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Measuring Nutritional Requirements

Dietary Reference Intakes or DRIs¹ are the collective name give to various methods employed in calculating the requirement of a nutrient for the human body. Because there are lot of variables in the functioning of the human body and not all body is the same, a single DRIs cannot give accurate requirement for all in all circumstances. Therefore, various methods are used to estimate the requirement of a nutrient for the human body.

The most commonly used DRIs are:

• Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) is the average daily dietary intake level that is sufficient to meet the nutrient requirement of nearly all (97 to 98 percent) healthy individuals in a group.
• Adequate Intake (AI) is the value based on observed or experimentally determined approximations of nutrient intake by a group (or groups) of healthy people.
• Tolerable Upper Intake Level (UL) is the highest level of daily nutrient intake that is likely to pose no risk of adverse health effects to almost all individuals in the general population.
• Estimated Average Requirement (EAR) is a nutrient intake value that is estimated to meet the requirement of half the healthy individuals in a group.

We have tried to use RDA in this handbook since it is the most accurate measure of all — it has considered 97% to 98% of the population. When RDAs are not available, we have used other DRIs.

With respect to RDA, note that the amount of nutrient you must consume is generally higher than the RDA of that nutrient. This disparity is due to digestibility of each nutrient. The body does not digest exactly the entire amount of nutrients we consume. So to digest and assimilate x amount of nutrient, you must consumed more than x amount of that nutrient.

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