In the age of MAHA and food dye bans, parents rethink the Halloween candy basket

This Halloween, Kelsey Lucas’s kids, like millions of others across the country, will dress up in their costumes and go trick-or-treating, gathering candy and sweets. Lucas, a 38-year-old from Maryland, is looking forward to it. “Halloween is such a fun and exciting time for kids,” she says.

But Lucas is also planning on going through her kids’ Halloween stash and taking out some of the offerings. “I let them keep all their chocolate. Then I’ll take away the things that have zero real ingredients or are just essentially food dye and sugar.” She’ll particularly be looking out for Swedish Fish, Twizzlers and Skittles, which she worries are too laden with food dye.

In 2025, some parents are approaching Halloween candy with a new, critical lens, reflecting a broader shift in the culture and the currency the concerns of the Make America Health Again movement has found among many caregivers.

This year the U.S. Food & Drug Administration enacted a ban on the use of Red Dye No. 3, to be phased in over the next few years, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading proponent of the MAHA movement, has decreed that eight artificial dyes will be eliminated from the nation’s food chain by the end of 2026. On Instagram, mom influencers suggest dye-free alternatives for Halloween candy staples, and on Facebook, groups with hundreds of thousands of members share intel on dye-free candy recipes like “8-minute organic candy bars” made from puffed quinoa. Influencers link to dye-free candies on their Amazon storefronts, from which they make a commission.

Studies show that a certain subset of kids may react to artificial food dyes — like Red 40 — with more hyperactivity or trouble focusing. This seems to affect only a small number of children, and those with ADHD may be more sensitive than others. Many experts preach moderation. “To be totally honest, it’s not a thing that most parents really need to worry about,” Jamie Alan, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Michigan State University and mother of two, tells me. “It only affects a certain subset of children.”

Still, in an October Yahoo/YouGov survey, 58% of parents of children under the age of 18 said they are very or somewhat concerned about artificial food dyes in Halloween candy, and 32% are planning to prevent their kids from eating candy with artificial food dyes.

Parents who do want to curb candy consumption in some form or fashion this Halloween are turning to a novel tactic: a method called the “switch witch.”

The idea is that, after kids are finished trick-or-treating, parents and kids go through their stash together, weeding some out to leave for the Switch Witch, who comes during the night and takes the abandoned candy, leaving a small surprise or gift — like a book or healthier treats — in its stead. “It’s just a fun way to weed out stuff that I would prefer them not to eat,” says Lucas, who notes she does not ascribe to the MAHA movement. “If they eat nothing but food that’s exclusively red dye, they’re just going to be hyperactive.”

When Larissa Kuhnly, a 32-year-old mother of two in Connecticut, goes grocery shopping, she avoids food dyes as much as possible, opting for more organic, natural choices. Kuhnly has noticed a behavioral difference in her daughters, who are 9 and 11 years old, when they ingest food dye. “They’re just way more aggravated and cranky and agitated and high-energy,” she says. “The best way I can describe it is [like] a toddler who definitely needs a nap has been awake for three days.”

But with Halloween around the corner, Kuhnly is going to ease up on the household rules to let her kids enjoy the holiday. “I’ve definitely kind of gotten a little bit more lenient with things like Halloween because it’s also their childhood,” she says. “I want them to enjoy themselves and not have any negative feelings toward their mom being super strict.”

Kuhnly’s plan is to let her daughters keep five to 10 pieces of candy they get from trick-or-treating and swap the rest out with dye-free alternatives. In an ideal world, she says, all the candy her daughters get on Halloween night would be dye-free — but in the real world, she finds herself shopping for brands she trusts, like Yumearth, which makes organic candy. As for the candy she takes out of her kids’ bags, that goes back into the trick-or-treat basket on her own front porch for other kids to take, or she brings it with her to work.

Alan, the pharmacology expert, notes that if a parent is worried their child may be sensitive to food dyes, they can talk to their pediatrician about an elimination diet. But on the whole, most parents don’t need to obsess.

There’s so much that contributes to the overall health and well-being of a child — putting too much of an emphasis on a single factor might just needlessly complicate things. “I think it’s a great thing that we’re getting rid of food dyes,” Alan says. “But when you think about the overall constellation of human health, to me, this is only a very minor piece.”

Alan is struck by what she calls the “cognitive dissonance” of Trump administration officials banning food dyes while SNAP benefits, commonly known as food stamps and benefit about 42 million Americans, are about to end as the government shutdown drags on. “The priority is off, in my opinion,” Alan says.

Parenthood in 2025 is a minefield: There’s screen time to fret about, emotional resilience to foster and countless extracurriculars to schedule. The parents I spoke to told me that they’re just trying their best to find a happy medium between health, safety and fun — childhood is supposed to be joyful, after all.

Beth Waechter, a 30-year-old mother of five children from Kansas, feels those pressures acutely. When she was a kid, she was forced to eat everything on her plate, even if she didn’t like it. Now, as a mother, she’s juggling the difficulty of trying to keep her kids away from red dyes while also keeping them from feeling a sense of scarcity around treats. If there is a dye-free option, Waechter says she’ll choose it for her kids, but there’s also something to be said for loosening the reins around Halloween. “It’s childhood memories,” she says. “They’re not going to remember every random Tuesday, but they are going to remember like, Oh my mom never let me eat Halloween candy.”