Vitamin candy
Sep. 29th, 2021 04:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anna_wingAnyone from the US who is reading this is free to laugh at me.
I had always been vaguely puzzled by occasional references in news, or fiction, to children poisoning themselves with medication or supplements because they mistook them for sweets. Because while pills come in bright colours, they don't usually taste of anything, and if they do, it's nothing terribly nice. But I never bothered to look for an explanation. Then just recently, a friend came back from the US, and gave me two jars of vitamin supplements in a form that did look exactly like sweets, specifically those fruit-flavoured, chewy ones coated with a layer of sugar crystals, like firm jellies. I'm not sure what they're called. Marks and Spencer used to sell fancy versions.
And all was explained. I'd never seen anything like them before, I doubt if they're legal in the motherland, precisely because of the risks of making a mistake, and because they're so easy to eat quickly and in quantity. There are medicated boiled hard sweets of various kinds (Strepsils were a mainstay of my childhood), for sore throats and so on, but they have to be sucked to get any taste, I suppose it's hard to eat them fast enough to do oneself any damage.
One learns something new every day...
I had always been vaguely puzzled by occasional references in news, or fiction, to children poisoning themselves with medication or supplements because they mistook them for sweets. Because while pills come in bright colours, they don't usually taste of anything, and if they do, it's nothing terribly nice. But I never bothered to look for an explanation. Then just recently, a friend came back from the US, and gave me two jars of vitamin supplements in a form that did look exactly like sweets, specifically those fruit-flavoured, chewy ones coated with a layer of sugar crystals, like firm jellies. I'm not sure what they're called. Marks and Spencer used to sell fancy versions.
And all was explained. I'd never seen anything like them before, I doubt if they're legal in the motherland, precisely because of the risks of making a mistake, and because they're so easy to eat quickly and in quantity. There are medicated boiled hard sweets of various kinds (Strepsils were a mainstay of my childhood), for sore throats and so on, but they have to be sucked to get any taste, I suppose it's hard to eat them fast enough to do oneself any damage.
One learns something new every day...
