Appendix A — Nutrient Reference Tables

⚠️ A note before the tables, and it is not boilerplate.

⚠️ These are POPULATION REFERENCE VALUES. They are designed to cover the requirements of most healthy people in a group — they are not personal targets, they are not optimal amounts, and hitting one exactly means nothing.

⚠️ If you find yourself checking your intake against these daily, or feeling that falling short of one is a failure, Chapter 34 §34.7 describes that risk and §34.14 is the section that matters.

⚠️ Values differ between countries and are revised. Use your own national figures for anything that matters clinically.

⚠️ How to read a reference value

⚠️ The terminology is genuinely confusing and the confusion is exploited constantly.

⚠️ The consequence most people miss: because the RDA is set to cover almost everybody, MOST PEOPLE NEED LESS THAN THE RDA. ⚠️ Intake below an RDA is not a deficiency, and supplement marketing depends on you not knowing that (Ch 13).

⚠️ And the distinction Chapter 13's threshold rests on:

⚠️ NUTRIENT STATUS IS NOT NUTRIENT INTAKE. ⚠️ A blood test measures status. A food diary estimates intake, badly. They are different things, and only one of them is worth treating.

Macronutrients

⚠️ Energy is deliberately not tabulated here. ⚠️ Chapter 4 explains why an estimated requirement is an estimate with substantial error, and Chapter 34 §34.7 explains why a calorie number in a reference table functions differently from a calcium number.

Vitamins — fat-soluble

⚠️ Vitamin D is the one genuine widespread-supplementation case in this book, and it is conditional: latitude, season, skin tone, coverage and age (Ch 13). ⚠️ It is not a general tonic.

Vitamins — water-soluble

Minerals

⚠️ Iodine and vitamin D are the two nutrients where a genuinely widespread shortfall exists in several high-income countries (Ch 14). ⚠️ Most of the rest of the supplement aisle addresses shortfalls that are not there.

⚠️ The short list of genuinely indicated supplements

Consolidated from Chapters 13 and 16. ⚠️ Appendix H grades these in detail.

⚠️ That is close to the whole list. ⚠️ Everything else in a typical supplement aisle is 🟡, 🟠 or ❌ in Appendix E — and Walt Prosser was taking nine.

⚠️ Where these numbers come from, and their limits

⚠️ Reference values are set by committees reading the same imperfect literature this book has been describing for thirty-eight chapters.

⚠️ They differ between countries — sometimes substantially — for the same nutrient and the same population, which tells you something about the precision available.

⚠️ They are revised. Several in this table have moved within living memory, and dietary cholesterol guidance was withdrawn entirely (Ch 9).

⚠️ They are set for HEALTHY people. Disease, medication, pregnancy, malabsorption and age all change requirements (Ch 25, 26, 29).

⚠️ Use them as orientation, not as a scorecard. ⚠️ Chapter 37 §37.3 gave the plate in ranges for exactly this reason, and Chapter 38 §38.1 admits that a table of numbers is the most rule-convertible object a book like this can print.

⚠️ For anything clinical, use your own country's current figures and a clinician, not an appendix.