• America’s supplement industry is slated to pass $36 billion this year in sales.
• One of the break-out categories is gummy vitamins, which has become the No. 1 way those under 35 buy their supplements.
• But some consumer advocates and doctors worry that those supplements don’t have as many benefits as people think.
• “I don’t think it’s necessarily moving the health of our country forward, but it’s good marketing,” one professor at Harvard Medical School and longtime doctor told Business Insider. 
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Robert Shmerling’s patients eat too much candy. They think it’s good for them.

That candy — colorful, chewy, shaped like orange slices and teddy bears  — is the gummy vitamin. Shmerling, who’s been a rheumatologist in the Boston area for three decades and is a professor at Harvard Medical School, said some of his patients were taking a dozen supplements, gummy or otherwise,