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 Earth's Promise from Enzymatic Therapy. 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).
About the author: Mike Adams is an award-winning journalist and holistic nutritionist with a mission to teach personal and planetary health to the public He has authored more than 1,800 articles and dozens of reports, guides and interviews on natural health topics, and he has published numerous courses on preparedness and survival, including financial preparedness, emergency food supplies, urban survival and tactical self-defense. Adams is an honest, independent journalist and accepts no money or commissions on the third-party products he writes about or the companies he promotes. In 2010, Adams created TV.NaturalNews.com, a natural living video sharing site featuring thousands of user videos on foods, fitness, green living and more. He's also a noted technology pioneer and founded a software company in 1993 that developed the HTML email newsletter software currently powering the NaturalNews subscriptions. Adams is currently the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit, and regularly pursues cycling, nature photography, Capoeira and Pilates. Known as the 'Health Ranger,' Adams' personal health statistics and mission statements are located at www.HealthRanger.org
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Thursday, July 08, 2004
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