Are the Wrong Kids Getting Vitamins?

Feb. 3, 2009— -- As scientific debate continues over the importance of vitamin supplements, a new study suggests that the children receiving them stand to benefit the least.

"Parents that had children that had healthier diets, higher milk intake, higher fiber intake ... these were the children that seemed to take [the vitamins] most frequently," said Dr. Ulfat Shaikh, one of the study's lead authors.

Shaikh and her colleagues at the medical schools for the University of California-Davis and the University of Rochester in New York used questionnaires, household interviews and medical examinations from the more than 10,000 participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examinations Survey.

Overall, they found that children with better diets and who were white, American-born and from higher income families were both more likely to be taking vitamins and less likely to actually need them.

"It seems clear that children who are at risk for [vitamin and mineral] deficiencies are taking them the least," said Dr. Thomas Badger, director of the Arkansas Children's Nutrition Center, who was not involved with the study. "That does not surprise me at all but seeing the data confirms it."

The American Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend routine use of vitamin supplements in children. But the study indicated their use was widespread. More than one-third of children in the study had taken a supplement in the previous month.

More than 22 percent of children who lived below the poverty line had taken a supplement, while 43 percent of children at twice the poverty income level had taken one.

"Potentially, poverty is a barrier to children who do need these supplements using them," co-author Shaikh said.

She noted that the risk factors of lower income children might prompt clinicians to recommend vitamin supplements.

But she noted that better quality food would be more helpful in reducing nutritional deficits than simply taking vitamin supplements.

"Experts do say that a healthy diet supplement in a pill form, in a tablet form, does not completely replace all the goodness that a healthy diet brings," Shaikh said. "These articles of food have other nutrition, have other nutrients that the pill form doesn't completely compensate for."