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).