The various policies on vitamin intake in Europe and worldwide (United States) | Les differentes politiques d'apport en vitamines en Europe et dans le monde (Etats-Unis)
2000
Potier de Courcy, G. (Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris (France))
The need for norms in the supply of (micro) nutriments has gradually become apparent, alongside anxiety from a growing number of users (consumers, manufacturers, scientists and politicians) about the excess consumption of certain nutriments, consumer concern about food, and competition between industrialists and between countries. These norms have taken the form of a series of benchmark values, particularly with regard to vitamins, going from a lower limit defining the dangers of deficiencies up to the safe limit and maximum intake defining the dangers (or absence thereof) of excess with recommended daily intake per person in between (a list of French recommended daily intakes was published in 2000). Despite efforts to bring these recommandations into line, particularly through Codex Alimentarius and the EU, with a view to greater trading and health efficiency, they may vary from one country to another. This is because the policies on recommended daily intake in a particular country are the result of a variety of factors: experts' opinions, the validity of scientific knowledge, pressure from industrialists, changing fashions, behaviour of consumers, level of concern about public health and the nutritional level of the population as a whole. In order to correct any anomalies in the supply of vitamins to their populations, the various countries use, depending on the situation, the following methods: making the addition of vitamine to certain foods obligatory (margarine, cereals), allowing their addition to other foods by manufacturers, putting them back into other foods (milk), awareness campaigns, but always within a legal framework
Show more [+] Less [-]AGROVOC Keywords
Bibliographic information
This bibliographic record has been provided by National Institute for Agricultural Research