EFSA Panel on Dietetic Products, Nutrition, and Allergies (NDA); Scientific Opinion on principles for deriving and applying Dietary Reference Values

This Opinion of the EFSA Panel on Dietetic products, Nutrition, and Allergies (NDA) deals with the general principles for development and application of Dietary Reference Values (DRVs). These quantitative reference values for nutrient intakes for healthy individuals and populations are based on health criteria. Derived from DRVs, nutrients goals and recommendations take into account other criteria such as food composition or dietary habits, and may be used for assessment and planning of diets. It is proposed to derive the following DRVs: 1) Population Reference Intakes (PRI), 2) Average Requirement (AR), 3) Lower Threshold Intake (LTI), 4) Adequate Intake (AI), 5) Reference Intake ranges for macronutrients (RI). Nutrient requirements differ with age, sex and physiological condition. The Panel proposes to define the age ranges used for each nutrient on a case-by-case basis depending on the available data. For the age group < 6 months requirements are considered to be equal to the supply from breast- milk, except in those cases where this does not apply. Separate reference values will be established for pregnant and lactating women. Interpolation or extrapolation between population groups will be used in instances where no data are available for defined age and sex groups

The Economics of Health and Vitamin Consumption

We estimate the impact of vitamin supplement intake, lifestyle, health indicators, food culture, and demographics on diet quality outcomes as measured by the Healthy Eating Index–2005 (HEI). Our data consists of U.S. adults who participated in the 2003–2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Alternative instrumental variable estimators explicitly address issues of endogeneity and complex sample design. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that diet quality is strongly interrelated with food culture. We suggest that vitamin consumption serves as another marker for healthy eating. This finding emphasizes the need to employ economic modeling when developing public policy to reduce obesity