We’re living in an age of information abundance.  Unfortunately, not all the information that bombards us is of equal quality.  Especially before you go panicking (or getting too excited) about health-related information, read closely and carefully.  Often an article will mislead, either unintentionally (through poor writing), or by design (through clever manipulation of words).

This article about gummy vitamins was posted in one of my Facebook communities the other day, after having caused some parents great concern.  Careful reading, however, illuminates the fact that the claims are not all what they initially appear.  I thought it might be helpful to read through it together, as an example.

Overview of the Article (Let’s call this “pre-reading.”)

The article is this one from Daily Mail: Why gummy vitamins do NOT work — and ingredients that make them tasty do more harm than good 

First, let’s consider the source.  Daily Mail is not particularly known for high-quality, trustworthy articles.  That doesn’t mean anything posted there is necessarily wrong, but it does mean we should consider it with a healthy dose of skepticism.

If we check out the author a little further (clicking on her name will show her other articles at Daily Mail), we’ll see that nearly all of them are “click bait”-type articles, some with some pretty sketchy-looking headlines.

We’ll also notice with our first careful read-through that there are a lot of grammar fails in the article.  Now, I’ll be the first to say that typos happen and even the best author can have mistakes in her work.  But when very bad grammar is pervasive in an article, we ought to wonder how much of an eye the author has for checking details.  Grammatically bad articles are the stuff of “Nigerian” email scams.  This ought to make us pay a little more attention to whether the author has backed up her claims with trustworthy evidence.

Line by Line – the Bullet Points

Now let’s work our way through the article (or at least the first portion of it), line by line.  Essentially what I’m going to do is take each piece treated as a “paragraph” in the original (usually a sentence each) and look at it.  First there are some bullet points preceding the title.

Tests conducted by ConsumerLab.com found that gummy vitamins do not contain the amounts of nutrients marketed on the labels

So far, so good.  We would hope to find this explained in more detail in the article, but this is a good start.

In a test that compared 50 different multivitamins, 80 percent of the gummy vitamins did not meet the standards of dietary supplements

If 80% of the gummy vitamins did not meet the standards, 20% did, a fact which is glossed over.  So the issue is not with “gummy vitamins,” necessarily, but with “many gummy vitamins.”  Also, which standards?

Some of the vitamins had too much Vitamin A in them which can cause dangerous side effects such as heart-disease and nausea

How much too much?  Which vitamin A?  Not all vitamin A causes side effects like those mentioned.  Synthetic vitamin A does.  Natural vitamin A does not.  Most “vitamin A” in multivitamins is not technically vitamin A at all; it’s beta-carotenes, which are actually a precursor to vitamin A.  It isn’t always converted effectively by the body, so often a lot is included in the hopes that a portion of it will be converted to vitamin A.  All of this means we lack the necessary information to draw an educated conclusion here.

A New York nutritionist said that most of the nutrients gets masked by preservatives and sugars that make the gummies taste good

Apart from the weird grammar (maybe she was going for agreement between “most” and “gets”?), this is also a fine statement, ‘though tentative.  (We’re going to want to see who this nutritionist is, so we know s/he really exists.)

Line by Line — The Article Itself

Now we get into the meat of the actual article.

Chewing gummy vitamins do not provide the body with the proper nutrients, according to new research.

We have a grammar error here in the very first line.  Factually, though, it’s okay, as this is an introductory statement.  We’ll need to wait and see and if it holds up based on the evidence later in the article.

Though they may be sweet and tasty, tests found that they either have too many or not enough of the essential nutrients and minerals that are marketed on the label.

At this point, I’m asking questions that I expect to see answers to a little later.  Which tests?  What “nutrients and minerals” are we talking about?  I’m also starting to wonder about the wording.  Why “nutrients and minerals”?  Minerals are nutrients.  Presumably she means “vitamins and minerals.” And does she actually mean “too many” or does she mean “too much”?  (That isn’t as nitpicky as it sounds.  Those would be two different things.  “Too many” nutrients would mean, for example, including 10 different vitamins where there should only be 8.  “Too much” would be containing too large a portion of any one nutrient.)

Tests conducted by ConsumerLab.com compared 50 different multivitamins and found that 80 percent of the gummies did not meet the standards of dietary supplements.

This is basically a restatement of our bullet point from earlier, so we have the same observation that 20% of the gummies did meet these mysterious standards.  We also want to know who or what is ConsumerLab.com?  Which multivitamins did they test?  What about the non-gummy vitamins — how did they fare?

And while many people turn to gummies as an alternative to swallowing pills to get their daily dose, nutritionists warn that the sugary coating may be doing more harm than good.

Well, sure.  Sugar isn’t great for health; one doesn’t need to be a nutritionist to know that.

Photo caption:  A file image shows the sugary coating and food coloring in gummy vitamins that takes nutrients out of them and make it hard for the body to absorb, according to a New York nutritionist

This doesn’t really make sense.  (The social media-shared version of the caption is slightly different, and communicates this idea even more directly.  “…the preservatives and sugars in gummy vitamins take the nutrients out of them…”)  It is true that sugars and additives impact how something is used by the body.  Some substances in the body may even draw upon the body’s nutrient stores.  But it is literally impossible for a substance in a vitamin to remove some other substance from the vitamin.

If that gummy sits on your shelf, and the sugar in it “takes the nutrients” from it, where is it going to take them?

