2

Charge to the Committee

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine was asked to appoint a standing committee to review the Dietary Reference Intake (DRI) framework, structure, and process for future DRI reviews. The committee was tasked to consider past experiences and learnings from previous DRI reports, including Guiding Principles for Developing Dietary Reference Intakes Based on Chronic Disease (NASEM, 2017), a recent meeting of experts, Strategic Planning for a New Review of Macronutrient Dietary Reference Intakes, and other relevant documents related to the DRI process such as The Development of DRIs 1994–2004: Lessons Learned and New Challenges: Workshop Summary (IOM, 2008). The standing committee was charged to produce letter reports in response to questions relevant to the DRI framework and structuring new DRI reviews as questions arise from future DRI consensus committees (see Box 2-1). The committee’s responses to the questions posed are to provide overarching answers that could apply across a range of nutrient and food-substance topics that will be considered by future DRI reviews. The sponsors will use the standing committee’s discussions to inform future DRI reviews, including a review of the DRIs for macronutrients.

This second letter report will advise the Federal DRI Joint U.S-Canadian Working Group on three questions: (1) Are de novo systematic reviews needed in future DRI reviews or can qualified systematic reviews be used? (2) If qualified systematic reviews can be used, what are the appropriate inclusion and exclusion criteria? (3) Can previously published systematic reviews be updated? The committee will develop

a decision tree that includes the three questions and addresses the need for meta-analysis questions as part of the systematic review process. The standing committee notes that its response to this task was to focus its recommendations on the systematic review questions that occur in preparation for, but prior to, the deliberations of a DRI committee. It was not the standing committee’s task to address issues related to the interpretation or application of reviews that would occur during a DRI study.

In addition, the sponsors requested that the committee comment on the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations 2022 (Arnesen et al., 2020a,b; Christensen et al., 2020; Høyer et al., 2021); and a report from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), “Scientific Opinion on a Tolerable Upper Intake Level for Dietary Sugars” (NDA, 2022).