The Meaning of Requirement

The Advisory Committee to Revise the Canadian Dietary Standard (1983) offers the following description of the meaning of requirement  

Requirement is taken to mean that level of dietary intake of a nutrient that meets an individual s need, described as the establishment and maintenance of a reasonable level in tissues or stores in the body. For infants, children and pregnant women, requirement is meant to include needs for the deposition of new tissues, and in lactating women, for the production of milk. As here described, requirements refer to levels of intake needed to maintain health in already healthy individuals. For this purpose, health is considered to be more than the absence of clinically apparent ill health. 

To the extent that nutrient requirements are known to be influenced by measurable characteristics of the individual, of the individual s diet, or of the environment in which the individual lives, these factors too can be 

Finally, mention must be made of the situation in which data needed to support requirement estimates are sparse. For several of the nutrients we continue to lack good markers of satiation of need and, as a result, 

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