The previous FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Energy and Protein Requirements, 1973, defined “the energy requirement of persons as the energy intake that is considered adequate to meet the energy needs of the average healthy person in a specified category”. The Committee noted that “some individuals are expected to need less and others more than the average energy requirement, but in a group these surpluses and deficits cancel each other, and the suggested requirement represents the average of the group” (21). There may be some argument about whether there is a possibility that energy requirements may also sometimes be applied to individuals, but the fact is that the present tables were constructed to be valid only for groups. One of the problems encountered in this review was that the size of some of the groups reported in the literature was so small that it is difficult to know how valid it is to compare these results to the “requirement” value. Many other questions arose in the assessment of the data in the literature which will be discussed a little later in this article.
This paper is intended as a critical review of the information published since 1970 related to human energy requirements. It is not an exhaustive account of all published data on this topic but it has hopefully covered most of the relevant papers in scientific journals of reasonably wide circulation. It has perforce had to be mainly concentrated on the English, French and German literature, although we do not think we have missed anything significant in the Spanish or Italian literature journals. On the other hand, it is at least possible that some important papers published in Japanese, Russian, or other languages have not been seen by us, although we have carefully examined the various indexing publications and the nutritional abstracting journals.
We apologise to authors of papers which have not been quoted by us because of our ignorance of their existence, and we should be grateful to receive information.
On the other hand, many papers have been carefully read and not quoted, for reasons which are given in detail below, and we apologise again to authors who may be upset or annoyed at the bias in our selection.
