You probably know the Halloween routine. A bowl by the door, a kid in a costume, and a mountain of wrappers on the kitchen table the next morning. Most of us treat the whole pile as the same kind of sugar.
It is not. According to the Mouth Healthy, the real troublemakers are sour candies, hard candies that linger in the mouth, and sticky sweets that cling to the enamel.
Chocolate sits at the gentler end of the list.
Sour candies sit at the top of the worst list
Sour candies combine two bad things in one piece.
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The American Dental Association says they are high in dietary acids that attack the hard, protective coating on your teeth, and calls them some of the worst offenders for tooth decay.
The acidity is measurable. A laboratory study from the University of Iowa, published in the Journal of the American Dental Association, compared the original and sour versions of popular candies.
Enamel lesions were deeper after exposure to the sour versions.
Even the regular versions caused erosion, but the sour ones were worse.
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Hard candies and sticky candies damage teeth in different ways
Lollipops and jawbreakers draw out the sugar bath by design.
The longer a candy sits in the mouth, the longer the bacteria on your teeth have fuel to produce acid.
Sticky candies do the opposite. Caramels, taffy and gummy sweets cling to the pits and grooves of teeth and resist being rinsed away by saliva.
Writing in Harvard Health, Dr. Robert Shmerling notes that the lingering, acidic sweets are the ones to worry about most.
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Chocolate is the least bad choice
Chocolate clears the mouth faster than most Halloween candy.
The ADA notes that chocolate does not stick to your teeth as readily as other candies, and that semisweet and dark chocolate contain less sugar than milk chocolate.
Blood sugar follows a similar pattern. Pure sugar candies like lollipops and gummies deliver glucose quickly. Chocolate contains fat, which slows the stomach emptying and softens the rise in blood sugar.
Dark chocolate, with less sugar, tends to produce a smaller spike than milk chocolate.
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Sugar-free candy can bring its own problem
Sugar-free sweets look like a workaround, but many of them are made with sorbitol, which the gut absorbs poorly.
In larger amounts it draws water into the bowel and acts as an osmotic laxative.
A report in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report documented an outbreak in Milford, New Hampshire, in April 1984.
Eight children between the ages of 5 and 13 developed abdominal cramps and two to six loose bowel movements each, within one to one and a half hours of eating 3 to 16 pieces of a dietetic candy.
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Each piece contained about 3 grams of sorbitol.
Smaller amounts matter in smaller children. A review of Halloween health risks in the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association notes that pediatric sorbitol thresholds are low enough to be crossed by a handful of pieces.
A simple rule for the end of October
Chocolate, especially dark, clears the mouth faster and spikes blood sugar less sharply than a lollipop, a gummy or a sour candy.
Eating candy with a meal helps, because saliva flows more freely then and rinses sugar away more quickly.
Brushing afterward, or at least swishing water, removes what saliva misses.
Parents of young children should scan sugar-free wrappers for sorbitol before handing them out, and anyone with cavities, braces or diabetes has reason to pick more carefully.
This article is made and published by Ida-Marie Palm Varbæk, who may have used AI in the preparation.