Posted October 27, 2010
How can you make trick-or-treating healthier for your youngsters?
And what kind of healthy treats can you pass out that won’t cause children to turn up their noses or their parents to toss them for safety reasons?
Four local registered dietitians have some good advice to address these issues.
As for keeping your kids’ trick-or-treating (relatively) healthy, the answer seems to be reasonable restrictions with the candy they bring home.
“Halloween is not about broccoli. It’s candy,” said Leslie Bonci, director of nutrition at UPMC Sports Medicine. “But it doesn’t have to be a free-for-all. You may not be the most popular person in the house but that’s not our role.”
She suggests you let your kids select three items to eat that night and ration the rest for later.
“There are a couple of things parents can do,” said Christine Doolittle, who works as a registered dietitian with Directions Counseling, a group of psychotherapists in Pine.
“One is let your kids eat their candy freely for the first day or two. … Then you have the option that you can give it away or throw it away. It may feel wasteful, but the whole issue is they get to enjoy it for two days.”
Still another option to getting rid of it is leaving some out and putting some away to be brought out at another time, like a week later, Mrs. Doolittle said.
“Some kids are going to lose interest. Others are going to overload. … The key is not to avoid letting them have it.”
Kari Halloran, an independent dietitian and member of the Pittsburgh Dietetic Association’s speakers’ bureau with a background in pediatric nutrition, likes a strategy used in her kids’ school district, Chartiers Valley: About a week to 10 days after Halloween the school sends home notes asking for leftover candy.
“I don’t know where it goes, the food bank or other places, but you know you don’t have to throw it away and it might go to someone who didn’t get to experience the joy of Halloween,” Ms. Halloran said.
And what to do if your child comes home with homemade or home-baked treats like cookies or little bags of trail mix or cereal?
The dietitians agree: If you don’t know the neighbors it came from very well, throw it away. Don’t pass out treats like that either unless it’s under the same circumstances.
“What it comes down to is if it’s a neighbor and the people know each other it’s nice to have something like trail mix or something your child can help with like to decorate cookies,” said Judy Dodd, adjunct assistant professor of nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. “But that doesn’t work for most neighborhoods: There are too many kids and too little time.”
As a parent and grandparent, Mrs. Dodd said she would never even allow treats from school because she didn’t know how they were handled.
Allergies to foods such as peanuts, gluten and wheat also complicate the problem of finding healthy, safe treats to pass out.
Still, the food experts came up with a list of safe items to distribute, some not edible but fun nevertheless.
Mrs. Dodd, for example, puts out an assortment of foods and trinkets from which the kids can choose. They may include stickers, pencils, stretchy wrist bands and erasers, along with pretzel snack packs, juice boxes and candy bars.
“If you’re going to buy candy bars buy the smallest ones, the teeny ones,” she said. “The big thing is they don’t care how big they are, they care how many they got.
“But I give them a choice. That way I’m not making the decision and I have a choice for the child who doesn’t eat — or shouldn’t eat — candy.”
Other options: small bags of Goldfish crackers, baked chips, boxes of raisins, packages of “lite” microwave popcorn, sugar-free gum, dark chocolate (which has more antioxidants than light chocolate), Play-Doh, bubbles, animal crackers, single serving boxes of cereals, packages of Fig Newtons and little packs of sugar-free hot chocolate mixes.
One final word of caution: “It’s important caregivers inspect anything a child brings home,” Mrs. Dodd said. “We’re talking safety.”
Pohla Smith: psmith@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1228.
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