Who Recommended Vitamin Intake and How Much Should You Consume?

The Institute of Medicine has determined the upper limits for 24 nutrients. This chart is for adults 19 years of age and older and does not apply to pregnant or breastfeeding women, as they have different nutritional needs. To understand how the daily value (DV) and the daily percentage value (%DV) work together, let's take a closer look. Daily values are the recommended amounts of nutrients that should be consumed or not exceeded each day.

%DV is the amount that a nutrient provides in a single serving of an individual packaged food or dietary supplement to your daily diet. For example, if the daily value of a given nutrient is 300 micrograms (mcg) and a packaged food or supplement has 30 mcg in one serving, the %DV of that nutrient in one serving of the product would be 10%. If you ate one serving of the product, you would have covered 10% of your need for that nutrient in one day and you could consume other foods or supplements to get the remaining 90%. Vitamins and minerals are essential micronutrients that the body needs in small amounts to function properly and stay healthy.

In general, excessive consumption of minerals or vitamins is due to excessive intake of a certain micronutrient through the use of multivitamins or supplements. Vitamin D can be obtained from sun exposure, cod liver oil, fatty fish, fortified juices, milk and cereals. A simple vitamin and nutrition test in blood or urine can help determine what micronutrients a person is lacking. The DRI calculator for health professionals is an interactive tool that calculates daily nutrient recommendations for diet planning based on dietary reference intakes (DRI) established by the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

The recommended daily allowance (RDA) for vitamins and minerals is the average daily intake a person needs to avoid deficiencies and stay healthy. In most cases, people don't consume too much of a particular vitamin or mineral, especially when they get it from food. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sets guidelines for the amounts of different vitamins and minerals a person should consume per day. The vitamins and minerals needed in higher doses are measured in milligrams, while those that the body needs the least are measured in micrograms.

That number is the amount of a vitamin or nutrient you must get for optimal health on a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet. With lots of vitamins and minerals, you can safely take a much higher dose than the RDA or DV without getting close to the UL. Vitamin and mineral toxicity is rare and only occurs when a person consumes a certain nutrient in very large quantities. Vitamins and minerals are micronutrients responsible for many biological processes that support life. While these data represent current scientific knowledge about nutrient needs, individual requirements may be higher or lower than the DRI recommendations.

Ben Liebhardt
Ben Liebhardt

Amateur travel fanatic. General web buff. Certified travel junkie. Twitter nerd. Infuriatingly humble web practitioner. Certified beer nerd.

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