Requirement and Recommendations of Mineral Elements

For both animals and man, the requirement of inorganic elements is extremely important. Requirement is the lowest continuous level of nutrient intake that, at a specified efficiency of utilization, will maintain the defined level of nutritive in the individual. 

At this point a distinction must be made between basal and normative requirements. Basal requirement refers to the intake needed to prevent pathologically relevant and clinically detectable signs of impaired function attributable to inadequacy of the nutrient. Normative requirement refers to the intake that serves to maintain a level of tissue storage or other reserves that is judged to be desirable. 

The essential difference between basal and normative requirement is that the latter usually facilitates the maintenance of a desirable level of tissue stores. For most 

Individuals differ in their requirements even if they may have the same general characterization (age, sex, physiological size, body size). One may therefore speak of the average requirements of a group of individuals, or of the level that marks a point in the tail of the requirement distribution curve - the level previously identified as the recommended or safe level of inorganic element level intake. 

Normally, the recommended intake of elements is 30 to 100% higher than the normative requirement. In practice, we must distinguish between the (normative) requirement of the elements and the recommendation for the intake of a population. The recommendation is necessarily higher than the normative requirement (Anonymous 

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