Abstract
This article focuses on the use of human nutrition requirements for applied social science research by non-nutrition experts. Our motivation is to provide the data and default nutrient requirements to calculate the Cost of Nutrient Adequacy (CoNA) least-cost diet meeting specified nutrient requirements. The final format of the resulting datafile is ready for use in the CoNA protocol. However, we expect this article and associated software tools to be generally useful to social science researchers interested in nutrition-related research questions and the potential implications of food systems’ changes for nutrition. We provide readily usable data files (Supplement 1) containing the Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs) and guide non-nutrition experts through appropriate use to establish the nutrient needs and assess the adequacy of diets for populations and groups. We complement the DRIs with companion data files (Supplement 2) containing the WHO Child Growth Standards and WHO Growth References for School-Aged Children and Adolescents percentiles tables of anthropometric measures, extract the median heights and weights, and calculate median reference values for the age-sex groups consistent with the DRIs nutrient requirements. We provide calculations of energy requirements using the DRIs Estimated Energy Requirement (EER) equation and WHO growth references for all age-sex groups and physical activity levels. We also calculate the protein Estimated Average Requirement (EAR) per kilogram body weight according to the WHO growth references. For children under two, we provide nutrient needs required from food in Supplement 3. We provide Stata code and R syntax (Supplements 4 and 5) to compile the single data files into usable datasets for statistical analysis. Finally, we also provide data files (Supplement 6) with the recently proposed harmonized average values and upper levels and briefly discuss their potential application.
Highlights
Agricultural, development, and applied economists and other social scientists are increasingly concerned with incorporating nutrition into their research
We chose to use the 2006 “Dietary Reference Intakes: Essential guide to nutrient requirements” instead of the WHO/FAO/UNU requirements[9,10,11,12,13,14] because it made a number of important advances to establishing human nutrient requirements, notably the formalization of a requirement appropriate to use in the context of populations and groups, the Estimated Average Requirement (EAR); and the use of doubly labeled water methods to calculate energy requirements2 . 3,15 The DRIs were subsequently reviewed and updated in 2011 for calcium and vitamin D and in 2019 for sodium and potassium[4,5]
We provide data files to utilize these harmonized values (Extended data, Supplement 619) but detail the IOM DRIs values as our use case employs only the DRIs values
Summary
1. Olivier Ecker , International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, USA. World Food Programme, Any reports and responses or comments on the article can be found at the end of the article. Dietary reference intakes, child growth standards, growth references, nutrient adequacy, food consumption. This article is included in the AgriKnowledge gateway
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