Happy Halloween (if you survive all the hazards)

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Halloween -- it’s the most dangerous time of the year, or so it seems from the 1,001 health-themed Halloween-warning e-mails we’ve received from health groups and PR firms these last weeks. Be afraid.

From the USC School of Dentistry: Candy causes cavities!

From the California Dental Hygienists’ Assn.: Sour candy is as acidic as battery acid and will etch your wee ones’ teeth!

From Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York: Kids can asphyxiate on treats such as sourballs and gumballs if they lodge in the windpipe.

Of course, much of the advice meted out can’t be argued with. Watch out for cars; kids should wear face paint instead of masks that could obscure their vision; don’t shove scratchy costume contact lenses in your eyes; eat candy while sitting still, not while running about; don’t use toxic makeup. Make sure hems aren’t too low and trippy. (Maybe that’s one good thing about the current trend toward slutty, high-skirted witch-and-princess costumes we recently covered.)

But you also start to wonder how realistic some of these tips really are, and if the earnest groups that send them are likely to get much by way of compliance. Don’t ever let kids carve pumpkins -- knives are sharp. Don’t put real candles in the pumpkins. Give the kids dried apple, soy cookies, unsalted nuts, oatmeal bars and raisins. Trick-or-treat only in the daylight. And never wear dark costumes. (I guess any kid dressing up as the Grim Reaper, Count Dracula or a witch should go as a Grim Reaper, Count Dracula or witch on vacation in the Caribbean or Bali.)

And here’s another easy one: Avoid candy with any artificial food coloring because it might make a kid hyper. (When my kid was racing around a bat- and cobweb-festooned house dressed up as Belle from ‘Beauty and the Beast’ all those years ago, it never occurred to me that the food coloring was to blame.)

Perhaps my favorite news release came from Mederma for Kids, an anti-scarring product, which lists 27 Halloween safety tips on two pages, then devotes two-and-a-half pages to information about the anti-scarring product -- is that for in case the tips don’t work?

We’ll concede that if you have a child who’s allergic to a foodstuff like peanuts then sentences like ‘Halloween spooks and scares are not limited to vampires and witches’ are excusable, but do parents of such children truly need to be reminded to check ingredient lists on the candy? You’d think they would have nailed that one by now.

And for most kids, the hysteria around candy just seems a little much -- lots of talk of rationing and instructions to give kids just a piece or so and make them work for every piece they receive thereafter. Wellspring weight-loss programs writes to tell us that, ‘Halloween is about having fun, not hoarding stashes of candy’ and that the ‘typical dietary recommendation for candy is a maximum intake of 22 pounds per year for a 12-year-old child.’ A very useful stat, that.

We got more handy stats from the California Dietetic Assn. and the California Milk Processor Board: ‘Did you know that a typical Jack-O-Lantern bucket holds about 250 pieces of small chocolate bars and candy that could easily add up to 9,000 calories (4.5 times the recommended daily amount for a grown person!), 200 grams of fat and 1,500 grams of sugar?’ (It recommends milk to be drunk as part of a healthful meal before kids go out trick-or-treating.) One can practically see PR firms bipping away on their calculators from one end of the land to the other.

By our own calculations, Halloween is one night. There are 365 nights in a year, except once every four years when there are 366 nights -- so let’s average things out and say there are 365.25 nights in a year. It would seem that what matters, when it comes to kids and diet, has not much to do with Halloween and everything to do with the rest of the year. Let’s be safe. And keep perspective.

-- Rosie Mestel