by Theodore Colcher (6th)

As of writing this, it is officially spooky season! So to celebrate Halloween and everything scary, I’ve decided to answer a question that everyone’s thinking right now. What would happen if you only ate candy corn for the rest of your life? From now to the day you die, all you can eat is candy corn. What would be the long term effects? Could you live a long life? Well, you don’t know, and neither will I until some madman decides to take on the challenge and only eat candy corn. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make inferences.

Before we answer the question, let's take a look at some of the ingredients of candy corn. As you might expect, candy corn isn’t exactly the healthiest snack. It has sugar, corn syrup, salt, honey, artificial flavors, and a few other ingredients. None of those are healthy at all. The amount of sugar alone in candy corn would probably make all your teeth fall out by the age of 30.

When I say candy corn is loaded with sugar, I am not lying. A normal serving of candy corn contains around 25-30 grams of sugar, which is already a ton for a normal person. Stuff like that adds up, and you’ll be eating around 200 grams of sugar a week, and that’s only factoring in one meal. You’ll be eating 80-90 grams of sugar each day, which means you’ll be eating around 630 grams of sugar each week. I shouldn’t even have to explain why that’s bad.

Let's ask another question: could you live off of any one food for the rest of your life? You can probably assume that candy corn is not something you should eat everyday, and you’d be totally right. You might be surprised, however, to hear that even something healthy like bananas is not something you should eat for the rest of your life. Eating only one food is extremely dangerous as the human body requires many nutrients to survive, and most foods only give one or two. If someone were to make a food that had all nutrients needed for a human to thrive, then maybe someone could eat it for extended periods of time.

But we still haven’t answered the true question that this article is answering. Talking about candy corn, you won’t be surviving long. A candy corn based diet will cause all kinds of diseases to take over your body, and all of your teeth will probably fall out within a month. So if you ever wanted to have a diet of candy corn, it’s unfortunately not happening. But what if we removed diseases from the equation? How long could you live now?

While you might live a bit longer, but it won’t be long before you get a heart attack from overdosing on sugar. You also might have to deal with other symptoms like type 2 diabetes. Overall, removing diseases from this problem won’t change much in the long run. You won’t survive nearly as long as you would normally, in fact, you’ll probably only survive a maximum of a year with a candy corn based diet.

But to be honest, is anyone surprised? I half came up with this question jokingly, saying to myself “what is the most absurd question I could answer for Halloween?” So I don’t think anyone is surprised when the answer given is exactly the same as what you probably were thinking when you read the title of this article.

So the moral of the story? /Don’t eat candy corn for the rest of your life. It won’t go well at all. Anyways, I hope everyone has an awesome spooky month with screams, laughter, and hopefully not a lifetime supply of candy corn.

¡Hasta la próxima!

(That’s Spanish for Until Next Time)!