Dr. Bill Sears and Dr. Jim Sears are two renowned pediatricians. Most parents know of Dr. Sears. Yet, as a parent, I had no idea he had a nutrition-based company called Juice Plus®+ until I learned about it via a blogger campaign.

Juice Plus is whole-based nutrition. Not a multivitamin. Multivitamins are good, but not great; most of them are synthetic, and not from real food. Also, they miss a lot of needs. Think of your multivitamin as the alphabet, and then look at the label on your multivitamin. It is missing some letters in the alphabet, isn’t it?

Juice Plus is not juicing either, which loses fiber. It is real fruits and vegetables that are pureed in a strict process, in the United States, and then transformed into swallowable powder or a bite-size gummy. Taking the daily dose of Juice Plus, you get about 24 fruits and vegetables in your diet.

The Type of Juice Plus Vitamins and Gummies

There are three kinds of Juice PLUS®+ capsules and gummies: Garden Blend, Orchard Blend, Vineyard Blend. The Garden Blend has 10 veggies and grains: carrot, parsley, beet, kale, broccoli, spinach, cabbage, tomato, oat and rice bran. The Orchard Blend has 7 fruits: apple, orange, pineapple, cranberry, peach, papaya, acerola cherry. The Vineyard Blend has 9 fruits: concord grape, blueberry, cranberry, blackberry, bilberry, raspberry, red currant, black currant, and elderberry.

Juice Plus comes in three forms: a capsule, a gummy, and a whole food complete powder.

The gummies and vitamins have no artificial colors, preservatives or flavors, and are a product of the USA.

So now that you know a bit about Juice +, here is how you can incorporate it into your family’s life, even if you have precocious preschoolers!

As with any dietary changes or dietary supplements, discuss with your trusted health care provider before taking. This post is my own thoughts and feelings about the product and should not be construed as providing health or medical advice.

Juice Plus Gummies Review

I’m a health nut, but I am also a parent. Sometimes those two roles don’t mesh well together. However, I think Juice+ Plus Gummies attempts to marry the two roles, much to my grateful relief.

My son is a picky eater. Correction. My son is an extreme picky eater. It is not just the “preschooler food fare” of macaroni and cheese, hotdogs and chicken nuggets. (Oh, I wish.) It has to be the elbow macaroni and white cheese or the spiral pasta with white American melted cheese on top. It can’t be yellow cheese, it can’t be ziti, and I can’t mix the two.

We are working on expanding his repertoire of relishings, but in the interim, I worry. A lot. About his nutrition. So we have bought copious amounts of multivitamins in hope that it will do the nutrition trick. Yet, I knew it wasn’t my best option, but I also didn’t know what else to do.

When I was approached to review Juice PLUS+, what first caught my attention is that it was the brainchild of Dr. Bill Sears. (Yes, that Dr. Sears.) and his son Dr. Jim Sears (yes, that Jim Sears.) If these two influential doctors have a product that has been on the market for 20+ years and are the top pediatricians in their field, and they use it in their own families, I wanted to know more about it.

Now, let me just say this…I’ve used and liked many of the parenting/baby/toddler recommendations by Dr. Bill Sears. Not all, but most of them. And even the ones I didn’t like or agree with, I still valued his thoughts on the subject and his expertise in the health care field, even though it wasn’t right for us.

Thus, when I wanted to learn about his Juice PLUS+® line, I was already open to the idea. You may not, however, and thus may not be as open or as willing to try this product. Which is totally okay. However, since our family is open to nutrition advice, supplements, and even a holistic approach in some cases, we were, and especially by a doctor that has proved his health care knowledge over decades, which can’t be said by many other products and the persons peddling them.

Since Juice Plus is pureed vegetables and fruits turned into a powder or gummy, form, I know that if my kids’ take it, they’ll be getting ‘substance’ and not a supplement. A fine difference since, of course, I’d prefer them to eat an apple. Yet if they cannot (or won’t) at least the Juice Plus Gummies has the nutrition of an apple (and 12 other fruits). A preferable option over, say, a Vitamin C supplement. A supplement won’t have the fiber, the enzymes and the other bits and bobs that make it an apple. Juice Plus provides that.

Ideas for Using Juice Plus for Toddlers and Kids

I’ve personally been taking the capsule form of Juice Plus, since they are easy to take on the go. However, my son has a hard time with tastes and textures. Thus, the capsule, and even the gummy option, is not the best choice for him. So, I get creative.

I take the capsules, encased in soft ‘plastic’, and pop them open. By doing so, the powder inside becomes a seasoning/sprinkles.

My daughter loves the sprinkles on her food. Since it is green, red and purple, we call the Juice Plus capsules Rainbow Sprinkles. There is very little taste to them. If anything, they taste like fruits! She likes them on her yogurt or in her cereal. However, my son is suspicious. So, we hide it in the food he consumes and it is pretty easy to mix into anything. I’ve hidden it in between the melted cheese of his grilled cheese sandwich, and mixed it into spaghetti sauce. I’ve even hidden it in maple syrup that he uses to dip his French Toast Sticks. Sometimes, if he gets his spoonful of vanilla ice cream for a treat after dinner, we ‘sprinkle’ it onto the ice cream. Since he is more interested in the ice cream, we sometimes can be successful that way too.

With some work, I have also been able to get him to try the fruit version of the Juice Plus gummies. (I think he was jealous of his sister’s “treats” and wanted some too…heck, whatever works, right?)

I enjoy the gummy version too since it can also act as a great snack in that it’s like having gummy bears or commercial fruit snacks. (But obviously, Juice Plus is much healthier for you.) It is great to have options though: a capsule, powder or gummies, which I can adjust to meet the day we are facing!

We also like the Whole Food Complete powder as a meal supplement in my recipe for a Chocolate Peanut Butter Shake! It’s a great way to give a good breakfast to the kids (and yourself) on the go. If you don’t like chocolate, try vanilla and add frozen or fresh fruit for a yummy smoothie on the way to school. Add extra ice and the kids can feel like they are having a milkshake after school!

So if you are looking to improve your diet or your families’ dietary needs, definitely check Juice Plus out. All in all, it has become a new {health} edition in our house!!!

Thanks to Juice Plus for giving us product from the entire line to try!

As with any dietary changes or dietary supplements, discuss with your trusted health care provider before taking. This post is my own thoughts and feelings about the product and should not be construed as providing health or medical advice.