Extension To EU Level
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In recent times, Dietary Reference Values are under the interest of the European Food Safety Authority too, which intend to extend them at the EU level. EFSA is the equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the USA, and acts as watchdog inside the European market in order to establish a common ground on food safety requirements and nutrition as well.
EFSA met in September 2009 with representative of the Member States in order to gain their views on fats, carbohydrates, fibres and water as well as Food-Based Dietary Guidelines. Furthermore EFSA is searching for comments (Open Consultation) by 15 October, in order to validate its assumptions on the need to have:
- carbohydrates comprising 45% – 60% of the overall daily caloric intake
- fats being comprised among 20% / 35% of the overall caloric intake
- fibre needs: complying with 25 grams/day
EFSA considers that there are not sufficient data to set DRVs for sugars, and not systematic scientific substantiation linking diseases such as stroke or diabetes (DMT1 or DMT2) to an increased intake of sugars (glycemic load/glycemic index). In any case, there is much literature referring to this link, on journals with very high impact factor and statistically robust design and results
Many problems seem nowadays to derive from having integrated EU level DRV:
- the presence of a previous EFSA opinion on Food Based Dietary Guidelines, aimed at stressing the need of having only country-based guidelines, against the WHO hypothesis. This is due to very different food patterns, for EFSA, inside Europe.
- the presence of private scheme such as GDA (Guidelines on Daily Amounts), referring on the same subject (calories from nutrient groups) but casting shadow on the effectiveness of DRVs as public authorities' scheme.
Read more about this topic: Dietary Reference Values
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