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The kids’ vitamins aisle at your grocer or health food store is the kind of nook only a madcap like Willy Wonka could have dreamed up. It’s brimming with bottled Technicolor promises in the form of vitamins, probiotics, fish oils and herbals. Clear containers encase winsome teddy bears (Yummi Bears) and sugar-sprayed sea creatures (Dolphin Pals). Remember Flintstones vitamins? Today, there are 11 varieties. This generation of children barely knows who Fred and Wilma are, but the crunchy shell and fruity, chewy center of Dino Eggs have a high cute quotient, making them irresistible to a certain age group. Then there are the dietary supplements aimed at teens (often with attractive, athletic girls and boys on the packaging) and even the preteen set.

Dietary supplements—a broad term that includes vitamins, minerals, herbs, botanicals, probiotics and amino acids—are big business. The $26 billion industry has grown by 27 percent in the last five years. Pediatric supplements are a $573 million chunk of that, according to Euromonitor, a market research firm. The most popular supplement is the vitamin category. Researchers at U.C. Davis Children’s Hospital have estimated that one-third of U.S. children take some sort of daily vitamin.

Most of the brands tout myriad health benefits. Vitamin Code Kids is made with lots of organic ingredients, including Brussels sprouts, kale, cucumber, garlic and blueberries. It also has probiotics, and its makers market it as the “chewable whole food multivitamin.” With a smorgasbord like that, why bother making dinner? A big seller these days is vitamin D; a recent report concluded that vitamin D deficiencies may cause hypocalcemic seizures, growth disturbances and rickets and perhaps influence cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer.

The problem, though, is that what’s on the label probably doesn’t match what’s in that pill or gummy bear. In 2013, Kaiser Permanente studied 55 bottles of over-the-counter vitamin D supplements. While these were adult supplements, the findings shed light on the murkiness of product labels. The amount of vitamin D in the tablets varied from 9 to 146 percent of what was listed on the bottle. That also varied widely from pill to pill in the same bottle.

This can have real repercussions, as in a case published in Pediatrics where seven children under 4 years of age overdosed on vitamin D because of a manufacturing error. These kids were taking fish oil pills with 4,000 times the labeled concentration of vitamin D and began experiencing symptoms like nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite and fever. They recovered, but manufacturing errors can be fatal. Last October, an 8-day-old premature infant died in Connecticut’s Yale-New Haven Hospital after doctors gave him a probiotic course of ABC Dophilus Powder. The probiotic, manufactured by Solgar in New Jersey, was recalled by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) a month after the death. A U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) investigation showed that the batch from which the child’s probiotics originated—along with other batches—was contaminated with a potentially fatal fungus that emerges from rotten vegetables. The boy’s family filed a wrongful death suit in April against the company and the hospital. The case is pending, and both Solgar and Yale-New Haven declined to comment.