Bess Dawson-Hughes

Director of the Bone Metabolism Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts. Author of the randomized trials that established, in the 1990s and 2000s, that daily calcium and vitamin D supplementation in older adults reduces fracture risk and stabilizes parathyroid function, and of subsequent work on the interaction of vitamin D status with protein intake and sarcopenia.

Why she matters here

Dawson-Hughes represents the wing of mainstream nutritional science that has, for two decades, published the numbers that would justify raising the reference intake of vitamin D and calcium for older adults, and has watched those numbers not translate into altered public guidance. Her work sits at the exact interface this resource is trying to name: the interface between demonstrated need and inherited recommendation.