Micronutrients and Supplements: What ANSES, EFSA and CIQUAL Actually Say

Trap #1: the "%" on a label is not the official requirement

Two sets of numbers coexist in Europe, and they don't do the same job.

• NRVs (nutrient reference values) — these are what the "%" printed on packaging and supplements is calculated from. They're set in Annex XIII of Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011: a single value for all adults, designed for labelling — not to describe any individual's requirement. Most of them rest on work predating 2011.
• ANSES dietary reference values (RNP, AI) — updated by the agency between 2016 and 2021, they vary by sex, age and physiological status. These are the figures French authorities use to reason about a population. See ANSES dietary reference values for vitamins and minerals.

The gap between the two is anything but cosmetic:

In practice: a product claiming "100% NRV" for vitamin D covers roughly one third of the ANSES adult reference. And the other way round, for iron the 14 mg NRV is higher than the 11 mg ANSES reference that applies to men and to part of the female population. So a label percentage tells you neither "you're short" nor "you've had enough".

Trap #2: there's an upper limit too, and it has a number

Minimum intakes get all the attention; the ceiling gets almost none. Yet EFSA (the European Food Safety Authority) publishes tolerable upper intake levels, revised on a rolling basis — the current summary is in its overview of tolerable upper intake levels (EFSA, 2024, PDF). A few adult values:

A point ANSES stresses: this limit covers all sources combined — regular diet, fortified foods and supplements added together. The agency notes that a supplement's maximum daily dose has to account not only for the nutrient's safety limit but also for the intake already provided by the diet. That's where the risk of exceeding the limit sits — not in any single food.

What ANSES says about food supplements

The agency's position, published in its dossier "Food supplements: the need for informed consumption", fits in one sentence: in the absence of disease, all nutritional requirements can be met by a varied and balanced diet combined with daily physical activity; taking food supplements is then not necessary.

The agency does identify situations where covering requirements is harder: pregnancy, young children, older adults, and exclusion diets (strict veganism, diets excluding seafood). In those cases it explicitly recommends seeking a healthcare professional's advice rather than self-supplementing.

On actual usage, ANSES's INCA 3 survey shows the practice is already widespread: 22% of adults and 14% of children report taking food supplements (29% and 19% under a broader definition including nutrients), a share that rose from 20% to 29% in adults and 12% to 19% in children between INCA 2 (2006-2007) and INCA 3 (2014-2015) under the broader definition (including nutrient-source medicines), with a seasonal peak in winter.

What about the actual nutritional status of the French population?

Santé publique France's Esteban 2014-2016 study measured blood levels of vitamins and minerals in a representative sample. Its headline conclusion: no major deficit and no large-scale deficiency in the French population. Two watch points do stand out in the published results:

• Vitamin D — only about one adult in four had a satisfactory status, and close to 7% of adults were in a deficient range.
• Iron in women of childbearing age — around 20% had depleted iron stores, and 4% had untreated iron-deficiency anaemia.

In other words: the documented problem is not a general shortfall that would justify mass supplementation, but targeted situations that call for a blood test and medical advice — not an app, and not a blog article. We cover the signs and the at-risk groups in iron, vitamin D and B12 deficiencies.

What foods actually contain (CIQUAL / USDA)

This is the part almost no calorie app shows. The figures below come from Radish's own database, built on the ANSES CIQUAL table and on USDA FoodData Central. Percentages are calculated against the ANSES adult reference shown, for a common portion.

Two things come out of this kind of comparison. First, some references are covered very quickly by ordinary foods — one red pepper is enough to pass the day's vitamin C reference. Second, others are structurally harder to reach through food alone: vitamin D is the textbook case, with very few genuinely rich foods (oily fish, fortified products), which lines up with the Esteban signal. Noticing that gap is not a diagnosis: it stays a data point to bring to a healthcare professional.

Why the data source changes everything

A micronutrient value only means something if you know where it came from. Three common pitfalls in nutrition databases:

• User-submitted data — many databases are filled in by users with no verification. On calories, an error is visible; on zinc or folate, nobody catches it.
• Raw vs cooked — CIQUAL values are given for a specific state of the food. Mixing up "raw spinach" and "cooked spinach" distorts a micronutrient far more than a macronutrient.
• Missing values — a blank field is not a zero. Showing 0 µg of vitamin B12 for a food that simply wasn't assayed gives a false picture of the day.

That's why Radish's database is built on CIQUAL and USDA, with the source kept per food item, and why an unknown value stays flagged as unknown instead of being rounded down to zero. The details are in our methodology.

What Radish does — and what it doesn't

Radish tracks 11 vitamins and minerals (sodium, potassium, calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc, vitamins C, D, A, folate B9, vitamin B12), plus fibre, sugars and saturated fat from CIQUAL/USDA data, and adjusts targets by sex and age wherever ANSES does so itself — for example 16 mg of iron for a premenopausal woman versus 11 mg otherwise, or 1,000 mg of calcium between 18 and 24 versus 950 mg after. Everything is computed on the device, with no account and no data leaving the phone. For the overview of all 14 references, see micronutrients: vitamins and minerals.

What Radish does not do: recommend a supplement, sell a supplement, make a diagnosis, or tell anyone they are "deficient". Food tracking shows estimated intakes derived from food composition tables; it does not measure biological status, which only a blood test establishes.

General information, not medical advice. Accurate as of July 28, 2026.

General information, not medical advice. No supplementation is recommended in this article; any decision to supplement is a matter for a healthcare professional.

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