Gummy minerals have quickly become popular with children who struggle to swallow pills, particularly those who cannot. While they do offer health benefits, experts still advocate sourcing your vitamins and minerals from whole food sources as the preferred approach.
Sweeteners in many gummies contain sugar, which may aggravate specific medical conditions. When selecting the ideal option for yourself, look for options with less or no added artificial ingredients.
Vitamins
Gummy vitamins come in all sorts of varieties depending on their manufacturer, from multivitamin blends to targeted minerals like calcium and potassium. Furthermore, various sweeteners may be used, and those living with chronic illnesses like diabetes should check the label to make sure that any sugar used does not exceed your recommended daily allowance.
Fat-soluble vitamins A, D and E may reach toxic levels if overconsumed for extended periods. Signs of overdose include diarrhea, abdominal discomfort and vomiting.
Minerals such as iron can also be toxic in large doses if consumed at inappropriate levels. While iron helps transport oxygen through the blood, too much may lead to nausea and vomiting. Over time, excess iron may interfere with how easily zinc and copper are absorbed by your body – thus making a balanced diet that includes plenty of fruits and vegetables essential in order to attain sufficient levels of these essential vitamins and minerals.
Minerals
Minerals are naturally occurring elements and compounds with an ordered internal atomic structure and distinct geometric form. Over 2,000 minerals have been identified; most are inorganic, meaning they do not originate in living organisms; most can be found on Earth’s crust as metallic or nonmetallic deposits.
Minerals exist in one of four states: solid, liquid, gas or plasma. Solid matter’s atoms are tightly packed together, which allows identification by crystal structure or by other properties such as its luster, streak, hardness or magnetism.
The lustre is how light reflects off of a mineral’s surface; streaking refers to any powdered color left when rubbed across an unglazed ceramic plate; hardness measures its resistance to scratching; and cleavage is how easily its breaks along weak planes such as mica group where black and brown phyllic mica peels away into flat sheets from white-gray muscovite; magnetism may occur with certain iron-rich minerals like galena or carnotite.
Toxicity
Consuming too many gummy supplements can result in vitamin and mineral overdose, so it is crucial to follow the recommended dosage when purchasing any kind of supplement, but especially those marketed toward children, who might view them as candy and consume excessive quantities – especially fat-soluble vitamins such as A, D, E and K which accumulate in fat stores in our bodies, leading to potential overdose.
Gummies, although nutritious, often contain sugar, sugar alcohols and artificial colorings that interfere with absorption of certain essential minerals like iron, zinc and copper. Furthermore, gummy supplements blur the line between food and drug; healthy supplements should taste bad enough to discourage overconsumption while not giving kids false security and prompting them to overindulge in unnecessary consumption. Toxicity refers to how harmful substances or mixtures of substances affect an organism (including humans), with five categories ranging from acute to chronic harm being caused.
Overconsumption
Gummy vitamins can be an effective way to encourage children to take their supplements, but their candy-like texture and marketing strategy could pose unintended problems. Vitamin and mineral levels found in gummy vitamins could degrade faster than pills, potentially causing overdose or toxicity issues.
Consuming too many gummy vitamins at one sitting may lead to stomach upset and diarrhoea; however, eating them over an extended period can increase your risk of chronically elevated vitamin and mineral levels that could eventually lead to liver failure and even coma.
Addition of minerals to gummy vitamins can be challenging as their larger molecules tend to alter flavor profiles and alter taste profiles. Iron, for instance, has a metallic taste which can be difficult to mask. Some manufacturers such as Nature Made have managed this challenge successfully with their mixed berry-flavored iron gummies and by creating high quality melatonin gummies with natural raspberry flavorings.
