Dietary Bioactives: Establishing a Scientific Framework for Recommended Intakes

In the United States, dietary reference intakes describe the relations between nutrient intakes and indicators of adequacy, prevention of disease, and avoidance of excessive intakes among healthy populations for essential nutrients but not dietary bioactive components (DBCs), whose absence from the diet is presumably not deleterious to health (i.e., does not cause a deficiency syndrome). An appropriate framework is needed for establishing recommended intakes for which public health messages and food labeling for DBCs can be derived, because their putative health benefits may not be readily defined in the context of nutritional essentiality. In addition, a myriad of factors make determining their intake and status and investigating their discrete contributions to health particularly challenging. Therefore, the ASN Dietary Bioactive Components Research Interest Section felt it worthwhile to convene a special “hot topic” session at the 2014 Experimental Biology meeting to discuss this issue and serve as a call for future scientific dialogue on establishing a framework for recommended intakes of DBCs. This session summary captures the discussions and presentations that transpired during this session.