Daily Values - Can You Trust Them?

 Written by: Tim

Daily Values highlighted in purple

Hypothetical situation time! You are doing your usual shopping rounds and getting the usual items. You come across two different type of cereals and see different nutrient contents for each. You decide to pick the cereal that has 1g more fiber per serving than your usual one. Great!

Next to that on food labels, listed is numbers in percentage form. These values are the percentage of what is in that food in comparison to the "daily value" (DV) for a person. Obviously the new cereal is going to have a higher percentage and you will feel great making that choice.

So what is the point of this? The point of this article is to point out that the daily values are not as accurate as one might think. With most recommended values for intake of vitamins and minerals, they are reviewed and changed relatively often. I will give a couple examples.

The value that nutrition professionals use to identify nutrient needs by age, gender etc. are known as the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA). These are reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) whenever new scientific data comes out to better estimate what the correct daily allowances are.

There also guidelines made for Americans that are a basis for evaluating diet and identifies foods both high and low in solid fat, sodium and sugars known as the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA). These guidelines provide the general American public science-based info on what foods they should consume to most improve the health of a human aged 2 years or older. The great thing about these guidelines are that, by federal law, they MUST be revised every 5 years. The most recent edition has been released in 2010 and the 2015 DGAs are currently in the process of making.

Now, back to DVs. Daily values were originally known as something different. DVs are modeled after the United States Recommended Dietary Allowance (USRDA) from 1968! It has been 45 years and counting since the Daily values have been revised. Yes food labels are regulated by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), however the FDA makes the percentages for the food labels using the Recommended Dietary Intake (RDI) which is based from the USRDA from 1968.

The USRDA from 1968 was the RDA for an adult male in 1968 with two exceptions:

• Iron: Increased to 18mg (RDA for women in 1968)
• Calcium: Increased to 1000mg (RDA for women in 1968)

Not only is the USRDA insanely outdated, but it hardly accounts for the nutritional needs of women which are different from men.

Since 1968, the RDAs have changed multiple times due to the advances in scientific knowledge, information and discovery. That being said, the DVs have sat unchanged and inaccurate for quite a while. This is why the percentages listed on food labels are, for the most part, useless.

My recommendation is not to ignore food labels, because that is not what this article is about and food label nutrient content is important. My recommendation would be to get an understanding of how much of each nutrient you need in reference to the RDAs and keep track of your own progress  by using the weight in grams in your food. If that sounds a bit too daunting at first, then just be aware of what the percentages mean and do not solely base your diet off of those numbers.

There is information, like DVs, that is not made known to the public and in many cases this lack of education to the greater good really hurts us. I feel that a major problem with the nutritional standing in the world today is that many people are not as educated about what they eat as they should. It is ludicrous to think that dietitians will be able to reach our goal of educating the public to the desired level when part of the food label is false!

Source

Image: http://www.fda.gov/ucm/groups/fdagov-public/documents/image/ucm078945.gif

my HNF 377 class at Michigan State University