Vitamin A intake calculator
A 30-year-old man needs 900 micrograms RAE of vitamin A a day, and a woman of the same age 700. Enter age and sex to get the daily amount for any life stage, from newborn to older adult. Free in your browser.
- Free
- Runs in your browser
- No sign-up
- Your data stays on your device
Run — free
Worked example
- Age
- 30
- Sex
- Male
- Recommended rae mcg
- 900 mcg_rae
- Rae mcg
- 900
- Age band
- 19_plus
- Life stage
- adult
Vitamin A is a fat-soluble micronutrient required for dim-light vision, epithelial integrity, immune function, and embryonic growth. Public-health tables do not quote a single adult number: they assign micrograms of retinol activity equivalents, or RAE, by age band and by sex, using Adequate Intake for infants and a Recommended Dietary Allowance from the first birthday onward. This vitamin A calculator looks up those Institute of Medicine and NIH dietary reference values from two inputs—age in years and sex—and returns the recommended daily intake in micrograms of RAE. Age must be a nonnegative finite number; a newborn is age zero, a four-month infant can be sent as a fraction, and a negative age is rejected as invalid input. Sex is male or female, with short forms accepted. Failed validation is not charged.
What recommended vitamin A means and which inputs you send
Recommended daily vitamin A is the life-stage Dietary Reference Intake expressed as micrograms of retinol activity equivalents, not as international units and not as milligrams of beta-carotene. One microgram RAE equals one microgram of all-trans-retinol, twelve micrograms of dietary beta-carotene, or twenty-four micrograms of other dietary provitamin A carotenoids, which is why food labels and supplement facts that still quote IU cannot be compared to this result without knowing the chemical source.
Public-health tables from the Institute of Medicine and the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements assign an Adequate Intake of four hundred micrograms RAE from birth through six months and five hundred micrograms RAE from seven months until the first birthday, because infants are fed breast milk or formula and an experimental Recommended Dietary Allowance is not defined for that window.
From age one through three years the allowance is three hundred micrograms RAE for both sexes, then four hundred micrograms RAE from four through eight years and six hundred micrograms RAE from nine through thirteen years. From fourteen years onward the table splits: nine hundred micrograms RAE per day for males and seven hundred micrograms RAE per day for females, including older adults.
How the daily amount is found
The engine does not interpolate between ages and does not scale with body weight or calorie intake. It classifies the submitted age into one of seven bands and, from fourteen years onward, applies the sex-specific Recommended Dietary Allowance. Ages up to and including one half year map to the zero-to-six-month Adequate Intake of four hundred micrograms RAE.
Ages greater than one half year and less than one year map to the seven-to-twelve-month Adequate Intake of five hundred micrograms RAE. Whole-year bands then follow the published child and adult rows: one through three, four through eight, nine through thirteen, fourteen through eighteen, and nineteen and older. Example: age thirty and sex male yields nine hundred micrograms RAE, adult, nineteen-plus, rda.
Age twenty-five and sex female yields seven hundred. Age five yields four hundred for either sex. Age zero yields four hundred as an Adequate Intake.
Do not treat the figure as a prescription, a diagnosis, or a tolerable upper intake: people who are pregnant or lactating have separate published rows that this age-and-sex landing does not apply, and high-dose retinol supplements can exceed the upper limit even when the recommended intake looks modest.
Where it helps and where it stops
Call the free in-browser vitamin A calculator for a well-child handout, a lecture demo, a meal-plan check, or a quick confirmation that an adult male target is nine hundred micrograms RAE and an adult female target is seven hundred, without installing a nutrition spreadsheet. Prefer age already stored in years; if you only have completed months for an infant, divide by twelve so a six-month-old is age zero point five and stays on the four-hundred Adequate Intake row, while a seven-month-old crosses into five hundred.
Source inputs follow the same retention rules as other KIT parse items, and outputs are safe to pin in automated tests because the algorithm never touches the network, a language model, a clock, or a random generator. Keep expectations educational: this is a planning and literacy tool, not a diagnostic medical device, not a supplement-dose calculator, and not a conversion from IU on an old bottle. Users with malabsorption, restrictive diets, or clinical protocols should follow professional guidance rather than any single table alone.
What you can do with it
Pediatric and adult nutrition counseling
Clinics and coaches enter age and sex to show the matching mcg RAE target next to the AI or RDA label for education, growth visits, and meal-plan reviews.
FAQ
How is recommended daily vitamin A calculated?
The engine looks up Institute of Medicine and NIH dietary reference values by age band and sex, returning micrograms of RAE per day. Infants use Adequate Intake (400 or 500 mcg RAE); from age one the table uses Recommended Dietary Allowance, splitting by sex from age fourteen (900 mcg RAE for males, 700 mcg RAE for females).
What happens if age is negative or not a number?
Age must be a nonnegative finite number of years; zero is allowed for a newborn. Failed validation is not charged.
