Twix Miniatures (3 pieces)
150 calories
8 g fat (6 g saturated)
15 g sugars
Twix has the worst saturated fat profile of any candy in your kid’s trick-or-treat bag. Think about it like this: Each one of this bite-sized candies carries 10 percent of the saturated fat you should consume in an entire day.

INSTEAD, try:

Tootsie Roll (3 pieces)

70 calories
1.5 g fat (.5 g saturated)
9.5 g sugars

 

2. Worst Chewy Candy

Brach’s Milk Maid Caramels (4 pieces)
160 calories
4.5 g fat (3.5 g saturated)
16 g sugars
Doesn’t Milk “Maid” sound a lot like Milk “Made”? But rest assured—they’re not the same. This candy contains a couple milk derivatives (whey and “lipolyzed butter fat”), but it hardly constitutes a dairy product. Plus, 90 percent of the fat is saturated. That’s bad news for your heart.

INSTEAD, try:

Now and Later (4 pieces)

53 calories
.5 g fat (0 g saturated)
10 g sugars

 

1. Worst Seasonally Themed Candy

Reese’s Pumpkin
170 calories
10 g fat (3 g saturated)
16 g sugars
This one should send your gimmick radar into the red zone. If it were flavored with pumpkin puree that would be one thing, but it’s not. It’s an oversized peanut butter cup shaped in a pumpkin-like mold. And what price do you pay for such fanciful novelty? Nearly two-thirds more calories than a regular Reese’s peanut butter cup.

INSTEAD, try:

Brach’s Candy Corn (11 pieces)

70 calories
0 g fat
14 g sugars

Now that you have the proper guidelines to SAVE yourself calories, how about a solid workout to counteract any excess calories?
“Trick Or Treat” Workout By Christopher Stacy