The Boy Who ate 150 gummy vitamins for breakfast

The Boy Who ate 150 gummy vitamins for breakfast 


A 14-year-old boy ate 150 gummy vitamins for breakfast, thinking they were gummy candies. He and his mother were immigrants, and he didn’t know the difference between gummy vitamins and actual candy.

Up until this point, he ate 30 to 40 gummy vitamins every day, thinking they were candy. As time went on, his belly swelled up. His mother just assumed that he was eating too much.

Then one day, he ate 150 gummy vitamins. One hour later, he can't stop urinating and complains to his mother that he has terrible stomach pain. He trips and falls, and breaks his arm. Then his mother calls 911 and an ambulance takes them to the hospital.

The Boy Who ate 150 gummy vitamins for breakfast

As he’s sitting in the waiting room, he begins to lose consciousness. He then slips into a coma. A physical examination showed that there was fluid building up in his stomach, causing hypercalcemia, a high calcium presence in the blood. Which is strange because there was no calcium i
n the vitamins. He had also fractured multiple bones in his arm from the fall.

Blood samples showed that there was no presence of any of the vitamins that should have been there. I mean, the kid took a lot of gummy vitamins, yet he had no presence of vitamins in his blood. he was however dehydrated and had liver damage.

What happened was, the excess vitamins he had taken were absorbed into his liver, and were destroying it. He was suffering from hypervitaminosis, which caused his brittle bones and hypercalcemia.

The excess amount of vitamin A he was consuming, caused his bones to break down, which is why, when he fell, his arm broke. The 150 gummies he ate for breakfast contained 187 thousand units of vitamin A. that’s 60 times the recommended daily amount, and equal to eating 720 eggs.


When there's too much vitamin A in the body, it pretty much cancels out vitamin D and prevents the absorption of calcium.

So what happened to the boy? Basically he had to wait for his liver to flush out all the excess vitamin A. At this time, doctors don’t know what happened to him. When they left the boy, he was on his way to recovery.

Moral of the story? Well, obviously don’t eat too many gummy vitamins, but instead of getting your vitamins from a multivitamin, get them from fresh produce. If you eat a lot of food with vitamin A in it, consuming a multivitamin every day on top of that might be unnecessary, and potentially damaging.


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