Would you like vitamins with that?

Marketing people globally are always looking for those specific keywords that convince us to buy their products.  Vitamin or Vita is one such word.  It is designed to make us feel as if we are really doing something good for our health by purchasing the product, but most of the time we're not!

There are the obvious ones such as Vitamin Water and Vitamin Gum, that most of us are quite aware are merely a marketing ploy, but then there are others that are a bit more conspicuous such as products like Vita Gummies that you would actually expect to provide a decent amount of vitamins as that is the main purpose of them, however they are also sadly lacking. 

Lets look at the obvious ones first:

Vitamin Water

You've got to be suspicious of a brand owned by Coca Cola trying to market vitamins.
Here's the label from one particular flavour of Vitamin Water.  Notice that there are 2.5 servings per bottle.  The majority of people buying this will not consume it over 2.5 sittings, so it's fair to assume that we need to multiply the figures by 2.5 to see what's in the whole bottle.
In one bottle you will consume 125 calories and a whopping 32.5g of sugar (around 8 teaspoons).
In terms of the vitamins - most of the vitamins in this bottle are ones that are easily obtained from other sources that don't come with a massive serve of sugar at the same time.  For example
-  you can get the same amount of vitamin C from one kiwi fruit
- you can get 4 x the amount of vitamin A from a serve of sweet potato (plus the same amount of magnesium, 1/2 the B6 and almost 1/2 the B3).
- you can get your B-vitamins and zinc from a daily serve of meat (or for the vegetarians from alternate protein sources such as legumes, tofu, quinoa etc (B12 can be a bit trickier for vegetarians - but that's a topic for another day - let's just say for now that Vitamin Water is NOT the best way to get your B12!)
These are just 3 foods and I haven't tried to match up everything in the label - it's just to give you an idea of how easy it actually is to get the same amount of nutrients from actual food.  And real food has added benefits such as fibre, phytonutrients etc.

VITAMIN GUM

While Vitamin Gum may not have sugar, it does have some really nasty ingredients such as sorbitol, colours #102 (tartrazine) and #133 (brilliant blue), sweeteners 955 (sucralose) and 961 (neotame).
And from the table above, you can see that the amount of vitamins in a serve (2 pieces) are so minimal that there really is no justification for buying it at all!

VITA GUMMIES

Out of all 3 products I've mentioned, this is probably the worst purely because it's sole purpose is to provide vitamins, yet it doesn't do a very good job of it at all!
Let's compare these Kids Smart Vita Gummies to a practitioner brand kids powdered multi vitamin to see how they stack up.

So as you can see Vita Gummies are really nothing more than glorified lollies that are cleverly marketed.

So it's pretty clear to see that these products are really not worth the money.  If you really, genuinely are in need of additional vitamins or minerals - here's some tips:
-  don't take them with a side helping of sugar 
-  be an informed consumer
- don't fall for the tricks that the advertising industry use to convince us to buy products
- ALWAYS read the labels to see what you're really buying.  
and lastly.......
- don't trust brands owned by Coca Cola to keep you healthy!!!


Rebecca Milham
Naturopath & Nutritionist

The Natural Health and Wellness Clinic
www.thenaturalclinic.com.au
www.rebeccamilham.com.au

(03) 5977 7342