Fend Off Tooth Decay and Treat a Soldier This Halloween

Fend Off Tooth Decay and Treat a Soldier This Halloween

While our U.S. soldiers are overseas serving our country, dentists all over America are participating in a buyback program that treats our soldiers while trying to prevent cavities in our little ones.

Children trample all over the neighborhoods, visit their friends and family on Halloween all in hopes of coming hope with the lots of yum-yum gooey sugar. They dump the candy out on the floor or table and begin to go through the candy piece by piece. They pick out what they really like and for the most part, the rest goes into a bowl and sits there for several months until mom finally dumps it into the garbage.

This magnificent mound of candy is not seen as glorious by any dentist. Dentists see tooth decay and unnecessary trips to their office for children instead. Of course brushing and flossing is the biggest prevention of tooth decay but the less sweets you eat the less chance you have of developing tooth decay. This nightmarish vision sparked within dentists everywhere to come up with the candy buyback program.

I became aware of this program last October when I got a notice from our dentist’s office. They would buy back any candy that we didn’t want from our Halloween take-home at a dollar a pound. The intent was not to rob the children of their childhood Halloween memory but to let them have a choice of what they wanted to sell back. What a deal! They explained that they would then send the goodies we sold them overseas to our soldiers.

Trying to convince young ones of how great it is to send their candy to someone else is no easy task. However, if you let them know the dentist is offering to pay them for their goods, they may be more compromising. Personally, I thought of giving the money back to the dentist in order to help with the shipping cost. My seven year old was not so agreeable.

After my son went through his candy for a couple of days, on November 2nd we went down to our dentist’s office for our first buy back. It felt good knowing that the troops were being treated; my son was making a little cash and we were doing more to help prevent cavities as well.

Operation Gratitude, a nonprofit organization out of California, distributes the candy to soldiers and I attempted to talk my son into splitting the amount of money he received for his candy. After a bit of coercing and explaining to him why this was such as good idea, he finally agreed.

If you’re interested in participating in the candy buy back for soldiers, ask your dentist or look for a dentist in your area that takes part in this program. Eat up soldiers and thank you!