With Easter quickly approaching, many families will be hustling out to buy their children an Easter basket filled with non-nutritious goodies. Many of the favorites that might end up in the coveted basket can be peeps, chocolate peanut butter eggs, Dove chocolate bunny, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, jelly beans, chocolate marshmallow bunnies, and many others. Even a modest basket like the one pictured can consist of well over 1,000 calories and 250 plus grams of sugar. If your children are like most, they will try to devour the entire basket if they are given the opportunity to.
If you consider that an average caloric intake for a healthy individual can be in the neighborhood of 1300 to 1600 calories, that would mean one basket could be almost your total daily caloric intake. I am not saying that you cannot indulge a little bit, however try to be educated about what types of candies you are consuming and/or providing for your children.
For instance, a Dove chocolate bunny consists of 690 Calories, 42 grams of fat, and 69 grams of sugar. A cadbury egg contains 300 Calories, 12 grams of fat, and 40 grams of sugar. Would you care to know what the center of a cadbury egg consists of? Natural and artificial flavors: A catch-all term that can include flavoring of any provenance as long as its origin — either derived from nature or from a lab — is specified. Here’s an example: Castoreum, a derivative from the excretions of beaver anal glands, is often in natural flavoring for vanilla and raspberry flavored-products. And beavers are, well, natural. Maybe you had a craving for a package of peeps, if you eat 5 peeps, you are consuming 140 Calories, 34 grams of sugar. The main ingredient in peeps is gelatin.
Gelatin is made from collagen and anyone who’s seen a night cream commercial knows where collagen comes from: skin. Well, skin and bones and hoofs and cartilage and intestines. There are no confirmed health risks associated with gelatin consumption, but it isn’t suitable for vegans, vegetarians and those who practice religious dietary restrictions.
You might be the type of person that just prefers Brach’s Jelly Bird eggs as your treat of choice. If you are than in 3 servings of them you will get 450 Calories, 90 grams of sugar and it contains shellac. “Confectioner’s glaze” is another name for shellac, often referred to as the real beetle juice: a candy coating made from the secretions of female lac bugs (latin name: Kerria lacca). Shellac is also used to finish wood. There is no recorded adverse health effect, although some vegans may want to avoid the ingredient. There you have some of the most common items found in a custom Easter basket. If you items are different than these, just start reading the ingredient list as well as the nutritional label to see what it is your consuming.
If you consider that in order to burn off those 5 peeps that you consumed you need to walk 1.6 miles or 3200 steps if using a pedometer assuming you take 2000 steps per mile, you might be better off eating the peeps while you walk around the track several times. If you chose the large chocolate bunny which was 1,000 plus calories you would need to walk 10.5 miles to burn off those empty calories. The next time you think about stuffing an Easter basket with candy, you might want to try throwing in some fruit with the candy so that your not supplying 3 weeks worth of calories in one basket. If you have any questions about nutrition, please contact us at info@xspeedtraining.com or call 610 334-4120.