The Truth About Children’s Supplements

Vitamins and mineral supplements are designed to plug a pre-existing hole in your diet. Should you be lactose intolerant and thereby not getting enough calcium into your diet then a calcium supplement may be exactly what the doctor ordered. There’s a different supplement for just about every conceivable deficiency and then there are the multivitamin tablets. These are meant as general all-purpose bandages for the balance of your diet but the fact is the evidence for their benefits is so slim it’s almost non-existent. Unless you’re genuinely showing a deficiency in something, doctors are very unlikely to suggest supplements.

If supplements aren’t of much worth for adults then what benefit do they have for children? Almost none, is the answer. There’s no evidence that general supplements are of any benefit of all for kids. There are a huge number of chewable, sweet flavoured supplements on the market specifically aimed at children but that doesn’t mean that they’re worth anything. It simply means that people will buy them. Corporations and companies aren’t interested in whether they’re actually making your lives better, they’re interested in making money. Sure, they don’t really want to hurt you in the process but there’s very little they won’t do for a quick buck.

The fact is children can get everything they need from a healthy, well balanced diet. A well respected American paediatrician said that in all his years of working with kids (37 in total) he’s never seen genuine deficiencies without an underlying condition to cause them. He went on to say that children would almost have to work at developing deficiencies in their diets and that even those with less than perfect eating habits shouldn’t have much of an issue finding the balance. So what purpose can those brightly coloured, sweetly flavoured multivitamins really fulfil? None at all really.