Comparisons with Other Recommendations

FAO/WHO verbatim.

Comparisons with other recommendations

Our recommendations in Table 31 can be compared with the current recommendations of Australia, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United States and Canada in Table 32. Our recommendations for adults are very close to those of the United States and Canada but higher than those of the United Kingdom and Australia, which do not take into account insensible losses, and higher than those of the European Union, which assumed 30 percent absorption of dietary calcium. 

The British and European values make no allowance for ageing or menopause. Recommendations for other high-risk groups are very similar in all five sets of recommendations except for the rather low allowance for infants by the United States and Canada. 

Nonetheless, and despite this broad measure of agreement, we have some misgivings about the application of these recommendations, all of which rely ultimately on data from developed nations, to developing countries where other dietary constituents – such as animal protein and sodium – and environmental factors may be very different. We shall therefore in the next sections briefly review current knowledge about the prevalence of osteoporosis across racial national boundaries and its relevance to calcium requirement.