October is the month the candy bowl turns up on every desk. At work, at reception, at your sister’s kitchen table.
Here’s the good news. Candy is easier than dinner. A sauce can hide a tablespoon of butter. A gummy bear can’t hide anything.
The one-second sort
Sugar candy: hard candy, lollipops, gummies, jelly beans, most licorice, marshmallows, candy corn, sour sweets. These are nearly all sugar and usually carry little or no fat. Check the label anyway, because some chewy sweets add oil.
Everything else: chocolate, anything with nuts or peanut butter, and caramel or toffee made with butter or milk. That’s where the fat lives. A fun-size chocolate bar usually carries a few grams, and the peanut butter ones tend to carry more.
A few grams sounds small. In my strict weeks I ate on 20 to 30 g of fat a day, which was my hospital dietitian’s number, so two little bars could take a real bite out of the day.
What the fat label won’t tell you
Sugar. I’ve checked my blood sugar since my second attack, so I count the gummies too.
If pancreatitis left you with diabetes, or your numbers have been odd since, a handful of gummies can be a bigger problem than one square of chocolate. Fat-free sweets still count.
The sugar-free trap
A lot of sugar-free candy is sweetened with sugar alcohols like sorbitol and maltitol. Eat enough of them and they cause bloating and diarrhoea in plenty of people with healthy guts. With a gut that’s already touchy, I’d go very slowly.
How I’d handle the bowl
- Decide before you’re standing next to it: how many pieces, and which kind.
- Chocolate is a phase 2 food on my list. In the first weeks it’s the sugar candy or nothing.
- Later on, a plain chocolate piece beats the peanut butter or caramel ones, and it goes into the day’s count.
- If you take enzymes, ask your team whether a chocolate bar counts as a snack that needs a dose.
- If you’re buying for the door, buy the kind you don’t like. The leftovers are the real Halloween risk, and they sit in the cupboard until Christmas.
Stepan’s Rule: sugar candy is a fat question I can answer in one second. The blood sugar question takes a little longer, so I ask that one too.
I’m a patient, not a doctor. Your fat budget and your blood sugar targets come from your own team.
How I worked out my own fat budget (it took me 18 months), and how I read a label in the shop, are both in the book. Get PancreasZen: the patient’s manual.