Can you have your cake and eat it too??

This is an age old question with many answers depending on what you are talking about. The answer is yes when it comes in the form of a jar of gummy vitamins. Yummy gummy goodness AND packed with essential vitamins?  Sounds like a winner to me! 

These tiny morsels of nutritious goodness seem to be almost impossible to put down once you have eaten your “daily recommended” allotment. Being told I could only have a couple always reminds me of childhood when my parental units recited cautionary tales such as, “if you swallow that gum, it’s going to stay in your body forever and eventually make you very sick or clog up your intestines.”

I call double bullshit on that one…

I have been a self-professed gum swallower (only the sugary variety-yes, it’s icky but we all have our issues don’t we?)  for at least 30 years and I can tell you with 100% confidence that this is purely mythological nonsense created by clever parents so they don’t have to purchase multitudes of gum.  If this were the case, I would have been one dead squirrel long ago…plus, I have irrefutable proof that I need not go into further detail about at the moment 😉 

Just trust me on this one.

This leads to the question at hand-how much of a good thing is really too much?  Gummy vitamins have an entire back label dedicated solely to singing their nutritional praises.  I will admit, there has been more than one occasion  growing up (by more than one I mean every) in which my sister and I have consumed far greater than our measly directed daily dosage of two. Two!

Come on now…when you are accustomed to being allowed a whole package of gummy Life Savers, who can only eat two vitamin gummy bears?

After a bit of good, old fashioned Google research (side note-my search history makes me laugh and cringe in shame simultaneously), I have learned that Vitamins A, D, E and B6 are mean, spiteful little bastards if you consume them in mass quantities. 

Some particularly thrilling side effects?  Let’s see-painful, disfiguring dermatological lesions, vascular and tissue calcification, coma and death. Holy mother of Jesus! Granted, this is likely not an issue as I don’t eat truckloads of gummies consistently, but still a bit unnerving given the number I consumed as a child when mum wasn’t looking. 

Moral of this story my lovelies…eating the head and appendages of more than two gummy bear vitamins per day will kick the proverbial shit out of you over time! I suppose from now on I shall limit myself to one extra yummy gummy here and there…that should take decades to kill me. 

 Besides, Kelly Clarkson has repeatedly tried to tell us, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!!!”