You can enjoy sweets and hit your nutrition goals, but only if the rest of your snacking and eating habits remain on target.
Think of candy as a dessert rather than a snack, says Rainie Robinson, RD, CDCES, director of clinical nutrition at Children’s of Alabama in Birmingham. “Changing that mentality allows people to think about eating candy in smaller portions. We are typically fuller from the meal and therefore eat less candy or sweets than we would have before,” she adds.
“Our bodies need carbohydrates throughout the day — and candy can be a delicious, festive, enjoyable source of it on occasion,” says Meg Salvia, PhD, a nutritionist and diabetes educator in private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
But several types of candy are high in added sugar, a highly processed ingredient that rapidly raises your blood sugar and can negatively affect your health. In excess, sugar can raise your risk of high blood glucose, chronic inflammation, weight gain, liver disease, and cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s current dietary guidelines recommend that adults consume no more than 10 percent of their daily calories from added sugar. For many adults, that’s about a single can of soda.
The American Heart Association sets an even stricter limit for added sugar at only 6 percent of daily calories. For a 2,000-calorie diet, that 6 percent limit allows around 30 grams of added sugar per day. For reference, a regular-sized bag of chocolate candy or chocolate bar has around 23 grams of sugar.
In other words, a candy bar will fall just under that upper limit, if you eliminate added sugar from the rest of your diet. This can be challenging, given how much hidden sugar is found even in packaged foods, such as condiments, protein bars, and energy drinks.
