Ah, Halloween, the only time of the year when parents give their kids license to hoard and consume vast quantities of candy. On this special night, every child's worst nightmare has nothing to do with the ghoulish pageantry of the holiday, and everything to do with that mysterious stranger who plops raisins and apples inside your sweet receptacle, thereby soiling your keep.

But that stranger might be on to something, and there's a lot more to this story than the health benefits of that apple.

According to Diana Donlon of the Center for Food Safety, the mass consumption of Halloween candy during the holiday is exacerbating the deforestation of sensitive rainforest areas, and in turn, climate change.

It all has to do with a single ingredient found in many Halloween candies: palm oil.

Everything about palm oil is sexy to food and consumer product manufacturers. The substance is extremely versatile, efficient and above all else, cheap. Palm oil makes soaps and shampoos creamier and can even be used to produce biodiesel fuel.Oil palm crops generated 10 times more oil than other vegetable oil crops, The Economist reports. And palm oil is much cheaper than its seed and vegetable counterparts (although a drought this year has shrunk palm oil supplies and cast doubt on the price of the commodity this year, Bloomberg reports).

With so many obvious perks, palm oil exports experienced a meteoric rise, quickly ending up in many of our foods, particularly candy.

Just how much palm oil is in our food is up for debate given that it's not often labeled as "palm oil" on packaging, but as NPR reports, the U.S. sure has been importing a lot of it in recent years. In 2012, the U.S. imported 2.7 billion pounds, or 380 million gallons, of palm oil, doubling the amount of palm oil brought into the country since 2005.

(MORE: This Place is Losing 3,200 Square Miles of Trees in Just One Year)

Pretty much all of the world's palm oil comes from just two places: Malaysia and Indonesia. The discovery that oil palm trees — the primary source of palm oil — thrived in the tropical environments of the two countries stimulated demand for palm oil plantations, and by the mid-to-late 20th century, business was booming. As The Economist notes, from 1967 to 2000 palm oil lands in Indonesia grew from just 2,000 square miles to more than 30,000 square miles, prompting the United Nations (U.N.) to warn that Indonesia's forests might all be lost by 2020.

According to that 2007 U.N. report, from 2000 to 2005, nearly 50,000 acres of forest were lost every day across the Earth. Some of that forest was cleared to make way for palm oil plantations, because, in order to make room for oil palm trees, farmers in areas like Indonesia and Malaysia often slash and burn native forests, not only eliminating vital habitat for indigenous peoples and endangered species like orangutans, but also contributing to global greenhouse emissions.

The climate impact is two fold. The process of burning and/or downing the dense foliage found in forests releases large quantities of carbon dioxide — even more so than vehicles, according to Scientific American — into the atmosphere, amplifying global warming. Couple that with the unique, peatland rich ecosystems typical of tropical climates, which release a disproportionate amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when burned, Science Daily reports, and you've got yourself a recipe for climate disaster.

(MORE: Paradise Lost: The Fragile Future of Borneo)

However, there's not all bad news here. Earlier this year, the three largest palm oil companies teamed up with a number of major palm oil consuming companies in an effort to limit unsustainable farming practices. According to the U.N., now around 60 percent of all palm oil farmers and consumers have committed to sustainable practices to help stave off deforestation and climate change.

That effort alone could eliminate 400 to 450 million tons of carbon dioxide each year — a major greenhouse gas —by 2020, the U.N. reports. So if similar efforts continue in the coming years the world might be that much closer to a Halloween with a much less substantial carbon and environmental footprint.

In the meantime, checkout both the Huffington Post and Think Progress for lists of sustainable and palm oil free candy, or you know, just load up on apples.

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A view of stumps in a recently deforested section of natural forest that will become a pulp and paper plantation in Riau province, Sumatra, Indonesia, in July 2014. Indonesia lost nearly twice as much of its natural forests as Brazil in 2012, despite its forests being a quarter of the size of the Amazon rainforest. (Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images)