The other woman is 5ft 4 inches tall as compared with my 4 ft 10.5 inches. She weighs about 135 pounds as opposed to my 90, and eats 2000 calories a day compared to my 1200. I don’t know her name but I call her Mrs Average and she has haunted me all my adult life. Don’t get me wrong - I don’t want to be her, but I am well aware that the world is designed for her requirements and dimensions and I just have to try and fit in as best I can. She is of course the reference person for whom the DRI tables have been calculated. I wrote to the Food and
On a more positive front, this retirement and being 60 years old stuff is pretty damn good. The only niggle at the back of my mind is that I might wake up one morning and find it was all a lovely dream, and I have to get up and go to work. Ugh! But this is a hell of an incentive to keep healthy and live long. If you are in your 20s and 30s retirement is about the last thing you think about, but this is just the time to start a pension scheme, put away whatever you can afford, and take care of your health, so that all those years later you can take full advantage of what life has to offer.
7 comments:
Glad to hear you are enjoying retirement. i guess I cannot help you on the nutrional front as I am the other woman you talk about. But even so, I take suppliments to make sure i get all my nutrients. As I doubt that any of us are getting all the nutrients we need with all that is going on in the production of our food these days....genetically altered, hormone and anitbiotic injected...just to mention a few horrid things that is being passed onto us through food intake.
Stay healthy and keep enjoying your retirement!!!GG
I take a few supplements as insurance - calcium and vitamin D for my old bones, also a small amount of full-spectrum vitamin E. I wouldn't take the huge doses some people do. I am so lucky to have an organic market close to home - it started last year and I would really miss it if it closed. I am sure the DRI guidelines are only a rough rule-of-thumb and maybe they will be refined in time, but any attempt to get the requirements has to be better than most people's haphazard way of eating.
You are so right when you say "haphazard way of eating". But the food industry and TV advertising make junk food so tempting AND it is easier than making food from scratch. I personally love to cook so processed food is a no-no in our home. and lucky for me we have our own organic garden, so fresh fruit and veggies all summer lon and well into winter if we get a good crop of carrotts, beets and potatoes!!
It's an interesting question - since I'm significantly taller than the average, and built to scale with big hands and feet. Do the DRI's scale with body volume, or with energy expenditure, or something else ?
artifex
Hi Artifex - the DRIs don't take energy expenditure or body size into account at all. They scale by age - infants, small children, and age in stages from 9 to 70+, also there are figures for pregnancy and lactation, but all figures are based on an average size reference person. They claim that the figures are set to meet the needs of 97 to 98 % of individuals in any group. Some figures like Vitamn D, E, folate, B12 for example are the same for men as women! So I am expected to get the same amounts in my 1200 calories as a man eating 2500. Thus my problem.
Linda,
we are agreeing that the basis on which the DRIs are established doesn't seem sound. It occurred to me later that for fat soluble nutrients there is likely another factor, associated with the ability of the body to store and release the essential material.
Then most of the research papers I see focus on one vitamin and or mineral at a time, or one disease at a time, not on the (interacting) set of nutrients required for daily health for a variety of body sizes and uses.
Which does point back at Luigi Fontana's research - whom else is working in that space, and has anyone collected peer reviewed papers ?
artifex
Hi Artifex - I have looked through the society archives on the DRI subject but I don't see anything that takes this any further. Most discussions suggest that the safest thing to do is aim for those 'reference person' DRIs and being satisfied with less is tempting fate. At least if I am trying as far as possible to get my nutrients from food I am very unlikely to overdose.
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