Day 256 - 04 Jun 96 - Page 75


     
     1
     2   MR. RAMPTON:  Do you agree then that the French and the Germans,
     3        or to put them in their right order, the Germans and the
     4        French are significantly fatter than we are?
     5        A.  Not much but a little bit.
     6
     7   Q.   Not much but a little bit.
     8
     9   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  Let me just look at that again.
    10        A.  Sorry, did you ask a question?
    11
    12   MR. RAMPTON:  What?
    13
    14   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  I wanted to look.  There is not a great deal
    15        of difference.
    16
    17   MR. RAMPTON:  Not a great deal of difference.  We score, my
    18        Lord, slightly better.
    19
    20   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  Everyone has got more overweight and obese
    21        people than they ought to have.
    22
    23   MR. RAMPTON:  Then there is the final column which may also be
    24        significant, not only for heart disease but for cancer,
    25        Professor, is the one on the right which is smoking.  The
    26        West Germans, and this I am afraid is a bit confusing.  It
    27        is not my fault because it was done by the Government.  It
    28        is expressed the other way round.  In other words, the
    29        worse part of it is the white who are people who are still
    30        smoking, so that in this area we are worse than the French
    31        and the Germans in that 40 something per cent of our males
    32        between 35 and 64 years of age are regular smokers.  Do you
    33        see that?
    34        A.  Yes.
    35
    36   Q.   Do you have an explanation, without obviously having had a
    37        chance to study the raw data, why those figures are so
    38        apparently contradictory of what science would regard as
    39        orthodox learning, namely a lifestyle which involves heavy
    40        consumption of saturated fat, overweight, high blood
    41        pressure, high serum cholesterol or higher should result in
    42        significantly lower rates of mortality from heart disease?
    43        A.  First off, I would obviously need some time to look
    44        into these data more carefully, but the first two things
    45        that I made a note of here is that I would not, quite
    46        frankly, use total cholesterol as an indication of health
    47        risk, I would use something different and better than that,
    48        something like LDL or even an oxidize, cholesterol
    49        fractions, so I have to kind of discount that relationship
    50        there for that reason. 
    51 
    52        Secondly, in so far as sort of selecting out these various 
    53        bits that you did for these different foods, I am not sure
    54        that that really is the best way to do it.  I would rather
    55        put them on the graph and have all the points on the graph
    56        and see what the regression is between let us say these
    57        diseases and the total aggregate effect of these foods and
    58        to get a better picture than just simply doing it like this
    59        and then singling out a few diseases here and there.
    60

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