I hope everyone had a fun Halloween, and I’m sure many of you now have piles of candy as the remembrance. Not that I eat much candy myself, but when I saw the article “The Exact Amount Of Halloween Candy You Can Eat Before It’s Lethal” by Erica Sweeney (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-much-halloween-candy-lethal_l_6172241be4b010d9330ec746?), I couldn’t help but be intrigued. It seems you can OD on candy, which does add a certain amount of irony to the holiday.

Start with the fact that we overindulge on sugar in the first place. The American Heart Association recommends no more than nine daily teaspoons for men and six teaspoons for women; we average 22 teaspoons of sugar, equal to 350 extra calories, each day.

Then consider Halloween candy is cleverly packaged into bite-sized portions, so the temptation is to eat multiple pieces.

On top of all this is our survival instinct. There have been times when sustenance has been very scarce, so our brains have adapted by telling the body to eat as much as possible, especially energy-dense sugar and fat, when food is plentiful.

And of course, Halloween provides a great excuse to party, which usually means overindulging. There are also youthful memories we are tempted to re-create.

But anything can be done to the dangerous extreme, and that certainly includes eating candy. In fact, the American Chemical Society’s Reactions show released a YouTube video titled “How Much Candy Would Kill You?” in 2016. According to the video’s calculations, a deadly dose would be 262 pieces of fun-sized Halloween candy or 1,627 pieces of candy corn, if eaten all at once.

This is a very informative video. But if you’d rather not be reminded of how many health complications come from the over-consumption of sugar, just remember personal moderation.

Happy Halloween!