treestarfae Posted December 7, 2011 Share Posted December 7, 2011 USA Rda's for food are the minimal and are for preventing disease in third world countries. They are wayyy off and do not help determine optimum daily health. Why don't doctors tell us the correct amount of vitamins and minerals that we need? It's ridiculous! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LAS in LA Posted December 7, 2011 Share Posted December 7, 2011 Just a guess, but there are lots of people living a third-world lifestyle in our country. RDA's probably get a lot of use in WIC offices and the like, where social workers and nutritionists are trying to help people get their basic needs met. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bcnlvr Posted December 7, 2011 Share Posted December 7, 2011 One word: LOBBYISTS. So you can start there and end here: greed, power, and $$$$. Period. Humans stopped eating intuitively many moons ago, much to the demise of our health. :( Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thia Posted December 7, 2011 Share Posted December 7, 2011 1) Does include the RDA on vitamin bottles? 2) How did you find this out? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
regentrude Posted December 7, 2011 Share Posted December 7, 2011 Why don't doctors tell us the correct amount of vitamins and minerals that we need? Because I don't think anybody actually knows for sure how much of each vitamin and mineral is needed. They know how much is dangerously too much, and they know how little is dangerously too little, but I do not believe scientists are able to pinpoint exactly how many milli- or micrograms of each vitamin a body needs. I would also suspect that these numbers would greatly depend on the lifestyle of the person, the other dietary contributions, her health and possibly genetic makeup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
msk Posted December 7, 2011 Share Posted December 7, 2011 Don't the actual amounts of various nutrients a person needs vary enormously? I've trying to remember my college nutrition class eons ago, but as I recall this is actually a very complicated issue. Nutrient requirements vary by age, sex, activity level, body size and composition, etc. Plus, some vitamins and minerals use the same carrier proteins and can potentially inhibit each others' absorption, and others complement each other, so consuming different foods in the same meal makes a huge difference. I think this is why doctors always default to "eat a varied diet with lots of fruits and vegetables;" it's very hard to pinpoint *exactly* what people need. If I remember correctly, a lot of the minimum recommendations are more or less made up as well (like the difference between M and F zinc recommendations). We don't know exactly what some nutrients do or how quickly they're "used up" by various processes, and new research comes out all the time. I think pinpointing the optimal amount of many nutrients would be so situation-specific it would be pretty impractical. Except for things like fat-soluble vitamins (which have a maximum RDA as well as a minimum), most just get flushed out in our urine if we don't use them, so it's easier just to make sure we get lots of them (in other words, treat the RDA as a bare minimum) and let our bodies dump whatever is left over, rather than spending time figuring out exactly what we need. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThisIsTheDay Posted December 8, 2011 Share Posted December 8, 2011 USA Rda's for food are the minimal and are for preventing disease in third world countries. They are wayyy off and do not help determine optimum daily health. Why don't doctors tell us the correct amount of vitamins and minerals that we need? It's ridiculous! I'll take a stab here and say that they are wrong because it's just one more ineffective federal government program. (Not that all are ineffective, and not that the USDA as a whole is useless.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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