By Nancy Webster

Siren-like wailing rose and fell from the kitchen table. Then, shaking uncontrollably, my husband collapsed on the floor in front of the sink.

For the past ten years, the scene of my then five-year-old daughter choking down our family food supplement while my husband laughed himself into oblivion has been one of our favorite home videos. Every time we watch, memories of gagging on green slime overcome us. But what a different scene the camera would capture nowadays.

“Andrew, close the refrigerator! We’re not through with dinner yet.”

We routinely call our current five-year-old son back to the table until it’s time to take vitamins. You’d think he was pulling ice cream out of the freezer for dessert, but what he wants is the chilled Beeyoutiful SuperKids vitamins our children take after dinner.

It’s the orange, sweet flavor they love, reminiscent of that yummy, chewable baby aspirin my husband and I remember taking as children. The sweetness comes from xylitol rather than sugar (see the Beeyoutiful summer ’07 catalog to review the cavity-prevention merits of xylitol). And the orange taste comes from real orange juice. Our children think of it as a dessert supplement! But I think it’s simply the best bunch of kid’s vitamins ever devised.

The Elusive Nutrition Dream
Ever since high school I’ve read about ways to improve health. The problem is, time and again, Real Life gets in the way of a perfect diet.

Before children, my husband and I lived in Los Angeles where ambitious “gardening” would have been to grow a tomato plant in a pot on the front steps of our apartment. A cross-country move gave us more outdoor space, but our subdivision yard in Atlanta still yielded only enough room for a small organic garden. I augmented our home-grown produce by hauling our growing crop of babies to the local farmer’s market every week. We had more money for groceries, but since I spent most of my time nursing babies and chasing tricycles around the neighborhood instead of soaking and prepping healthy foods, the perfect diet still remained out of reach.

But now that we live on a farm all the challenges are gone—not! Life-long city slickers don’t become country folk overnight. We often can’t find where our free-range chickens ranged to do their laying. For the frustratingly brief time our cow was giving milk, she boasted interminable mastitis. The one time we actually achieved a sizable garden, it was so successful we couldn’t put up the food fast enough and much of the produce rotted on the ground. And fresh, wholesome meat? My daughter’s sheep became pets—and you can’t eat your pets! Honey? My son’s bees either swarmed or died after just one good season of production. The challenge of converting to country living is exacerbated by my homeschooling of eight children (several with special needs) and helping my husband with his business. So even here, the perfect diet eludes us.

Unfortunately, finding the right supplements to help isn’t easy. Many sold on the cheap are made from synthetic combinations that fool your body into thinking it’s got the real thing. What’s worse, many inexpensive vitamins are chock full (so to speak) of artificial colors, flavors, and sweeteners, and some are stuffed with fillers like wheat gluten or yeast that can trigger allergies.

Even some of the good health enhancers are not without problems. Our kids complain about the stifling odors of essential oils, and if you take five or six different specific-purpose vitamins, opening and closing the containers can seem like the job that never ends. Juicing is a superb way to complement meals, but the mega-amounts of produce and the hours required to juice for a large family each week make regular juicing prohibitive.

When my years-long search finally led me to SuperKids from Beeyoutiful, my biggest problems were solved. These liquid multivitamins contain all the ingredients you want in a single supplement, plus generous extras, all derived from real food substances.

A Radically Good Supplement
Free radicals. You’ve likely heard much about how they affect our health—and for good reason. Free radicals are damaged, lonely cell molecules missing an electron mate because of too much oxygen. This misalignment is caused by things like poor diet and chemical pollution. These free agents go crazy in body cells until they can steal an electron from some unsuspecting stable molecule. The theft, of course, then makes the once stable molecule lonely and crazy, too. This chain reaction damages cells and compromises the overall health of your body.

I first learned about these bad guys when our daughter with Down syndrome was seven months old. At the time she had “failure to thrive,” so under the supervision of a specialist, we began what is called targeted nutritional intervention—giving her selected vitamin supplements as antioxidants to counter the negative effects of too much cellular oxygen. (People with Down syndrome are especially susceptible to free radical damage because of their extra chromosome.) Within a month of starting the vitamin plan, Grace began growing noticeably. She gained alertness and motor skills by the day. We followed the regimen for more than three years, and today, at age eleven, she is extremely healthy and high functioning.

SuperKids is perfectly equipped for free radical warfare. Although a human body can produce some antioxidants for itself, it must have the input of foods containing antioxidants like vitamins C and E, bioflavanoids, and carotenes to successfully wage a serious health-building war. These vitamins stop the free radical chain reaction by providing an electron to stabilize the molecules. Since few of us maintain a perfect diet, our bodies need these reinforcements.

Neutralizing free radicals provides long-term benefits such as decreased tumor rates, heart attack prevention, and increased longevity. The exciting benefits arise because antioxidants affect metabolic processes that bring about changes we can feel and see in our physical health (better joint movement, improved skin conditions, faster healing), our emotional health (better ability to cope with stress), and our psychological state (increased alertness).  It’s not just old people who need this assistance!

The list of antioxidant ingredients in SuperKids is phenomenal. Lycopene, for example, is extracted from ripe tomatoes, and it exhibits the highest overall antioxidant activity of any carotenoid. Lycopene is especially known for reducing cancers—a protection needed even for children these days.

The aloe vera juice in SuperKids treats bugs and internal boo-boos largely by smoothing out the digestion, thereby maximizing the bioavailability of the included vitamins and minerals.  Your children will enjoy happier and more regular trips to the bathroom, thanks to aloe’s helpful work in the colon. Meanwhile, the manganese, zinc, selenium, and other colloidal minerals plus the Vitamin D in SuperKids enhance your children’s absorption of calcium. This helps bone growth which takes place the fastest between ages four and 12. Healthy bones are much better at surviving bike wrecks and falls from tree houses.

Some moms say their children are more active after taking SuperKids. I suspect this is because these children are experiencing cell improvements, and the moms may be seeing for the first time what their children are like when their little bodies are in prime working order.

There’s not a food out there that could provide so many health benefits to my children for the twenty-cents-per-serving cost of SuperKids. Knowing how wonderful Beeyoutiful’s SuperMom vitamins have been for me (I’m coping much better with Real Life now, even as the old-lady hormones rage. And SuperMom vitamins reversed the extreme hair loss of my 16 year-old-daughter!), I am thrilled to have SuperKids formulated especially for my little ones—and for my niece, whose idea of vegetables is French fries!

Beeyoutiful vitamins are now a family affair, and I enjoy more peace of mind knowing that gaps in the family diet have been adequately and easily filled. But I must admit there’s not as much to laugh about in our more recent videos of vitamin taking. Which reminds me: we still need to submit that slime-eating scene to Funniest Home Videos. It just might be a winner.

Beeyoutiful Products Mentioned in This Article:

• SuperKids
• SuperMom