What is a microgram of RAE?
RAE means retinol activity equivalents. One microgram RAE equals one microgram of retinol, twelve micrograms of dietary beta-carotene, or twenty-four micrograms of other dietary provitamin A carotenoids. This calculator reports mcg RAE, not international units.
Is the vitamin A calculator free?
The browser tool runs free on your device.
Does this include pregnancy or lactation targets?
No. Pregnancy and lactation have separate published DRI rows (for example 770 or 1300 mcg RAE in adults). This landing takes only age and sex and returns the non-pregnant table. It is educational, not medical advice.
Related tools
For developers — API access
Everything on this page is available programmatically. This section is for teams who want to wire it into their own systems; everyone else can just use the tool above.
API endpoint
Prefer to automate it? One authenticated POST creates the task; the result comes back by webhook or a signed link. The same capability also runs here on the web, by email and from Telegram — and soon from our app too.
Call it from your stack
curl -X POST https://api.kit.forhosting.com/health/vitamin-a \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KIT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"age":30,"sex":"male"}'const res = await fetch("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/health/vitamin-a", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Authorization": `Bearer ${process.env.KIT_KEY}`,
"Content-Type": "application/json"
},
body: JSON.stringify({
"age": 30,
"sex": "male"
})
});
const { task_id } = await res.json();import os, requests
res = requests.post(
"https://api.kit.forhosting.com/health/vitamin-a",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['KIT_KEY']}"},
json={
"age": 30,
"sex": "male"
},
)
task_id = res.json()["task_id"]<?php
$res = file_get_contents("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/health/vitamin-a", false, stream_context_create([
"http" => [
"method" => "POST",
"header" => "Authorization: Bearer " . getenv("KIT_KEY") . "\r\nContent-Type: application/json",
"content" => '{"age":30,"sex":"male"}',
],
]));
$task = json_decode($res, true);body := bytes.NewBufferString(`{"age":30,"sex":"male"}`)
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "https://api.kit.forhosting.com/health/vitamin-a", body)
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("KIT_KEY"))
req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
res, _ := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)Example request
{
"age": 30,
"sex": "male"
}Example response
{
"task_id": "tsk_a1b2c3d4e5f6a1b2c3d4e5f6",
"type": "health.vitamin_a",
"status": "queued",
"_links": {
"result": "/tasks/tsk_…/result"
}
}The API is asynchronous: the call returns a task_id immediately and the result arrives by webhook. Polling is capped at 1 req/s per task.
Pricing
Published price — no tokens, no invented credits. A failed task is never charged.
Errors
| HTTP | Code | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
401 | unauthorized | Missing or invalid API key. |
402 | insufficient_balance | Your balance doesn't cover the task price. |
404 | unknown_type | That task type doesn't exist. |
429 | rate_limited | Too many requests. Use the webhook instead of polling. |
Technical notes
The algorithm is a pure table lookup with no network, no model, and no clock, so identical requests always produce identical JSON.
What recommended vitamin A means and which inputs you send
Send age as a nonnegative finite number of years, including zero for a newborn and fractions such as zero point four for a four-to-five-month infant; aliases age_years and years are accepted. Send sex as male or female, case-insensitive, with short forms m and f and the words man or woman also accepted; aliases gender and sex_at_birth map to the same field. Missing fields, negative age, non-finite numbers, ages above one hundred twenty years, and unrecognized sex values fail with invalid_input and are not charged.
How the lookup works and how to read the JSON
On success the response echoes the numeric age and the normalized sex so a client can confirm what was classified. The headline number is recommended_rae_mcg, repeated as rae_mcg for short labels, with unit always mcg_rae. age_band names the row that fired, life_stage is infant, child, adolescent, or adult, and criterion is ai for the two infant bands and rda thereafter. formula restates that the source is the IOM and NIH dietary reference intake table in micrograms RAE per day, and method is always iom_nih_dri_vitamin_a so downstream code can branch without sniffing shapes.
API usage, pricing, planning workflows, and honest limits
Send a JSON body with required age and sex, or their aliases. Use the prepaid API when a wellness app, school cafeteria planner, electronic intake form, or coaching dashboard needs a stable contract under KIT balance at $0.002 per successful item; validation failures never consume balance after the engine rejects the request. Pair the result with your own food log: convert logged retinol and carotenoids into RAE on the client, then score the day against recommended_rae_mcg. Authors shipping SDKs can map recommended_rae_mcg, age_band, and criterion into dashboard cards labeled AI or RDA without re-implementing the seven-row table in every client language.
Integration use cases
Wellness and diet-tracking apps
Apps that already store date of birth and sex call a stable prepaid endpoint for daily vitamin A RAE instead of copying the DRI table into every client.
Classroom dietary-reference demos
Courses compare infant Adequate Intake with child and adult Recommended Dietary Allowance rows and pin expected JSON because the lookup is deterministic.