Healthy Kids

Walk into any pharmacy, health food store or even supermarket supplement aisle and you’ll find countless options of supplements for your children. They each profess to be the tastiest, healthiest or the most like their favourite cartoon character. But how can you tell which one is right for your child, and what supplements do growing bodies really need?

Some key vitamins and minerals to look out for…

1. Calcium – This is probably the most famous mineral that children need, after all, they’ve got a lot of growing to do which means bones need to keep up. Calcium is one of the main building blocks of bones, which means too little calcium and bones won’t grow as much and they won’t be as strong (which helps prevent fractures). There are lots of natural sources for calcium such as dairy products, beans, lentils and some nuts, and there’s plenty of kid-friendly foods that have added calcium for just this purpose, such as cereals and juices. However, it’s worth looking at how much they’re really providing, as just 15% of the recommended intake is enough to claim it is ‘fortified with calcium’. There are plenty of supplements out there with calcium for kids; we would recommend looking out for a good multimineral, as this will provide all the minerals a growing body needs.
2. Vitamin D – And speaking of calcium, did you know the body needs a healthy level of vitamin D to properly absorb the calcium provided to it? So not enough vitamin D means not enough calcium. This is why you’ll often see vitamin D added to milk, alternate milks and cereals. Unfortuantely, these fortified foods often use Vitamin D2, not D3. Vitamin D2 is the form found mostly in plants (and is cheaper to produce as it can be easily synthesised) whereas D3, also known as cholecalciferol, is the form the human body takes from sunlight, so we are more adept at utilising it. We recommend looking out for foods or supplements that use Vitamin D3.
3. B & C Vitamins – The full list of functions these vitamins affect are too long to type out, but it includes rather important things like the immune system, nervous system, metabolism, mental health and hormone regulation. The real kicker though – they’re water soluble. This means that they don’t stay in the body long as they’ll pass out through sweat and urine. To keep healthy levels then one needs a regular source of these key vitamins through diet or supplements. A diet that’s rich in plenty of fresh (mostly raw) vegetables, meat, dairy and whole grains is likely to get a good regular mix of the B vitamins and vitamin C, but for fussy-eaters in particular a supplement may be needed. B vitamins have a strong taste, so most gummies and vitamin drinks for kids use tiny amounts (and omit some B’s altogether). We recommend trying a whole food drink or capsule, such G&G’s Kid’s Rainbow Food, which uses the power of a blend of natural superfoods and vegetables to provide all these vitamins and more in a palatable form.

The right form of supplement…

There’s plenty of forms out there, but as you’re presumably here for our opinion on what’s best, here it is.

1. Gummies – These are increasingly popular as it becomes cheaper and easier to make them, and as popular cartoon characters give out more licenses to use their image to sell to impressionable kids. There’s a few problems though. First, they often contain sugar. And those that don’t often use artificial sweeteners which have their own issues (and can even be carcinogenic) so check the ingredients carefully (and remember, sucrose = fancy word for sugar). Then, because of the taste of many key vitamins, they use tiny amounts. Yes, children need less as their bodies are smaller, but they’re also bodies that are growing fast and so burn up certain vitamins and minerals at an alarming pace. Finally, we believe it send a bad message to kids as it creates the impression that sweets (because these gummies are designed to taste like a sweet) are good for them. Gummies are the easy way to get some vitamins and minerals into really fussy kids, but there are better ways.
2. Tablets – These are similar to gummies, in that they need to taste good and that (often) means low levels of vitamins and high levels of sugar or sweeteners. They also need to be bound together (requiring binding agents) and coated in something so they don’t release their payload too early. So once again, better than nothing but we’d suggest looking for something cleaner.
3. Liquids – This is a relatively new field of supplementation. Again the issue of taste rears up, so most multivitamins either taste foul or don’t do too much good. There are some, like Better You’s Vitamin D3 spray, which taste great and are so easy to give your child, but unfortunately it only covers the one vitamin. There are some very clever things being done where tiny cells of fat (lipids) are used to coat the vitamins (known as liposomal supplements), which helps with taste and delivery to the gut, but buyer beware – this process is expensive, so if you find a liposomal liquid supplement with a low price tag it probably means it’s just been shaken around with some fat cells, and not truly coated at a molecular level. The science behind this is very long, but trust me when I say it’s not the same thing. We would suggest finding a good drink powder or liquid, and finding a healthy way (such as a vegetable and fruit smoothie) to introduce it to your child.
4. Capsules – In many ways these are the holy grail of supplement delivery. The capsule shell hides the taste of the vitamin powder inside, and (most of the time) they don’t contain anything else, just the active ingredients. That means more bang for your buck, and a higher quality of product for your child. The drawback? They have to swallow them. It takes a bit of practice for children to stop the back of the tongue automatically catching that capsule before it goes down the back of their throat. But my experience is that with a bit of practice (usually wasting 2 or 3 capsules) they learn to do it with a tiny capsule (known as a Size 4, or 40mg capsule shell). Once they’ve used a tiny capsule for a while, they can generally handle the larger ones with ease. This way the whole world of vitamin and mineral supplements is open to them, and you don’t have to conflate sweets with vitamins, or spend a fortune making fresh smoothies every morning!

So my final suggestion… if your child is old enough, find a good capsule brand that doesn’t use magnesium stearate (more on this another time), check they do a child’s multivitamin / multimineral in a 40mg capsule shell, and teach them to swallow one with a drink of water. It’s like riding a bike, it takes some perseverance, but once they’ve got it, it’s easy and they’ll have it forever. If they just can’t do it or you’re not comfortable with the idea, find a drink powder or liquid that covers all the bases and find a delivery method (that doesn’t contain so much sugar as to defeat the purpose) that they’ll enjoy enough to have it daily.

Author:
Alex – Father of 3 with over 10 years experience in the supplement industry.