The Right Balance of Nutrients

A healthy diet contains all the nutrients necessary for growth and proper body function. The U.S. government has developed Dietary Reference Intakes (DRI) to provide recommendations for daily intake of the most important nutrients.

The following recommendations are for a healthy adult with a caloric intake of 2,000 calories a day. If your caloric intake is higher or lower than 2,000 calories, or if you’re pregnant or have a health condition, you should talk to your doctor about what your DRI recommendations should be.

The DRI guidelines give you a sense of how much of each nutrient you need to eat each day. But of course there’s not enough time in the day to calculate every milligram of nutrients in every bite of food you eat. To make things easier, nutritionists have created the food groups.