Two REALLY SCARY Things About Halloween

​Boo! The season of Halloween is upon us and there are scarier things than witches, goblins and black cats that we may want to beware of.  These things are not only scary; they are tricky.  So tricky, in fact, we may have been inviting them in to our homes for years.  What are they?
 
The first thing haunts your body in ways we are only beginning to better understand; sugar.  Yes, the very thing we love to gather on Halloween night.  Recent revelations show that we have been manipulated into thinking fat is the contributor to many diseases when in fact it is sugar. 
 

Sugar is today’s tobacco.  It is addictive, found everywhere, and has no health benefit.  The World Health Organization recently upgraded their sugar recommendation to less than 5% of our daily consumption or 25 grams. 25 grams, do you know how much that is?  Take a look at this table to see how your favorite candy rates in terms of grams of sugar.  Be sure to note, they are talking about the ‘fun size’.  I don’t know about you, but enjoying just one ‘fun size’ is tough. To learn more about sugar and its health effects, you may want to check out Authority Nutrition.  They are a great resource for evidenced-based information about nutrition.  I have to thank, Kati Kleber, aka ‘Nurse Eye Roll’ for recommending me to this great site.

Scared yet?  No, okay, maybe a little?  I hate to be the scrooge of Halloween, but I believe awareness is power.  When we are aware of problems we can be proactive in avoiding them rather than get bonked on the head and forced to react to them.  So let’s move on to the second really scary thing about Halloween these days; plastic. 

If you follow me on social media or have read my second novel, By The Sound Of The Crow, you know about the hazards of plastic.  Ridding our oceans of plastic is something that I am very passionate about as I have seen the fatal results of it as whales, dolphins, sea turtles and other marine life ingest it, as they mistake it for food.  Plastic doesn’t biodegrade, not even “biodegradable plastic”.  Experts predict that if we do not stop the flow of plastic into our oceans, over 80% of which comes from land, we will have more plastic in the ocean by 2050 than fish. 
 
All we have to do is go into one of our local retail stores and chances are these two scary things, sugar and plastic, will be haunting and taunting us.  If you find that scary too, let’s join together to share ideas how we can enjoy this Halloween season without these two ghosts. 

​If sugar and plastic scare you too, lets join together and create change.  Do you have ideas on how we can reduce sugar and plastic this Halloween?  Feel free to share them below.  Let’s connect on social media and spread our ideas and increase awareness of these two issues that affect our health and the health of our planet.
I invite you to sign up for my blog as I present some ideas that I have collected.  Together we can make Halloween fun and less scary.