Submitted by Darrell Miller
The Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine, US National Academy of Sciences, has been setting national standards for nutrient intake for over 60 years. The recommendations are often referred to and known as the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs). Similar standards to the US RDAs have been adopted in over 40 countries. RDAs were originally developed during World War II when it was determined that a comprehensive set of standards was necessary to establish scientifically valid baselines for nutrient intake.
The standards were necessary to provide guidance for the development of wartime rationing measures amongst the armed forces and civilian populations. With this in mind, the recommendations were minimal in nature, as they established the lowest levels of nutrient intake required in order to avoid common maladies that were associated with nutritional deficiencies. Some of these deficiencies include diseases such as rickets, scurvy, pellagra, and beriberi. The RDAs were not designed or never intended, to address the ideal levels of intake required for optimal health.
The RDA for a particular nutrient is based on the amount of nutrient that is required in order to prevent failure of a specific function or the development of an observable clinical deficiency. Since these RDAs were developed fro demographic groups within a population, there are separate recommendation is for different ages, genders, and physiological states. The recommendations are made for healthy individuals only and do not consider the needs of those who have particular nutritional needs due to different disease states. Since their creation in 1943, the RDAs are revised each decade, with the evaluation of new scientific evidence that has emerged. In some cases, these revisions have resulted in the lowering of the recommended intake of certain nutrients.
The basis that the American population is “healthy” simply because its citizens do not exhibit classical symptoms of clinical nutritional deficiencies is extremely flawed. The decision of the US Food and Nutrition Board to reduce further the RDAs of several important nutrients seems to be a nonsensical choice. America and Canada are both nations that seem to be awash in illness, with two-thirds of adults being overweight and obesity running in epidemic. The incidence of heart disease is that major killer and reflects the dietary and lifestyle choices, while the rising prevalence of several cancers, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, and neurodegenerative disorders threaten to take over our healthcare systems.
The dramatic increase in the consumption of nutritional supplements in order to achieve long-term health has not gone unnoticed by the pharmaceutical industry or the regulatory authorities in North America, as some governments have developed recommendations on tolerable upper levels of intake for several nutrients. Since RDA recommendations define the lower limits of daily nutrient intake that are necessary to avoid acute nutritional deficiencies, they do not address the requirements for optimal nutrition, as they were not designed to do so. Because of this, some governments are considering using the US RDAs to limit the levels of nutrients that are needed in commercial dietary supplements.
If such a policy were put into place, the validated benefits of high-dose supplementation for the maintenance of optimal health and the treatment of specific disease processes would be dismissed. Dietary supplements are an important part of many American diets. The ability for one to take health in to their own hands is important to all those people. Natural vitamins are available at your local or internet health food sore.
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