Day 031 - 05 Oct 94 - Page 56
1 of your copy.
2
3 MR. MORRIS: Yes.
4
5 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Then they can decide whether it needs
6 photocopying any further.
7
8 MR. RAMPTON: I doubt very much I will copy the whole thing.
9
10 MR. MORRIS: Then they will give those two copies back to us.
11
12 MR. RAMPTON: In due course, yes. Finally, Professor
13 Crawford, before you leave. Again this is a request for
14 illumination, on page 9 starting at line 10 there is a
15 passage about the parallels between diet and cancer and
16 diet and heart disease.
17 A. Yes.
18
19 Q. You say: "The evidence on diet and cancer is less well
20 formulated", and so on, "than data on cancer approximates
21 and its contents, the data on heart disease available in
22 the 1970s". Then you say this, which is where I would
23 like some help: "Nonetheless, if lines are drawn
24 laterally between the parallel evidences of heart disease
25 and cancer, there is, in my view, enough evidence to make
26 it difficult to reject the hypothesis", so on and so
27 forth.
28
29 Do you mean to say that if one, as it were, hypothetically
30 goes back to 1970 and draws a straight line through heart
31 disease, you expect that if you did the same thing with
32 cancer from now the lines would remain parallel?
33 A. Yes.
34
35 Q. It is a prediction; is that right?
36 A. It is a prediction. It is also an ambiguous one. I
37 can see what you are getting at.
38
39 Q. I am little bit confused by it.
40 A. What I am trying to say are two things: First, that
41 the evidence that we have in relation to cancer is not as
42 comprehensive as it is in relation to heart disease. The
43 evidence in cancer, this is purely a personal opinion, you
44 need to understand, that in my view, the cancer people
45 might well object to this statement but, in my view, the
46 quantity and coverage of evidence they have in relation to
47 cancer is roughly about the same sort of level as we had
48 it in the 1970s. We have much more detail since the 1970s
49 so far as heart disease is concerned.
50
51 Really, what I am trying to say here is that I think there
52 is enough of it, because in the 1970s we were pretty
53 convinced, we had the Royal College of Physicians
54 presenting their report in 1976, we were pretty convinced
55 about the relationship between dietary fat and,
56 particularly, saturated fats and heart disease. I think
57 that today in 1994, or actually round about the end of the
58 80s, really, we had reached that sort of stage, the same
59 degree of conviction about cancer and diet.
60
