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“Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat!” Like many of you, I have already purchased my Halloween candy in order to ‘be prepared’ and promptly ate half of it! What is all that sugar doing to my body? Wreaking havoc on my heart, hips, and blood vessel that’s what!
When I eat sugar from yummy chocolate candy covered in caramel, peanut butter or coconut topping, my pancreas puts out insulin to help push that sugar into cells for energy. If it can’t be used, then it is stored as fat. The empty calories go straight to my belly and the saturated fat into my liver increasing my cholesterol.
Knowing this I still can not resist temptation.
The excess sugar can lead to pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, and/or diabetes. It creates many unwanted pounds around the mid-section, endocrine/hormone problems, skin changes, and numbness/tingling in your toes or fingers.
The additional fat and calories raises your blood pressure, your waist line (again), and your cholesterol. This then increases your heart disease and stroke risk and creates unnecessary inflammation in your body that can lead to joint pain, muscle pain, and headaches.
Able to resist yet?
Consider these facts, 1 in 3 Americans have insulin resistance. Most people who are pre-diabetic go on to become fully diabetic unless they lose weight. There are approximately 54 million people with pre-diabetes and 21 million with diabetes. About 31% of women over the age of 20 have high blood pressure or are on high blood pressure medications and 1 in 6 adults have high cholesterol. Having high cholesterol, blood pressure or blood sugar puts you at risk for heart disease which is the leading cause of death in the United States.
Please don’t be a statistic. Limit your candy and sweets intake, continue to exercise, and maintain a healthy height to weight ratio.
References:
www.cdc.gov
www.americanheart.org
www.diabetes.org
Add a Comment2 Comments
Ha, ha! I definitely needed to read a funny (yet informative!) post that I could very easily relate to. I made the mistake of buying my Halloween candy 2 weeks before Halloween last year. I packed goody bags but still had lots of left overs. Needless to say, I ate too much candy. This year, I have restrained myself from even buying the candy until the day before or the day of. I'm not going through this candy binging experience this year! (Maybe)
October 29, 2009 - 5:35amThis Comment
Dr. Jones,
Thank you for this ammunition!! But long ago I have to say that I had to just buy candy I don't like for Halloween. The bags of 100 "bite-size" chocolate bars, etc, are just too much to resist -- it's too easy to convince myself that "just one won't matter!" And, well, you know how quickly the "just one" turns into "just a dozen."
I also try to see Halloween as the beginning of the holiday season. Because Nov. 1, everyone brings their leftover Halloween candy to the office (including me), and there begins the long, slow slide toward Thanksgiving, holiday cookies, parties and too-much-pie. You find fudge here, nut bread there and peppermint everywhere. My old office even added motivation to be bad -- we "bought" the items on the treat table with donations, and then all the money went to charity. What could be better? Eating sugar for a good cause!! It was delicious and horrible all at the same time.
Thanks for this timely reminder. Maybe we can tiptoe by the graveyard on this one.
October 28, 2009 - 8:00amThis Comment