Published Recommendations
Since their original inception back in the 1940’s, the U.S. Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDAs) and the comparable Canadian Recommended Nutritional Intakes (RNIs) have been updated on a very regular basis, as more discoveries are made.
Unfortunately, whilst these standards (and similar ones that are in use in most Western countries) were originally created as guidelines to establish nutritional minimum baselines, they have instead become de facto guidelines for optimum nutritional intakes!
So, it is critically important that you fully understand that these allowances were and are established to provide the minimum criteria necessary to prevent basic deficiencies.
They do not represent nutritional intakes that are supposed to be ideal or perfect for ensuring long term good health, nor were they ever intended to do so.
Indeed, recent advances in research into nutrition have enabled us to move towards a point where it will be possible to determine and establish true optimal requirements, which would be a very important step towards using nutrition as an effective weapon against degenerative diseases.
In response to this, the USA and Canada have accordingly embarked on a detailed review and update of all of the scientific evidence and data available, in order that a joint ‘optimum standard’ can be created.
This attempt to create such a harmonized and correlated reference standard represents a significant shift away from the previous situation, where accepting nutritional deficiencies as being the norm was widely accepted, and towards optimizing health on a large scale.
There would, however, be a significant school of thought that it is all too little and much, much too late.
With obesity already well established as an international health problem of almost cataclysmic proportions, simply establishing a new set of standards is hardly going to make any great deal of difference to how normal people choose to live their lives.
And that is, unfortunately, exactly what is needed if the medical resources of all of the countries in question are not to be stretched way past breaking point by ever increasing numbers of grossly overweight but undernourished people.