Hello everyone. Today I will be chatting with Dr. Wendy Hunter. Dr. Hunter was educated at Cornell University, UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine, and attended UC San Diego for Pediatrics residency.

She spent 10 years experiencing the fun and drama in the Pediatric Emergency Department at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego.

Now as a primary care pediatrician, she helps parents understand why their kids do the weird things they do, and how to raise kids as cool as her own.

Some interesting facts about Dr. Hunter are that she takes drum lessons, super cool. Recently started her podcast called The Pediatrician Next Door, and started flying airplanes again after a 13-year break, and getting current again as an instrument-rated pilot.

In today's episode, we will discuss if children really need to be taking a multivitamin, what is the evidence behind elderberry and other supplements, melatonin dosing, how to teach kids about eating a wide array of foods, and so much more. Let's dive in.

Just a little disclaimer before we start this episode, this podcast does not provide medical advice. The information on this podcast is for informational purposes only.

No material on this site is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Hello, everyone. Today we have Dr. Wendy Hunter here on the podcast. Thank you, and welcome.

Thanks. Thanks for having me, Lindsay.

So we are going to talk about quite a few different things today, and that is going to include talking about whether or not kids need to have vitamins or maybe different supplements that might help them either sleep,

or maybe immune support, and then we are also going to focus in on eating.

This can be such a stressful situation for parents, I mean myself included, where I feel like either one of my four kids, two of my four kids just won't eat this big array of foods, and then you think to yourself,

did I do something when they were younger, and I offer them enough, and that's why they don't like vegetables or what have you.

And so I'd love to go into some more detailed questions on maybe how we can sneak veggies in, how important is it if my three-year-old is only eating mac and cheese at every dinner or every meal, and we'll kind of go into the details about eating, and then really focus in on starting to notice maybe some body image issues that might be coming up, maybe as your kids are getting older.

So the first thing I want to talk about is do kids really need to have this multivitamin every day, and or any type of supplementation?

So I want to start off with, I don't know if you grew up the same as I did, but Flintstone vitamins were like all the craze when I was the same.

And my mom would always give me my Flintstone vitamins every day, and I think to myself, I don't know, did we really need those, I don't know.

I did give my kids multivitamins when they were really like when my first was born, I was like, oh, multivitamin, multivitamin, and then I was like, I don't know, so tell us, tell us, what do we need?

There's so much to this question, I could go on and on about it, but it's, it's a question on every parent's mind, you're right.

So multivitamins, the answer really is there are only a few vitamins that you actually need, and I will talk about those, and in a multivitamin, there's a little bit of danger that you actually could overdose on some of the components of it, but mostly they're just not necessary.

The American, the typical American diet, even if it's garbage, like a kid's diet of like goldfish crackers and mac and cheese, still is going to give you a lot of the micronutrients that you need.

Okay, so which ones do you need? You have to get vitamin D somehow in your diet, and you mostly get that through milk, so there's no natural vitamin D in any food.

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