Nutrition Advice From Your Favorite Halloween Characters

By Sara Butler

I’m just going to throw it out there: Halloween is the best holiday of the whole year!. Before you freak out on me and yell at me about Christmas, let me make my case. Halloween is the best time of the year because it involves two things people love most: Food (mostly in the form of candy) and dressing up. Well, maybe not everyone loves those two things but from my perspective, there’s nothing better than unwrapping a few (actually, more than a few) fun size candy bars and watching your significant other don a pair of spandex for a night. Ah, good times.

As I was pondering who I should dress up as this Halloween, it got me to thinking which, I know, is a dangerous proposition. But I wondered what all those fictional characters we love to emulate at Halloween exist on in real life? I mean, if you wanted Superman’s buns of steel, how on earth (or on Krypton) would you sustain all that muscle mass? Well, here are my conjectures about how a few of our favorite Halloween characters can sustain a healthy diet. Maybe we can all learn a thing or two from them!

Captain Jack Sparrow

Captain Jack seems to glean an existence primarily from consuming rum. He’s a pirate, sure, but a man can’t exist on rum alone. I don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble, but alcohol is actually not an essential nutrient. In fact, consuming too much alcohol can impair your body’s ability to absorb important vitamins such as A, B and C. When you combine this with months at sea, it’s pretty clear to me that Captain Jack should be consuming more citrus fruit lest he falls victim to scurvy – a disease that has sent many a pirate to the depths of Davy Jones’ Locker.

In order to get some Vitamin A, Captain Jack should reach for some sweet potatoes, carrots, kale, cantaloupe or pumpkin. For his Vitamin B, he needs to plunder the ocean for some salmon or shellfish, and for Vitamin C he can grab some oranges, but strawberries are a better bet! Maybe he should have a daiquiri every once in awhile.

In any case, if it’s truly a pirate’s life for him that isn’t cut short by disease, he needs to slow down on all that rum. Yo ho!

Spiderman

Perhaps one of the most loved things about Spiderman is he’s just a normal guy who got tangled up in a web of lies and deceit, accidentally bitten by a radioactive spider and then turned into a superhero. It could really happen to anybody.

If you were to have a dalliance with a radioactive spider yourself and wake up with the ability to shoot spider webbing from your body then you’d need one very important thing to do it: Protein. In fact, a professor at the University of Hull actually calculated that Spiderman would need to eat 60 eggs in order to produce 100 meters of spider silk. The only reasonable way to do that would be to follow Rocky’s lead and just chug them raw – but I don’t recommend that. Hello, salmonella!

The daily recommended intake of protein per day is 56 grams a day for men and 46 grams per day for women -- more, if you are looking to bulk up or, you know, swing from buildings by spider silk as you fight the powers of evil.

Elsa

I have a 5-year-old daughter, so I know all about Queen Elsa from the movie Frozen. Elsa is a loner, a recluse (who happens to conjure a really awesome dress). Personally, I blame her parents for her shame and rejection of her gift (who tells their child to “conceal, don’t feel”??) but since those incredibly unsupportive parents (spoiler) die within the first 10 minutes of the movie, she has to take some responsibility for her unwillingness to open up.

I’ve put a lot of thought into this during my roughly 27,587 viewings of this movie and I have a theory about all of Elsa’s problems – she totally has seasonal affective disorder (SAD) from lack of Vitamin D. She doesn’t get out enough, she’s depressed, and that lack of sunshine means her body is unable to produce the Vitamin D it needs to keep her body, and mental health, balanced.

Elsa may be fictional, but everyone can take a lesson from her when it comes to the wintertime blues. Make sure you get out and get some sunshine for at least 10 minutes a day in the winter so your body can produce this important vitamin. I guess you can say that you’ve just got to let it go and be one with the wind and sky. The cold never bothered you anyway, right? You should also add some eggs, milk, cheese and wild salmon to your diet in order to get enough Vitamin D.

And you’re welcome because now that song will be stuck in your head for the remainder of the day.

Your Very Own Superhero

It may not have occurred to you but you actually have a real-life nutritional superhero in your midst: Your chiropractor. He or she may masquerade as experts of the spine, but they’re also more than qualified to give you nutritional advice to keep your body healthy and balanced. After all, what’s a balanced spine without a balanced system to support it?

The next time you come into The Joint for an adjustment, make sure you discuss your diet and nutritional needs with your chiropractor. They may not be able to help you with your Halloween costume, but they can help you the other 364 days of the year to eat right and keep that human costume you wear daily as healthy as possible. You may (or may not) be Bruce Wayne, but there’s a good chance you’re somebody’s hero, so take care of yourself.