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VII.4 - Recommended Dietary Allowances and Dietary Guidance

from Part VII - Contemporary Food-Related Policy Issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Alfred Harper
Edited by
Kenneth F. Kiple  and
Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas
Kenneth F. Kiple
Affiliation:
Bowling Green State University, Ohio
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Summary

Allowances and Dietary Guidance

To view this topic in perspective, we need answers at the outset to two questions: “What are Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA)?” and “What purpose do they serve?” RDA are a set of dietary standards; they are reference values for the amounts of essential nutrients and food sources of energy that should be present in human diets. Standards of this type, based on the best available scientific knowledge, are needed by policy administrators, public-health officials, physicians, dietitians, and educators who have responsibility for establishing food and health policy; for providing the public with reliable dietary advice; for planning nutritionally adequate food supplies for large groups of people; and for assessing the adequacy of diets consumed by individuals or populations.

Definition of RDA

RDA for essential nutrients are defined differently from RDA for food sources of energy. For essential nutrients, the RDA values are amounts judged to be high enough to meet the known physiological needs of practically any healthy person in a group that has been specified by age and sex. They exceed average requirements to ensure that few, if any, individuals who are consuming amounts of nutrients equivalent to the RDA will have inadequate intakes. In contrast, RDA values for food sources of energy are the average amounts needed by the members of each group. RDA are not, in themselves, general dietary recommendations, but as standards, they serve as the scientific basis for many aspects of practical nutrition and food and health policy (FNB 1989b).

Nomenclature

The name “Recommended Dietary Allowances” for these reference values was proposed by the Food and Nutrition Board (FNB) of the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) in 1941 when it first established a dietary standard (ADA 1941). As the term “RDA” was more and more widely used, it became evident that its meaning was not well understood. It was frequently used as a synonym for requirements or with the implication that RDA were dietary recommendations for use directly by the public. The response of the FNB was to increase the specificity of the definition in subsequent RDA reports and to include an introductory section explaining the uses of RDA (FNB 1974).

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The Cambridge World History of Food , pp. 1606 - 1621
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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