Understanding Guideline Daily Amounts (GDAs)

Guideline Daily Amounts (GDAs) are approximate daily maximum guideline levels of calories and key nutrients, to enable adults to maintain a healthy balanced diet. They provide a simple tool to help you benchmark your food purchases and consumption to achieve a healthy balanced diet.

GDAs on packs summarise the contribution which individual foods make to your daily intake of calories, sugars, fat, saturates, and salt. This can help you to understand what is in the food you like to eat.

A personalised GDA would take into account your gender, weight and also activity levels, since all of these determine your daily calorie needs. Unfortunately it is impossible to include a wide range of variations on a label. The GDAs you see on food labels are based on dietary recommendations for an average adult. An average adult is defined as a female of healthy weight and average activity level with no special dietary needs.

GDAs are intended to be used as guidelines to help you to put the nutritional information on food labels into the context of your overall diet. Whilst it is OK to stick pretty close to the GDAs for calories if you are not trying to lose weight, the GDAs for sugars, fat, saturates and salt should be treated as maximum intakes.

Since they are only averages and not personalised, GDAs cannot be used as targets for individuals. They simply provide a guideline, which enables you to see how the foods you eat contribute to your nutritional intake.