Nutrient requirements for optimal health: what does that mean?
In the half century since Dr. Hazel Stiebling of the USDA and her colleagues fashioned the first Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA), the scientific insight underlying those allowances, including the work of Atwater, has resulted in an unprecedented stability of recommendations in the subsequent ten issues of the RDA. The same half-century has witnessed important newer developments in human nutrition relating diet and disease: the paradigmatic relationship being diet and heart disease. The quest for better recommendations to the public about diet and disease prevention has taken the form of national Dietary Guidelines and goals for the year 2000. Thus, nutrient recommendations in the RDAs have intersected with food and diet recommendations and the specific goals. Recommended Dietary Allowances have been called into focus once again. Definitions of optimal diets or health have been varied and imprecise. However desirable the goal may be to achieve vigorous health throughout the life cycle by appropriate diet and other lifestyle factors, we will not be able to avoid the critically based scientific method that formed the foundation for the sound nutritional recommendation of RDAs.
Rosenberg
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USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, Tufts University, Boston, MA 02111.
D004032:Diet; D006293:Health Promotion; D006801:Humans; D009747:Nutritional Physiological Phenomena; D009751:Nutritional Requirements