The RDA Hoax (Recommended Daily Allowance)


One way to suppress nutrition and its health benefits is the establishment of a nebulous, arbitrary and meaningless standard of measurement such as the RDA or “Recommended Daily Allowance.”

The purpose of the RDA hoax is to get the public to accept it as the gold standard. This is what has happened.

A prime example is in the case of vitamin D. The RDA for vitamin D has indeed practically wiped out rickets in the United States. But this is a camouflage for the need of much higher amounts of vitamin D—1,000 to 3,000 units daily even up to 10,000 in the case of tuberculosis (TB)—as proven therapy for patients with cancer, heart disease, dementia, autoimmune disease, influenza A, chronic pain, depression, gingivitis, the common cold and dozens of other diseases associated with vitamin D deficiency.

Laboratory evidence shows that TB can be prevented with vitamin D. Then straight off the press, a controlled clinical study showing vitamin D resulted in a 100 percent cure rate for TB patients, but they treated TB patients with 10,000 units of vitamin D a day—not the RDA 400.

Of course “orthodox medicine” screams toxicity. If you can experience natural healing therapy, you don’t need drugs. As Royal Lee, M.D., said, “One of the greatest deceptions is the treatment of symptoms with drugs instead of nutrition.” Starvation is being treated with drugs instead of nutrition.

As in the case with vitamin D, a certain amount of nutrition is required to get a therapeutic result—many times a large amount. This is not supposed to be known to the public.


The RDA for iodine is outright deception. The medical establishment, Institute of Medicine, says 150 micrograms per day for adults and less for children.

Guy Abraham, M.D., at UCLA School of Medicine and researcher of iodine says that 12.5 milligrams per day (that’s 12,500 micrograms) is the optimal dose, and that’s 83 times more than the RDA. Chances are very high that most of us are not getting nearly enough iodine.

We think in terms of overdose but the risk of underdose may be the highest risk when taking nutritional supplements. The big exception to this would be taking mega doses of synthetic vitamins. When we use synthetic instead of natural or organic, we go from food to pharmacology. Pharmacology is chemicals made in the laboratory. It is not food or nutrition.

The high risk of public fixation on the RDA is that we underdose on vital nutrition as in vitamin D and iodine.

We have to think of iodine in the United States as a dietary supplement because there is little in the soil that would translate into food production. The Japanese consume more iodine mostly from seaweed and they have much lower breast cancer. In fact, they have much lower rates of all cancer including prostate cancer.

Thyroid Health

Forty percent of the U.S. population has hypothyroidism, which is low thyroid function leading to a multitude of illnesses including heart disease and cancer.

So many people are on thyroid medication (hopefully on Armour natural thyroid), but all these people should also be taking iodine. The reason is that unless we get enough iodine with our thyroid supplement, we may be raising the risk of breast cancer and prostate cancer. The fact is if we had enough diet iodine, we wouldn’t have low thyroid function and wouldn’t need medication.

Hypothyroidism is a nutritional deficiency of the vital mineral iodine. It is extremely fundamental to health.

You can check your own thyroid function. It’s simply a matter of body temperature. The normal body temperature is 98.6º F.

Take your underarm temperature in the morning before you get out of bed and as you wake up, preferably with a shake down mercury thermometer. Leave the thermometer on the nightstand or table by your bed at night. Take your morning temperature at rest, underarm temperature for five days in sequence and record your average—which you get by adding them up and dividing by five.

If you are as much as one degree under 98.6, you are hypothyroid and you at least need daily iodine supplementation. I can’t go into it here, but conventional blood tests in a doctor’s clinic do not accurately show your thyroid function. Tens of thousands of people are struggling daily with low energy and obesity just because a blood test showed “normal” thyroid function. Do the body temperature test on yourself and your family.

If your thyroid is two to four degrees low, you need thyroid hormone by prescription from your doctor. Ask for the Armour natural. You should also take daily iodine supplement (see below for sources and amount).

Iodine displaces or flushes chlorine, bromine, fluorine, lead, cadmium, arsenic, aluminum and mercury with safety. In today’s world this is huge!

Sources and Amounts

I have never read of any injury because of iodine but don’t take more than 12 to 14 milligrams daily. Japanese researchers say that they have found cases of hypothyroidism caused by excess iodine, 20 mgs daily or more.

Lugol’s iodine is an old favorite. Two to four drops in water for an adult would be okay.

Iodoral from compounding pharmacies and some health food stores—one tablet daily.

Another choice is Prolamine Iodine. This is an all-natural, vegetarian source.

All three can be purchased from

Iodine is powerful and can be used in many ways. It’s an excellent water purifier. It can cure infection.

From The Cure for All Cancers by Hulda Clark, Ph.D.: “Salmonella and Shigella are two stomach and digestive tract bacteria. Six drops of Lugol’s solution can end it all for Salmonella and Shigella. If you have gas and bloating, pour yourself ½ glass of water. Add six drops of Lugol’s exactly, stir with wood or plastic and drink at once. The action is noticeable in an hour. Take this dose four times a day, after meals and at bedtime for three days in a row, then as needed.

“Notice how calming six drops of Lugol’s can be, soothing a manic stage and bringing a peaceful state where anxiety ruled before. Lugol’s is perfectly safe (if not allergic) to take day after day when needed because of its peculiar attaching property. It arrives in the stomach and then reattaches to everything in proximity. Doomed are Salmonella and Shigella; doomed also are eggs (cysts) of parasites that might be in the stomach.”

Unless we read a lot (which I recommend), we go by the RDA hoax. As you can see in just two examples of vitamin D and iodine, the RDA leads us into, or keeps us in, a deficiency state and disease.


Wright, Jonathan V. Nutrition and Healing newsletter,

Brownstein, David, M.D. Iodine, Why You Need it, Why You Can’t Live Without It. Bloomfield, MI: Medical Alternative Press.

Derry, David, M.D., Ph.D. Breast Cancer and Iodine. Trafford Publishing.

Barnes, Broda O., M.D., Ph.D., and Charlotte W. Barnes. Solved: The Riddle of Heart Attacks.

Acta Med Indones, 2006 Jan-Mar, 38(1):3-5, Vitamin D Newsletter, 2/24/06.

Bob Livingston
