THE SHOCKING TRUTH BEHIND KIDS VITAMINS

Many of us are accustomed to taking a multivitamin supplement each day, or even just from time to time, and there are understandable reasons for that.

Amid today’s extremely busy lifestyles, many of us worry that we might not be finding the time to cover all the nutritional bases needed for a healthy, balanced diet. Taking a multivitamin supplement might seem to be a great solution for this. After all, the role of a multivitamin is to help plug those nutritional gaps in the diet that might otherwise be easily left behind.

How easy is it to find a great kids’ multivitamin?

The groups of people who might be particularly advised to take a multivitamin include those with certain allergies or intolerances, as well as pregnant and breastfeeding women, and older people who might struggle to absorb some essential nutrients compared to their younger counterparts.

There is, though, another group that could at least theoretically benefit from a multivitamin supplement: children. In fact, the UK Government advises that all children aged six months to five years are given supplements each day containing vitamins A, C, and D.

That, in turn, got our own team thinking. If we simply headed out to the obvious brick-and-mortar health-food stores, what would our chances be of finding a truly great kids’ multivitamin? By that, we mean a multivitamin that is completely and genuinely healthy and clean.

So, how did we get on when we took on this challenge?

The overall conclusion we reached from our experiment was… not an overly positive one. In fact, we didn’t find a single kids’ multivitamin on the shelves that met the above requirement of being entirely healthy and clean.

The brief we set ourselves was to head down the aisles in Boots and Holland & Barrett to look for a kids’ multivitamin that was fully deserving of the Tonic ‘seal of approval’. Sadly, what happened instead was that every product we encountered was filled with sugar or junk chemicals, or barely contained any vitamins. Yep, some of the products we found consisted of more sugar than vitamin.

Below is a quick summary of our findings:

• Gummies; indeed, these are the most popular format for kids’ multivitamins. Unfortunately, we also found that they contain more sugar than vitamins, and that’s never good news for a multivitamin. It is well-known that sugar is bad for kids’ teeth, but slightly less widely acknowledged is that it is also associated with adverse impacts on gut health and the immune system.
• Looking away from the gummies format, multivitamin drops. These also contain sugar, but also have preservatives such as potassium sorbate, which isn’t necessarily completely lacking adverse effects, either; it is believed that too much intake of this preservative over a long period of time can lead to such symptoms as nausea, vomiting, and stomach upset. There have also been suggestions of a link between potassium sorbate and a slightly heightened risk of immune deficiency.
• The only suitable vitamin we did find on the market that received the Tonic ‘seal of approval’ was Wellbaby’s vitamin D supplement – although of course, this isn’t a multi

So, when it comes to finding a leading multivitamin that you can also expect to help provide the right immune support for kids, it is fair to say there isn’t exactly a wealth of brilliant options in stores.

That provides more reason for you to ensure your children are getting a good intake of vitamins from their diet, so that they don’t have to depend quite so much on a multivitamin in the first place in order to ensure optimum health.

As we have touched on previously, it can be tricky for anyone to get all the vitamins they need from their diet. And then, of course, there is the imperative to support your immune system, and that of your kids, right now. That might make our previous blog post on the natural improvement of the immune system an interesting read.

But something exciting is round the corner for Tonic as we are working on moving into kids vitamins, so make sure you sign up to our newsletter to keep updated on how we are going to solve the issue of kids vitamins.