Assessing the prevalence of nutrient inadequacy

Abstract

The apparently intractable problem of assessing the proportion of individuals in a group whose usual intakes of a nutrient are not meeting their requirements can be solved by comparing usual intakes to the EAR for the nutrient, as long as some conditions are met. These are: (1) intakes and requirements for the nutrient must be independent, (2) the distribution of requirements must be approximately symmetric around its mean, the EAR, and (3) the variance of the distribution of requirements should be smaller than the variance of the usual intake distribution.