Day 256 - 04 Jun 96 - Page 75
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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.
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9 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Let me just look at that again.
10 A. Sorry, did you ask a question?
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12 MR. RAMPTON: What?
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14 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I wanted to look. There is not a great deal
15 of difference.
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17 MR. RAMPTON: Not a great deal of difference. We score, my
18 Lord, slightly better.
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20 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Everyone has got more overweight and obese
21 people than they ought to have.
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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.
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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.
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