‘Open your beak!’ I command my four young children, standing at the kitchen counter with an array of bottles and jars around me.
Like baby birds readying for a juicy worm they open their little mouths, into which I put a spoonful of liquid multivitamin, a spritz of blueberry-and-bubblegum flavoured vitamin D and a dollop of manuka honey. Next up it’s their ‘fishies’, a couple of fish-shaped jelly sweets which come in marvellous flavours such as strawberry and tutti-frutti, all the better to disguise the daily dose of omega-3 within.
To round things off they might have a sachet of probiotic powder snuck into a glass of apple juice or – if they have refused the multivitamin – a vitamin C gummy in the shape of Peppa Pig.
Thus, I hope, I send my children into the world as defended as they can be against winter colds, their guts a-brim with good bacteria, their vitamin D stores topped up to see them through this grey, gloom-a-thon January.
Sound like the barmy routine of a health-anxious nut? Apparently I’m not alone. A recent survey reveals that the vast majority of parents – 92 per cent – have bought vitamins for their children over the past year.
Where it seems I am an outlier is how much I cough up for this cough-proofing regime.
The average annual spend is £234. A year? That wouldn’t see us through two months.
Totting up the totals for all the vitamins I give my four children over a year, I am shocked to find it amounts to around £2,000. I shudder to see it in black and white.
Vitamins for children often come in the form of jelly sweets with marvellous flavours such as strawberry and tutti-frutti (picture posed by model)
I could buy a used but decent Ford Fiesta for that. Or a weekend in Claridge’s, with champagne breakfast thrown in.
This total includes multivitamins from Boots, £260; probiotics sachets, £480; £75-ish on the vitamin D mouth sprays; around £100 spent on manuka (what are they feeding those bees, rare orchids?).
The real wallet-killer is the omega-3, in the form of jelly sweets shaped like fish. They come in packs of 36 for around £15. Like the boy in the biblical parable, each child has two fish. A day. That means two packets (at £30) last us little over a week.
This is not to mention my own vitamin haul, which totals £800 to £900 a year. On a daily basis, I do a shot of a probiotic drink, which costs £25 for a month’s supply, despite tasting remarkably like vomit. I pop several capsules and pills, from high quality omega-3 to a multivitamin, to magnesium glycinate in the evening before bed. Added to the mix is a potion including thyme and apple cider vinegar, a fizzy vitamin C drink and a vitamin D spray.
It is an astonishing amount of money – and it’s fair to say that in a survey of parents in my own house, only 50 per cent see it as cash worth spending. The other 50 per cent thinks that we might as well be feeding our children chocolate buttons.
My husband, a doctor, has long been sceptical about supplements. He is a no-nonsense, no-pain-no-gain sort of person who believes that while a good diet and exercise are important, your long-term health prospects are not going to be improved by eating your body weight in omega-3. When I’ve tried pressing him to take a men’s health supplement, or to join me in a shot of turmeric juice, I am met with disdain.
For him, vitamin guzzling to this extent is a self-interested wellness fad for suckers who believe you can shortcut your way to good health. Like me!
Still, despite his raised eyebrows, I continue to feed my children the pills and the fishes. Yes, I know it would be better if they got all their vitamins from food rather than Haribo-like sweets.
I know they should be eating sardines out of the tin rather than chocolate digestives out of the packet.
But frankly, it’s darned hard. In my experience, the more children you have, the more they become infected by each other’s pickiness. If one is refusing to eat anything but beige food, the others start protesting at the mere sight of broccoli too.
You can wheedle, cajole, play hide and seek with vegetables – but ultimately the optimum diet is hard to achieve.
For my own peace of mind, I want them to have a nutritional safety net – hence re-mortgaging the house to keep them in Peppa Pig gummies.
I do occasionally wonder about cutting down on the omega-3 fish, hovering over the ‘cancel subscription’ button on Amazon.
But knowing how vital this is to my children’s brain health, I stop myself.
Health is wealth, as they say, and, to me, this seems the last place we should be cutting costs.
So I will continue to shell out for our own domestic apothecary… and perhaps look into taking out shares in Holland & Barrett.
Award for most pointless award
Lady Beckham at the Ministry of Culture in Paris earlier this week, receiving her award
Anyone else tired of famous people getting awards for being fawned over by other famous people? Latest on this carousel of self-congratulation is Victoria Beckham, awarded the Chevaliere de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in Paris this week for her commitment to fashion, or something. Still, it’s (another) one in the eye for daughter-in-law Nicola Peltz Beckham.
Deep freeze any China gifts, Keir
Reading that the Chinese hacked into phones of aides working for previous prime ministers, I’m reminded of my days at No 10 during the David Cameron years. I was told gifts from the Chinese were to be placed in frozen storage to kill any spyware. Whether this is true or not, I have no idea – but if the PM gets any prezzies during his trip to Beijing, it might be worth stashing them in the hotel’s minibar freezer just in case.
Victoria and Thomas Gillibrand, speaking outside Cheshire coroner’s court in Warrington
It is deeply sad to read of Victoria and Thomas Gillibrand, whose baby Pippa died after a home birth went wrong. Thanks in part to the natural birth movement, giving birth at home is increasingly popular. While it is up to the mother to decide, this tragedy should raise questions about how well parents are warned about the risks of home births.
Uber says London is no longer the UK’s nightlife hotspot, with a bigger proportion of late-night trips taken in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Thinking of the happy years I spent carousing around the bars of Soho until 2am, I’m sad to think of young Londoners heading home early to sip camomile tea. At least the Scots are keeping the flame alive.
Ban numpties from our peaks
The Wasdale Head Inn in the Lake District, where two walkers left without paying after being rescued by volunteers
The cheek of two amateur walkers in the Lake District, who bailed out of a local hotel without paying – just after they had been rescued by brave volunteers in treacherous conditions. Isn’t it time we introduced permits for climbing Britain’s peaks, to screen out numpties like this and protect the mountain rescue teams?
