ABSTRACT

When I show my students Table 15.1 and ask for their comments, they almost invariably consider it a very bad diet because it so far removed from the dietary guidelines for adults discussed in Chapter 4. Many of them doubt whether anyone could actually be eating such a diet because it is also very different from the average intakes recorded in dietary surveys and household budget surveys. Table 15.1 in fact shows the approximate composition of mature human milk, the ideal food for babies. This extreme example illustrates the general point that nutritional needs and priorities are likely to change during the human lifecycle; in this case it shows that what is nutritionally ideal for newborn babies is far from ideal for fully grown adults. One would also, for example, expect the relative nutritional needs of an active rapidly growing adolescent to be markedly different to those of an elderly housebound person or even of a sedentary middle-aged person. Such differences mean that the dietary reference values (DRVs) vary with age, sex and reproductive status,

and they also mean that there should be differences in the priority and nature of the general dietary guidelines offered for different lifecycle groups. This chapter focuses on the differing requirements and nutritional priorities of different lifecycle groups.