Nutritionist Althea Zanecosky recommends giving your kids a glass of chocolate milk before trick-or-treating tonight and setting off on what could be a grueling few hours of candy collection.
Zanecosky says trick-or-treating can be a sport, one that involves heavy lifting of stuffed candy bags for two to three hours. To make sure your kid is prepared, give them something nutritious.
“It gives us carbs and carbs are used for energy, it gives us protein which means it stays in our stomachs for a while, and it is really loaded with the nutrients that kids can use,” says Zanecosky.
You might be surprised to hear someone tell you to have some chocolate before you spend the night collecting chocolate, but Zanecosky says there’s a big difference between a bar and a glass…
“Chocolate milk now is one of those foods that packs a lot of nutrients, which is not true for all of the candy that we are getting at Halloween, so having chocolate milk is different from having chocolate candy,” says Zanecosky.
The average glass of chocolate milk has two teaspoons of sugar, where the average bar packs eight.
Zanecosky says filling your kid’s stomach with heathy chocolate milk means less space for candy bars, and adds that opens up an opportunity for education.
“Halloween is a great way to teach children how much is enough, how much is not enough, and how much is too much, so we can parcel out our candy to a little bit every day,” says Zanecosky.
