For Patients Articles Effect of Oral Health on the Body Evans Centre Halloween Candy Buy Back a Howling Success! Calgary AB
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On Monday November 2nd, Dr. Thom Evans, Dr. Kindal Robertson and the staff of the Evans Centre for Dental Health and Wellness, hosted their annual Halloween Candy Buy-Back.
Building on the success of last year’s event, more than 150 kids from the community brought a whopping 525 pound mountain of Halloween Candy to the Evans Centre in a 3 hour event. The Evans Centre paid the ghouls and goblins of Halloween, a loonie and an entry for an IPOD Nano for every pound of candy they brought, plus each Trick-or-Treater received a Firefly LED Toothbrush. Two enterprising students, Ryan Dickie and Logan Neill, students at the Calgary Academy and also Ashley Perry, a Student Teacher at Westmount Charter School, collected 225 lbs and 150 lbs respectively. The money collected for their candy will be used for their school’s favorite charity. Many kids who came to the Evans Centre donated a portion of their take to various Charities. Dr. Evans matched all these charitable donations. In essence, those kids who donated to charity were giving up their hard-earned treats for two dollars a pound. The two most common questions asked at the event were:
What do we do with the candy?
Why do you do this? We are a health-centered office and we worry about the effects of this much sugar on our clients. The annual consumption of sugar has accelerated for the past century to a yearly 44.2 kg per capita in Canada in 2005. More alarming is the increased consumption of High Fructose Corn Syrup which we believe is much more harmful to health and is the sweetener used in nearly all Halloween Candy. At a time when our community is very concerned about strengthening an immune response to such health threats as H1N1, eliminating 900 lbs of candy from the diets of our children is the right thing to do. For those great kids who gave their candy up for charity, a number of other important groups have been helped in their ongoing efforts to improve our community. If the collected candy is unhealthy for our clients and families, it can not be good for others. So we destroy the candy. There are alternatives to candy. This was a fun and Healthy event to end the Halloween activities this year.
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