Nutrition Science and Everyday Application - beta v 0.1

Defining Nutrient Requirements: Dietary
Reference Intakes
How do we know how much of a given nutrient people should eat, or how much is too
much? For this information, we can turn to the Dietary Reference Intakes (DRI)—a set of
recommendations developed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and
Medicine to describe the amounts of specific nutrients and energy that people should
consume in order to stay healthy. They are developed by groups of nutrition scientists, who
together evaluate the research to determine how much of a nutrient is required to prevent
deficiencies and chronic disease, as well as how much is excessive and could cause toxicity.
The DRI standards are specific to people living in the United States and Canada, and they’re
meant to be used by people who are generally healthy, because those with specific health
conditions may have different nutrient requirements.
The DRI standards can be divided into two main categories:
• Recommendations for energy intake – How many calories are required, and how
much energy should proportionately come from carbohydrate, fat, and protein?
• Recommendations for nutrient intake – How much of each nutrient should be
consumed, and how much is excessive?
We’ll discuss each of these categories, and then we’ll discuss some of the ways that the DRI
standards are used. Be prepared to learn a lot of acronyms!
DRI RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ENERGY INTAKE
The DRIs include two types of recommendations related to energy intake:
1. Estimated Energy Requirement (EER). The EER is an estimate of how many calories
a person needs to consume, on average, each day to stay healthy, based on their
age, sex, height, weight, and physical activity level. For adults, the EER is meant to be
a caloric intake that maintains energy balance, meaning that it won’t cause weight loss or
gain. For children, the EER includes the energy needed for normal growth. For pregnant
or lactating women, it includes energy needed for development of the fetus and other
pregnancy requirements or for milk production. Different EER values were also developed
for different physical activity levels, because greater physical activity requires more energy. 1
The EER should be considered a “ballpark” estimate of a person’s caloric needs. As we’ll learn
later in the term, the way that people process and utilize energy is highly variable, and two
39