Are the Wrong Kids Getting Vitamins?

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As scientific debate continues over the importance of vitamin supplements, a new study suggests that the children receiving them stand to benefit the least.
New research shows that children who could potentially benefit from multivitamins aren't necessarily the kids who are taking them.
(ABC News Photo Illustration)

"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."