J Nutr. 1996 Sep; 126(9 Suppl): 2390S-2397S.

Interests and values in the Recommended Dietary Allowances and nutritional guidelines for Americans.

Kunkel HO.

Faculty of Nutrition, Texas A&M University, College Station 77843-2471, USA.

Evidence is provided showing that interests, values and belief systems have affected the development of Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) and nutrition guidelines for Americans in the past and can be expected to do so in the future. The conflicts of the 1980s relative to the nutritional guidelines for Americans and the RDAs illustrate the tension among values that can parallel a conflict of interests. In the conflicts of the 1980s, we saw an apparent conflict between those policies that attempt to optimize outcomes for a large class of affected parties and those policies that attempt to establish constraints on actions which appear to threaten individual autonomy and freedom of choice. The former approach derives from utilitarian, consequential moral philosophy which evaluates policies by evaluating costs and harms, and weighing them against benefits to all parties. The latter has its strongest advocates in contemporary libertarianism which takes individual freedom to be the bottom line. Ethical vegetarianism, a belief system which would limit RDAs and guidelines to those that can be translated to vegan and other vegetarian diets, has been a more recent entry into the discussions. Such human value issues suggest that a set of RDAs or of nutrition guidelines is analogous to and may be considered to be an ethic. An ethic is a theory reached via the method of reflective equilibrium that is a coherent ordered triple set of beliefs: a set of considered moral judgments, a set of moral principles, and a set of relevant scientific background theories. The reasoning, however, can become circular and unsound when the considered moral judgments, moral principles and relevant background are not independent sources of information. If they are mixed or, for example, an intuition is mistaken for a scientific conclusion, the reasoning can be flawed.