Sometimes a food product encapsulates all that's wrong with feeding children in America. With the children's vitamin called
SmartyPants, it starts with the name. Do you want your child to mouth off? As a food writer, I get to see lots of product promotions, but Smarty-Pants Gummy Multi-Vitamins caught my eye. How is a vitamin related to Earth Day?

"Where possible, the company uses eco-friendly materials and source their omega 3's from sustainable small fish sources so as not to impact dwindling tuna stocks or expose children to potential heavy metals like mercury that may be found in high concentrations in salmon and tuna. SmartyPants follows Good Manufacturing Processes (GMP) and use independent third-party labs to test their products to ensure the highest quality. Best of all, kids love the taste of our product (and parents too!)."

This had to be a joke, right? But the press release assures us:
"SmartyPants takes the health of all children seriously. To help kids in need, SmartyPants has partnered with Vitamin Angels so that for every bottle purchased, the company donates a year's worth of nutrients to a child most in need."
So, make sure your children take their Smarty-Pants every day, and not only will they get "the most Omega 3 DHA and Vitamin D in a gummy multi-vitamin, plus 11 other nutrients," but also you will contribute to the environment and help poor children.
As a parent of one child who was a very picky eater, the target market for SmartyPants, and one who developed an eating disorder that included obsessing about vitamins and nutrients, I think again, is this a joke? However, I have been to food shows where the starring products were vitamin waters said to promote all kinds of specific cures, so I went to the Web site, www.wearesmartypants.com and learned:
"Parents are overwhelmed by "shoulds" but want to do right by their kids. SmartyPants was born to solve the "picky-eater" problem by putting the best of everything (with none of the bad stuff) in a gummy treat that has everyone begging for their vitamins!"
In fact, SmartyPants goes on to claim that while of course vitamin supplements are not a silver bullet to your children's health, these sparkling multi-colored gumdrops can help parents who worry about getting their kids to eat three servings a fish a week or 32 ounces of milk a day. SmartyPants contain only 5 grams of organic sugar per serving. Is 5 grams a lot? The American Heart Association recommends 12 grams of sugar a day for children, so there goes nearly half. Is organic sugar better? In the case of sugar, being organic speaks more to the global warming issue than to nutrition, which is to say, not really to either.
Another selling point addresses our concern with knowing where food products come from. SmartyPants are proudly Made in California. Which is local for me, so again, the company collects environmental points. Finally, naturally, they are gluten- and casein-free. Some people believe casein, a protein found in cow's milk, contributes to autism.
I am a food writer. In our book, Hungry: A Mother and Daughter Fight Anorexia,
Lisa and I explore food connoisseurship and eating disorders. Her brother was a picky eater: "Jacob had suffered the full first-child treatment, constant vigilance, mirror to his sleeping mouth to make sure it showed a little puff of air and he was still breathing. ... How much of Jacob's pickiness did we cause by being so frantic, and how much was just him?"