Yearly, America produces 35 million pounds of:

A, second hand spit from smokeless tobacco

B, Weight gain from soda in Miami high schools

C, Candy Corn

The average American consumes between 3 and 4 pounds of candy over Halloween. This equals the sugar they’ll get from an average day’s consumption of café Cubano.. Eating that much sugar, we experience things of which

we may not be fully aware.

The short term ‘sugar rush’ can trigger the long term ‘duh factor.’

Refined sugar or excessive glucose is quite detrimental to your brain, ultimately affecting attention span, short-term memory and mood stability. Are we describing Congress here? It also blocks membranes which will cause neural communication to slow down. So when you ask a teenager who has just consumed a can of soda, a question that requires even the least bit of thought, they may answer “huh?”

But what the heck, go out and stock up on sweets for Halloween. We want the neighborhood children to not only look like zombies but act like them too.

When you buy candy for the trick or treaters, you are really buying it for yourself. They get what they want, and you’ve got a convenient excuse to load up on the candy you crave in the ‘snack’ or ‘fun size’. Snack size means you eat the whole thing at once because you rationalize, ‘it’s only a snack’. Of course when you eat too many snack sized bars is when it stops being fun.

Snacking is a national pastime and Halloween is a national holiday; the two go together like the latest Benghazi Committee and a load of bullshit. BTW, February is National Snack Food Month and March is ‘Take a Teen to the Dentist Month’.

A staple of Halloween is the Nestles Assortment.

The chocolate protocol of eating these fun sized treats is very predictable in our household. The dark semi sweet chocolates are eaten first, then the Nestles Crunch, the peanut and then the bastard child of the litter; the regular old chocolate. Dark chocolate has gotten a kind of healthy cache’ lately but not when you add chewy caramel, marshmallow, nougat and nuts.

Sometimes the regular chocolate lasts until the following summer because they’re eaten much less often and ultimately take on a swirl of discoloration. This doesn’t mean it’s bad, it only means you’re desperate for chocolate no matter how old it is.

At that point they get placed into the ‘emergency chocolate’ area of the fridge in the door next to the old brown sugar which has been there so long it can be used as a door stop.

Last year we slipped up and bought a 4 pound bag of ‘Smarties’. We still have three pounds. That wasn’t smart, but it was the value bag. Who knew we’d get sick of them after only a week. The sugar rush wasn’t worth it.

Also they were made in Canada. Canada? Do they make good candy up there? I looked at the ingredients on the bag and found that they ‘May contain corn syrup solids and/or maltodextrin.’ What do they mean ‘May contain’? Didn’t they know what they put into it when they made it? Did someone accidentally turn on the ‘maltodextrin pipe’ and not tell the factory until later?

Next time we’ll just buy a big box of wax lips. We won’t gain weight, they’re a great conversation starter and they’re just the right accent for that Mick Jagger costume in the closet.

Answer, C, Candy Corn