With the tone of the voice in Poltergeist—“they’re heeere…”
The grocery store shelves are full of them and have been for weeks! Halloween is only one day, yet candy makes its appearance weeks early, ensuring those little “fun-size” candy bars can make their way to every desktop and lunchbox in town—way ahead of schedule.
Grocery Stores willingly place bags of candy, piles of them, within reach, giving us that impulse purchase nudge. They know candy is the big kahuna of impulse purchases. And once that bag has landed home with you, well, impulse is what keeps you tearing open those wrappers. If we’re clear about what’s really in that bag of candy, it might be easier to leave it in the pile. Let’s look at exactly what you get with a bag of those “fun-size” bars.
Two fun-size bars equal one serving, and weighs in at about 160 calories.
Not bad, you’re thinking, I can burn that off on my treadmill. Maybe so but what you can’t “burn off” are the genetically-modified components and flavor enhancers or MSG; they’ll be stored in your liver. Most candy is made with high fructose corn syrup, or HFCS, which is a cheap ingredient made from cornstarch. Known to raise blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels, HFCS is not only damaging to the heart, but your mood and mid-section as well.
Judy Folke, at the FDA’s Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Press Office in Washington D.C. said, “Fructose is part of the sucrose sugar. Sucrose is affirmed as GRAS (generally regarded as safe). Fructose is not GRAS, but it was treated under prior sanction because it had been used for so many years.”
HFCS is cheap, easy to store, and extremely soluble; therefore, it is every manufacturer’s dream. And so you’ll find it in almost anything you can buy that tastes sweet, including fun-size candy bars. Usually made from low-grade chocolate with fillers added, that brings us up to about 17-20 grams of sugar per toxic serving of “fun-size” bars. There goes your mood, waistline, and ability to concentrate. Wonder why they named them “fun”. Let’s see, they make you feel…
F reaked out
U nattractive and
N ervous.
Yeah, maybe that’s what they meant. As you’re walking past the piles of “fun-size” bags of candy bars, remember that creepy voice telling you that just because “they’re heeere” they don’t have to go home with you. They’ll leave you feeling just as creepy as the movie.
Have a “fun-filled” Halloween but, “fun-sized”…not so much.
Love & health,
Loa
Loa Blasucci is a contributing blogger for JenningsWire.