How much vitamin C do you need The Food and Nutrition Board

How much vitamin C do you need? The Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine working in cooperation with scientists from Canada have used scientific data to answer this question for a variety of vitamins and minerals. Their methodology assumes that needs, or requirements, follow a distribution. They have produced guidelines called dietary reference intakes for different gender-by-age combinations. For vitamin C, there are three dietary reference intakes: the estimated average requirement (EAR), which is the mean of the requirement distribution; the recommended dietary allowance (RDA), which is the intake that would be sufficient for 97% to 98% of the population; and the tolerable upper level (UL), the intake that is unlikely to pose health risks. For women aged 19 to 30 years, the EAR is 60 milligrams per day (mg/d), the RDA is 74 mg/d, and the UL is 2000 mg/d.

The researchers assumed that the distribution of requirements for vitamin C is Normal. The EAR gives the mean. From the definition of the RDA, let\'s assume that its value is the 97.77 percentile.

Use this information and software to determine the standard deviation (±0.1) of the requirement distribution.

Solution

miu + 3 standard deviation = 97%

60 + 3 s = 74

s= 4.67