For most of the nutrients for which EARs have been established, the required assumption of distribution of requirements is that of symmetry about the mean. In the case of iron, a nutrient of concern in many subgroups in the population in the United States, Canada, and other areas, requirements are known to follow a non-normal distribution. Thus a different method was needed to determine the intake of iron at which half of the individuals would be expected to be inadequate in the criterion used to establish adequacy (the EAR) and also to construct an intake level at which only a small percentage of the population would be inadequate (the RDA).

If the requirement of a nutrient is not normally distributed but can be transformed to normality, its EAR and RDA can be estimated by transforming the data, calculating the 50th and 97.5th percentiles, and transforming these percentiles back into the original units. In this case the difference between the EAR and the RDA cannot be used to obtain an estimate of the SD of the CV because skewing is usually present.

When factorial modeling is used to estimate the distribution of requirement from the distributions of the individual components of requirement, as was done in the case of iron recommendations (IOM, 2001) and for the maintenance and growth components of the recommendations for children for protein and amino acids (IOM, 2002a), it is necessary to add the individual distributions (convolutions). This is easy to do given that the average requirement is simply the sum of the averages of the individual component distributions, and an SD of the combined distribution can be estimated by standard statistical techniques. The 97.5th percentile can then be estimated.³ If normality cannot be assumed for all of the components of requirement, then Monte Carlo simulation is used for the summation of the components. This approach models the distributions of the individual distributions and randomly assigns values to a large simulated population. The total requirement is then calculated for each individual and the median and the 97.5th percentile are calculated directly. As was the case for iron (IOM, 2001), the underlying joint distribution is approximated and a large