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I-Min Lee Department of
Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA
Correspondence to: Dr Lee
i-min.lee@channing.harvard.edu
The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.
Our attitude towards candy
"if it tastes that good, it
can't be healthy"
betrays society's puritanical stance towards
pleasure. Candy has been blamed for various ills, including
hyperactivity in children; however, clinical trials have not supported
this.1
Candy
sugar confectionery and chocolate
is not a recent invention:
the ancient Arabs, Chinese, and Egyptians candied fruits and nuts in
honey, and the Aztecs made a chocolate drink from the bean of the cacao
tree. Today, Americans gratify themselves with, on average, 5.4 kg of
sugar candy and 6.5 kg of chocolate per person annually.2
Since candy has existed for centuries, we surmised that it cannot be
totally unhealthy. We decided to investigate whether candy consumption
was associated with longevity.
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Subjects, methods, and results |
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Subjects were from the Harvard alumni health study, an ongoing
study of men entering Harvard University as undergraduates between 1916 and 1950. We included 7841 men, free of cardiovascular disease and
cancer, who responded to a health
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