Kids Cuisine

Today is exactly three weeks past Halloween. Did you worry about how to deal with all the candy your kids brought home? As I listened to friends with young children discuss various schemes for limiting candy, I wondered if this is one example of worrying about the wrong things.

I’m a nutritionist, so people often ask me about how I handle Halloween treats, expecting me to have some clever strategy for keeping my young children from overindulging in the days and weeks after Halloween. The truth is, we do very little.

In fact, on the day after Halloween, my son’s preschool teacher smirked and asked if anyone ate candy for breakfast. My son was the only one who raised his hand. He even explained in detail – he had oatmeal and then a “butter cup” (the Reese’s variety).

It seems like a contradiction that a nutritionist would let her three-year-old eat candy at breakfast. But, if asked, I’d have a stash of reasons why I didn’t think it was a big deal.

1. That single peanut butter cup had about half as much sugar as most kids’ breakfast cereals.

2. That single peanut butter cup had a lot less added sugar than a pack of fruit snacks (the fruit-less, fruit-flavored kind). And, no artificial colors!

3. Why aren’t chocolate and peanut butter okay for breakfast? Would it be better if they were in the form of chocolate milk, peanut butter toast, or a chocolate chip bagel?

Sure, I try very hard to limit processed foods and, no, my kids don’t eat candy at breakfast everyday. But sometimes I think we judge foods by where they are in the grocery store instead of considering how the actual ingredients fit into a healthy diet.

We worry a lot about a few weeks of Halloween candy. But shouldn’t we spend more time thinking about what our kids eat every day? Is a breakfast cereal that’s 40 percent table sugar really appropriate as a meal? Especially a meal your kids eat each day? Is serving fruit snacks with lunch every day any different than serving Starburst?

Photo courtesy of Hershey’s.