Are you considering a multivitamin supplement for your child?

My first advice would be to think twice and take a good look at the overall diet and eating patterns of your child. Generally speaking, a balanced diet which includes plenty of fruits and vegetables is enough to give your child a healthy dose of essential vitamins and minerals. Still, as I wrote in my post 5 reasons to consider a multivitamin supplement, it may be worthwhile to consider a daily multivitamin supplement in some cases. Of course, you should first consult with your Pediatrician to confirm if this is a good idea and get a recommendation from them.

So how do you select a good multivitamin supplement?

To answer this question, I decided to visit my local Walgreens store. Although, it was not a surprise to find many different brands of vitamins for children, it was quite hard to figure out how they compared to each other in terms of essential vitamins and minerals. The packaging was very appealing with some of childrens’ favorite cartoon characters such as Disney’s Princess, Dora the Explorer, Flintstones and Thomas and Friends! I am sure it is quite tempting to simply pick a bottle that shows your child’s favorite character, but unless you really look at the nutrition information label at the back and compare the amounts of each vitamin and mineral to the daily recommended amount, you may not get a good value for your money! That is why I decided to prepare an easy color-coded chart for this post that you can use to select a good quality multivitamin.

Here are some of the major brands of multivitamins

• Centrum Kids – Dora the Explorer
• Disney Princess Gummies
• Thomas and Friends Gummies
• Flintstones Gummies
• Flintstones Plus Immunity Support
• Flintstones Complete

$6.99 for 60 tablets	$6.99 for 60 gummies
$6.99 for 60 gummies	$16.99 for 15 gummies
$7.49 for 60 tablets	$7.49 for 60 tablets

Here is a comparison chart for these multivitamins

This chart compares these major brands of multivitamins against the Recommended Daily Intakes (RDI’s) for different vitamins and minerals. “Red” means the amount is less than 10% of the RDI, “Yellow” means the amount is between 10 – 90%, and “Green” means the amount is 90% or more.I should add that this color coding is quite arbitrary and based on my personal assessment of what I would look for in a multivitamin.

The more “Green” and “Yellow” boxes a vitamin has, the better it is in terms of the total amount of vitamins and minerals. In particular, I would pay more attention to Vitamin C, D, different Vitamins B, Calcium, Iron and Zinc. Based on this comparison, Centrum Kids and Flintstones Complete provide nearly a complete mix of vitamins and minerals.

Which multivitamin supplement are you using? Please share in your comments below.