Guideline Daily Amounts

[baratron]

I finally managed to find the UK Guideline Daily Amounts for different nutrients (on a packet of Sainsbury's "Be Good To Yourself" oven chips, of all places!). The official table agrees very nicely with the one that johnckirk managed to put together from 3 different sources. Seeing that it's such a pain in the bum to get hold of, I thought I'd type it out in case anyone else was looking for it.

	Women	Men	Children 5-10 years
Energy (kcal)	2000	2500	1800
Protein (g)	45	55	24
Carbohydrate (g) of which simple (g)	230 90	300 120	220 85
Fat (g) of which saturated (g)	70 20	95 30	70 20
Fibre (g)	24	24	15
Salt (g) of which sodium (g)	6 2.4	6 2.4	4 1.4

Comments

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I do get mildy annoyed when labels on food fail to distinguish minimum and maximum amouns, though. You would't be unhealthy if you got quite a lot less alt than that but they wouldn't (presumably?) want you to cut the fibre much. Still a good start...

Personally I am still trying to find out what is meant by a 'portion' or carbohydrates. Apparently a slice of bread counts as one, so clearly they're smaller than I thought...

[memevector.livejournal.com]

You would't be unhealthy if you got quite a lot less salt than that

That's just what I was thinking!

I don't think anyone eating the average western diet needs to give the slightest thought to any concern about getting too little, perhaps unless they're running a marathon in a heatwave...

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Yes - if I, as a vegan, get well over 90g of protein a day and the "guideline" amount for a woman is 45g, I don't think anyone needs to worry about getting too little :)

I know what you mean, though - some of those guidelines are recommended maxima while others are recommended minima. We, as reasonably well-educated people, can probably work out for ourselves which are which. But someone who knew very little about nutrition would have no clue. It's probably worth taking up that point with whoever's "in charge" of food labelling - perhaps those IGD people that nmg linked to?