How to Know Recommended Dietary Allowances of Vitamins

Video Transcript

"My name is Christine Marquette, and I'm a registered dietitian with the Austin Regional Clinic, and I'm going to talk to you about how to know recommended dietary allowances, or the RDA'S for short. This information actually used to be available free online. You could download PDF files from the National Academy's press. However, when they came out with the most recent revisions and published these in 2008 they took down any of the available free PDF files that you could get on the Internet. Now you actually, if you really want your own set you really have to purchase the book through the National Academy's press. Other ways to get this information; you can talk to your registered dietitian. Most often, they will actually have these tables available and can give you that information. There are a few dietitians that have some of this published on their websites, but usually it's only for adults. A lot of times they don't have the information published for children or for the different age groups, even for adults, because there are slight differences in what levels of vitamins and minerals you need depending on your age. For example, children; they need a lot less iron than adults do. Adult women that are post-menopausal will actually need a lot less iron than a pre-menopausal woman, and the calcium needs change as well with age. So, there's not one set that covers everybody. That's part of the reason why they do have it in a book, because there's a lot of different tables, a lot of different variables, depending on your gender and your age. So, at this point in time, the easiest way to get that information is to actually speak with a registered dietitian. So again, just a little bit of information on how to get the recommended dietary allowance information."