FREEZE FRAME! It’s Halloween
























Halloween is all about kids and candy and well, adult kids, too. Give someone a reason to dress up and they tend to go a little crazy. Halloween in Camden and Rockport is no exception as businesses were visited to capture, for posterity, the holiday garb.
And just to keep it interesting, we did a little research to find out the threshold of candy you can consume and still wake up the next day. Yes, death by candy can be reality.
So sit back, relax and enjoy your sugar-fueled, Snicker wrapper-strewn, free-for-all today as we enlighten you on some candy stats.
After the kids go to bed tonight you're likely to dip your hand into their treat bag and pluck out two or three or 10 pieces of sticky, sweet Halloween Candy. But let's say you're binge-watching Netflix and lose count — just how much candy would you have to eat in one sitting for it to be fatal?
The science people at the American Chemical Society crunched the numbers based on what's called the LD 50, or the sucrose factor. The big SF is the quantity that, when consumed all at once, would kill at least half of a population of test animals like rats.
The calculations show that the average 180-pound American would have to plow through about 5½ pounds of sugar to have about a 50/50 chance of a lethal overdose.
Since sucking down a 5-pound bag of sugar in one sitting isn't a widely celebrated Halloween tradition, they also determined the equivalent amount of those, "fun size" candy servings that are popular with trick-or-treaters. Taking the average sugar content for those single serving sweets, it would take about 262 pieces, or 20,000 calories worth of candy, to reach a lethal SF.
How about candy corn? You'd need to consume 1,627 pieces of the stuff to get close to death.
And speaking of candy corn, it ain't just for Halloween anymore, though the holiday does account for 75 percent of annual candy corn sales. The candy has also been made into reindeer corn for Christmas, Indian corn for Thanksgiving, cupid corn for Valentine's Day and bunny corn for Easter.
According to the National Confectioners Association, candy manufacturers sell more than 20 million pounds of candy corn each year, roughly 8.3 billion kernels. Applied to the above number, roughly 510 million people can meet their demise this Halloween just by candy corn alone.
It wouldn't be fair if we didn't bring the economy in on this. Halloween candy sales, it turns out, is a good indicator of how well the economy is doing. And it turns out sales surged this year.
This means candy sales had a positive economic impact on American companies that manufacture and sell candy, as well as the dentists who will repair the teeth of children for many months after the holiday concludes, or maybe not, but that's another story.
If you are wondering which American city is the largest purchaser of Halloween candy, you may be surprised to know it is about the farthest you can get from Maine and still be in the United States. Honolulu, the capital of Hawaii, comes in at the top of the list.
Above all, remember that Halloween is supposed to be fun. One night of wild sugar consumption isn't going to derail your existence.
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