What is DRI ?
DRI stands for Dietary Reference Intake. It was established in 1997 by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy. It took the original RDA guidelines which make up only part of the bigger picture.
What makes up DRI?
DRI measurements are calculated from 4 guidelines. These are as follows:
Estimated Average Requirements (EAR): These calculations are an estimate based on the average ideal intake of a nutrient. As it is an average, 50% of people will need less and 50% of people will need more. A good rough guide but not very accurate.
Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA): This was the original guide which lets us know how much of a nutrient we should consume per day. Developed during World War II by a committee known as United States National Academy of Sciences as part of an investigation to show how nutrition might affect national defence The committee was renamed the Food and Nutrition Board in 1941 and it was at this point that the focus of diet and national defence changed and the recommendations for the daily allowance of each nutrient was developed for the population as a whole.
As times change so the RDA’s have evolved and they are revised every 5 to 10 years. RDA’s are now used as a guideline on many food packages in the UK and Europe so we as consumers know what and how much we are ingesting. It is estimated that these figures will be accurate for 97% of healthy people for all age ranges and both genders. This is much more accurate than EAR.
Adequate Intake (AI): Where there has not been enough scientific study to create an RDA and for nutrients that very rarely, if ever, see deficiencies there are the AI’s. The quantities in AI are deemed to be greater than the body’s requirements and therefore enough to meet the body’s needs.
Tolerable upper intake levels (UL): These figures and recommendations are used to protect against excessive quantities of a nutrient that is considered harmful in large quantities e.g. vitamin D.
Food and their labels
RDA’s are used to inform the public worldwide of the quantities of nutrients they are consuming. The majority of foods will include a basic nutritional content guide on their label. This is being enforced more and more as governments and other authorities try and persuade us to learn more about what we are eating. With this knowledge we should be more aware of what to eat and what to avoid. However since the RDA’s have been around the education of the general public still needs to be improved and therefore until we get a proper structure in to fully educate people about what the body requires, these figures are only a limited aid to the growing bad health epidemic (note that we did not say obesity – Beeble).
Why do we use DRI?
We have chosen to use the DRI figures instead of the more common RDA’s because we feel it gives a broader picture of the body’s requirements than the RDA figures do alone. Which figures you follow is your choice, however we recommend adopting for the RDI’s for a more complete picture. If you decide to count the nutrients you have in a day you will not be able to achieve an exact 100% success rate everyday. So you should expect to see fluctuations, but if a nutrient is consistently low then you will need to take action and add foods to your diet that can improve this.
Summary
If we understood our body’s requirements more and measured our daily intakes to make sure we meet our body’s needs I truly believe that the amount of illness and disease would significantly drop. If companies stopped selling us the idea of just calorie watching and focused on our health rather than their profits, we might get healthier a little faster. Have a go at measuring your own intakes by using our calculator and see which nutrients your body is low in. This way you could make a significant change to improve your own health.
If you want to know what your DRI’s are please use our DRI calculator.
Good luck and let us know how you get on.
Visit our calorie counter here
