Common Dietary Sources of Natural and Artificial Phosphate in Food

The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for phosphate in the U.S. is around 700 mg/day for adults. The majority of healthy adults consume almost double the amount of phosphate than the RDA. Lack of awareness, and easy access to phosphate-rich, inexpensive processed food may lead to dietary phosphate overload with adverse health effects, including cardiovascular diseases, kidney diseases and tumor formation. Nutritional education and better guidelines for reporting phosphate content on ingredient labels are necessary, so that consumers are able to make more informed choices about their diets and minimize phosphate consumption. Without regulatory measures, dietary phosphate toxicity is rapidly becoming a global health concern, and likely to put enormous physical and financial burden to the society.