Diet Analysis

An excellent way to determine the need for a dietary supplement is to analyze your diet. This is a common tool used by some health-care professionals, researchers, and even individuals to evaluate nutrient intakes. It makes use of a computerized program and provides information about your levels of nutrients compared to the recommended daily allowance (RDA) or another standard reference (such as the USDA’s Dietary Reference Intakes, or DRIs). Studies using this approach and other methods continue to show seriously low intakes of many nutrients by large numbers of people, including athletes. For example, a USDA survey estimated that 80 percent of American women did not achieve RDA levels of folic acid, iron, zinc, vitamin B6, magnesium, and calcium. This problem, of course, is due to poor dietary habits.

I performed a diet analysis, usually two or more, on almost all the athletes I’ve worked with throughout my career. Just as other surveys have shown, many people had serious nutritional imbalances in their diets. Even when I factored in dietary supplements some athletes took, they were frequently below RDA levels of various nutrients. Today there are many computerized diet analysis programs available and the USDA Web site (www.usda.gov) provides a simple one online that is free.

广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元

If a diet analysis shows that specific nutrients are below a minimum level, there are two important steps to take:

 

 

 
  • First, improve your diet to include or increase foods containing these nutrients.
  • Second, you may need additional nutrients from a dietary supplement—at least temporarily until your nutrient levels return to normal and you can maintain these levels with your diet.