According to the US Food and Drug Administration, our bodies need 13 vitamins from our diet, fortified foods or dietary supplements that multivitamins are meant to supply.

“According to the US Food and Drug Administration” sounds very official, but this reference isn’t very clear.  Is she referring to some FDA-specified list of ingredients that multivitamins should have?  Or is she merely name-dropping the FDA to point out 13 vitamins that we know the human body uses, with a presumption that every multivitamin should have them?

The FDA does have fact sheets about multivitamin supplements, for both consumers and health care practitioners, neither of which specifies a list of vitamins that should be included.  (They do hit on some highlights of what to look for.)  It isn’t even made clear what vitamins are being referenced as “the” 13.  I assume she’s referring to vitamins A, C, D, E, and K, and the B vitamins thiamin (B1), riboflavin (B2), niacin (B3), pantothenic acid (B5), biotin, B6, folate (B9), and B12.

But gummy vitamins may be replacing their nutrients with unhealthy ingredients that make them tasty.

I think this may be what the photo caption intended to say — that unhealthy ingredients like sugar displace nutrients in gummy vitamins.  This is a legitimate concern, and worthy of consideration (although I believe it needs to be considered on a product-by-product basis, not as a sweeping generalization).

ConsumerLab.com purchased 50 popular multivitamin products, including five brands of gummy vitamins, in the United States and Canada and tested them for several key nutrients.
Twelve of the multivitamins contained 24 percent fewer nutrients than what was listed on the labels and as high as 157 percent more than listed.

“Several key nutrients” is rather vague.  What did they test, and what did they not test?  Again, we have a grammatical question regarding amount/number language.  Does the author really mean that they contained 24 percent fewer nutrients but 157% more of each of the nutrients they did have?  Or does she mean that some contained “24 percent less” of a given nutrient than claimed, while others contained 157 percent more?  There’s a lot of confusion introduced here, and it’s very unclear what the actual findings were.  (Our best bet would be to look for the original results.)

Also of note: Only five of the 50 vitamins tested were gummies, but 12 of the vitamins tested fell outside the expected parameters.  That means at least 7 of those were not gummies.  Thus, this clearly is not an issue restricted to gummies; it’s a multivitamin issue, period.

Most gummy vitamins are not approved by the FDA, meaning they are not tested in the way that other medications are to coincide with their packaging label.

I’m not sure what she means by “not approved by the FDA.”  Not approved for what?  Not approved to be sold?  That would be potentially be a problem, but it doesn’t seem likely, or they’d all be in the midst of major lawsuit right now.  Not approved as a treatment for anything?  Of course not, no supplements are – including non-gummy multivitamins.  To the best of my knowledge, the FDA does not test any supplements to verify that the quantities of active ingredients are as shown on the label.  Many supplements do, however, use outside labs to confirm this.  If you use a good quality vitamin, you may have even thrown away the slip of paper verifying the supplement’s contents and not even looked at it.  I recommend sticking with a good-quality, trustworthy brand and not relying on typical drugstore brands (which are often low in quality).

The tests found that Centrum MultiGummies for Adults is missing 10 of vitamins and NatureMade Multi Adult Gummies and Vitafusion Multivites lack nine of them.

Define “missing.”  The article implies that there are 10 (for Centrum) or nine (for NatureMade or Vitafusion) vitamins listed on the label which are not found in the vitamins, but it doesn’t actually come out and say that.  Are these “missing” vitamins nutrients the labels claim they contain, or simply nutrients the author believes “should” be in a multivitamin?  Only the former would be a real problem, because consumers choose which supplements to buy based on what they find on the labels.

Smarty Pants Adult Complete didn’t have vitamins B-1, B-3, and K, as well as the minerals iron, magnesium, copper, selenium and chromium, which are commonly found in multivitamins.

We have the same question here.  Did the label claim the vitamins contain these nutrients?  I don’t have a bottle of SmartyPants gummies here, but my sources (friends who have these vitamins at home) say these things are not listed on the label.  In other words, they knew full well they weren’t getting these particular nutrients when they chose these supplements.  (As a side note, these gummies also don’t contain any sugar in the conventional sense.  They’re entirely sweetened with monk fruit extract.)

New York nutritionist Nikki Ostrower and owner of NAO Wellness told Daily Mail Online that she never recommends gummy vitamins to her clients.
‘A lot of gummy vitamins have artificial fillers in them like food coloring, some have high fructose corn syrup and lots of preservatives,’ she said.

Ah, the mysterious nutritionist does make an appearance!  So she is real; that’s good.  I largely agree with her and imagine she’s much more comfortable with this quote than the weird photo caption that was sort of attributed to her earlier in the article.

Summary

There’s more to the article, and we could keep going, but I think this has adequately illustrated how critical reading works.  (A lot of the next section is expanding on the nutritionist’s statements, and it is somewhat more solid, overall, than the earlier part of the article.)

There are some good observations made in the article.  And I’m not suggesting that gummy vitamins are necessarily an ideal option!  Generally speaking, if you can take a capsule or even a chewable, you’re going to get a higher proportion of nutrients, a lower proportion of fillers, and a lot less sugar.  But it varies.  Some capsules are pretty junky and useless, and some gummies are carefully formulated with minimal junk.  If a gummy form makes the difference between whether you (or your child, or your aging parent, or whomever) take a vitamin or not, then a (good quality) gummy may well be worth the trade-off.

Read labels, and make educated decisions.  Read news (carefully) and make educated decisions.