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Lecture Notes

The second concept that's important for planning a nutritious diet is to understand the dietary reference intakes. And here we're talking about the recommendations that are given to all adults in our country about what you should be eating and how much you should be eating of these particular nutrients.

And so the recommended dietary allowances were originally designed to prevent nutritional deficiencies. But, nutritional deficiencies are much less of a problem now than they used to be, and so there are currently lots of revisions going on to these recommended dietary allowances where we're focusing on how to eat in order to prevent chronic disease, not just to prevent deficiencies. And so we still want to prevent deficiencies, but we're incorporating now the idea of a concept of using food and healthy eating to reduce your risk for chronic diseases, as opposed to originally when we were just trying to prevent those deficiencies, which are not as big of a problem anymore.