New views on the RDAs for older adults

The oldest age category in the 1989 edition of the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) is 51 years and above. Future committees on dietary reference intakes will likely define recommendations for age categories older than this. Instead of extrapolations from data derived from experiments on younger people, future RDAs should be derived directly from experiments on older people. Further, scientists are now interested in the amount of the nutrient that it takes to prevent chronic diseases from occurring rather than to prevent deficiencies, and this will likely influence RDA numbers. A review of past and current data suggests that the current RDAs for the elderly are too low for riboflavin, vitamin B-6, folic acid, vitamin B-12, vitamin D, and calcium, and are probably too high for vitamin A.