Articles about Vitamins

Vitamin makers sell candy multivitamins to children

How do you get a child to take their vitamins? Hide them in a sugary lollipop or gummi bear. As we're seeing in today's marketplace, more and more candy vitamin products are becoming available for children, and their sales are skyrocketing.

But is it good nutrition? To answer that question, you have to ask another. What's worse: having nutritional deficiencies, or consuming the refined carbohydrates found in the candies? In other words, these candy multivitamins do give kids some nutrients they need, but aren't they also harming them with the high-fructose corn syrup and added sugars?

The answer, in my opinion, is that the vitamins added to these foods are not very helpful to begin with. Makers of candy multivitamins tend to use the cheapest vitamin ingredients available, and those are usually synthetic vitamins that have marginal health benefits.

To make matters worse, none of these nutritional supplements contain phytonutrients that are essential to human health, even if they're not required by the federal government. So even if kids chew a hundred gummi bear vitamins, they're still getting zero phytonutrients.

The real answer here is that kids should be taking real supplements like Jenny Lee Supergreens and The Ultimate Meal. These can be blended in tiny amounts in kids' meals and smoothie drinks, along with stevia (instead of sugar) to sweeten them up. Furthermore, parents need to stop caving in to the whining of their children and set some ground rules for nutrition. I often hear parents saying, "But my child won't EAT that!" Yes they will, if you'd stop rewarding their tantrums with lollipops. Most parents have actually trained their children to throw tantrums as part of the process of earning ice cream of cake. It's pure Pavlovian psychology.

The bottom line to all this? Skip the candy vitamins and feed your kids superfoods, whole foods and -- if they want something sweet -- fresh fruit or a stevia smoothie. And find a way to get the good stuff like chlorella into their diets, too (even if that means rewarding them for swallowing whole food supplements).

Overview:

- The profusion of children's vitamins on store shelves might make a parent wonder if Mary Poppins has gone corporate: A spoonful of sugar apparently does help the medicine go down.

- Manufacturers say they've licked the problem of children refusing to take their vitamin because it tastes bad.

- But the assortment also reflects companies' pursuit of a lucrative market: More than 6 percent of the U.S. population purchased children's supplements in the past three months, according to National Marketing Institute.

- The 60 to 100 milligrams found in adult vitamins can eat through the lining of a child's stomach or cause systemic poisoning as it moves through the bloodstream, according to toxicologist and pharmacist Dr. Vincent Speranza.

Source: http://www.cincypost.com/2004/07/06/candy070604.html