Expected Nutritional Science in Japan Viewed from Dietary Reference Intakes

Abstract

The “Dietary Reference Intakes” represent the most basic and comprehensive guidelines related to diet and nutrient intake. These guidelines are used as a reference by practitioners in the dietary field. For humans, such guidelines must meet three fundamental requirements: (1) they must be based on evidence obtained from human populations, (2) they must be fully reliable, and (3) they must be useful in practice. If nutrition is to be considered an applied science with a public role to safeguard the lives and health of a given population, then dietary and nutritional guidelines, such as dietary reference intakes, represent a field in which nutritional science must take responsibility. However, such guidelines are based not on the traditional “science of discovery” or “science for clarification of mechanisms”, but on “science of verification” and “epidemiological research based on observation and intervention in the real world”. If we consider dietary reference intakes to be an example of applied science, they may offer a vision of the future of nutritional science.