Nutrition Nugget: To Eat or Not to Eat…Gummy Vitamins
Bite-Size Reads for Your Health and Your Waistline
Remember those Flintstones chewable vitamins? You may have seen them on store shelves or eaten them yourself as a kid. They’ve now evolved into sweet, chewy, gummy vitamins that look and taste like candy. These gummies are often presented as an alternative to choking down oversized, nausea-inducing pills, but are they too good to be true? If you’re thinking twice about the “healthy” gummies sitting in your cabinet, you’re in the right place!
Make it a habit to always read nutrition labels, even for vitamins! There’s a reason those gummies taste so good. Even the organic brands at the health store tend to have sweeteners and fruit juice at the top of their ingredients list. Additives like high fructose corn syrup and cane sugar contribute about 3–5 grams of added sugar to the nutrition label. While they aren’t as sweet as most fruit snacks or candy, you could unknowingly be impacting your health goals by eating these hidden sugars.
Gummy vitamin companies seem to be moving away from using hydrogenated oils to achieve that chewy consistency, but the substitutes they’re turning to aren’t much better (yikes!). Instead, the industry is beginning to use sunflower and palm oil. Though it’s great that these oils aren’t hydrogenated (turned from liquid into solid by adding hydrogen), palm oil is still a saturated fat and thus can be damaging to our health if consumed in excess.
If you or your child have certain allergies, that’s another reason you’ll want to look carefully at what’s in your gummies. The number one brand of kids’ vitamins claims on their website that they are free of gluten and gelatin. While reading the label, however, I saw gelatin was listed as an ingredient. It also contained wheat, which has gluten! Many companies use gluten and pectin as a way to create a gummy texture (instead of the hydrogenated oil), so keep an eye out.
There’s another type of gummy vitamin additive you’ll want to look for: wax, which is used to coat the outside of gummies to make them less sticky. Waxes such as paraffin, carnauba, and beeswax are indigestible, yet commonly used in vitamin gummies. A study showed that these three waxes did not dissolve in either gastric secretions or duodenum secretions, which is a problem if they are coating our vitamins! This means our digestive system can’t break-down the coating to absorb what’s inside and they can potentially go through our entire system largely intact. You now have some expensive poop!
You may have also heard that carnauba wax is used on cars and surfboards and is found in shoe polish, dental floss, and instrument polish. Carnauba wax is favored in non-food industries due to its glossy finish, high melting point (180 to 187 degrees Fahrenheit or 82 to 86 degrees Celsius), water insolubility, and tendency to dull instead of flaking away. Carnauba wax is FDA approved, but we should still be wary of such ingredients that find their way into our “healthful” foods.
While multivitamins are a great way to fill in the gaps of your food choices and our food supply to stay strong and healthy, gummy vitamins tend to include many unnecessary additives that could do more harm than good. I applaud your commitment to your health. The extra effort to take a vitamin does not go unnoticed! But If those flintstone gummies are made with unnecessary additives, then maybe yabadabadon’t.
