Day 034 - 11 Oct 94 - Page 28
1 Q. This is the Toniolo study: Calorie-Providing Nutrients
2 and Risk of Breast Cancer?
3 A. That is correct. There are just two things I would
4 like to note regarding this study. The first again is the
5 date of the study. It appeared in 1989, again in the
6 Journal of the National Cancer Institute, a journal which
7 is read by all cancer researchers, widely known, widely
8 reported. I will briefly read a portion of the abstract.
9 If there are comments regarding the rest of the study,
10 I would be glad to sort that out. But the only part
11 I would mention is nicely summarised in the abstract.
12
13 Dr. Toniolo states: "A case-control study was conducted
14 in Italy to investigate the role of diet in breast
15 cancer. Cases were 250 women with breast cancer, and
16 controls were a stratified random sample of 499 women from
17 the general population. A dietary history questionnaire
18 was used to measure the intake of total fat, saturated
19 fat, animal proteins, and other macronutrients. In
20 multivariate analyses, the relative risks of breast cancer
21 for women in the highest quintile of consumption of
22 saturated fat and animal proteins were 3.0."
23
24 If I may pause there, what that is suggesting is that
25 those women who are in the highest 1/5th of the group have
26 three times the risk of breast cancer compared to other
27 women.
28
29 He then states: "(95% confidence interval, 1.9-4.7)"
30 meaning that chances are 95 out of a 100, that the true
31 value is somewhere between 1.9 times higher risk and 4.7
32 times risk. He then describes the relative risk related
33 to animal proteins which, he says, is again 2.9 in
34 parenthesis (1.8-4.6); that being the confidence interval
35 respectively. "A reduced risk was found for women who
36 derived less than 28 per cent of calories from fat versus
37 greater than 36 per cent."
38
39 So, again, showing that women on a lower fat diet had
40 substantially less risk of breast cancer.
41
42 "A similarly reduced risk was found for women who derived
43 less than 9.6 per cent of calories from saturated fat or
44 less than 5.9 per cent from animal proteins. These data
45 suggest that during adult life, a reduction in dietary
46 intake of fat and proteins of animal origin may contribute
47 to a substantial reduction in the incidence of breast
48 cancer in population subgroups with high intake of animal
49 products."
50
51 So simply, in summary, he is suggesting that if those
52 individuals who are on high fat diets reduced their fat
53 intake there is an expectation there may be a reduction in
54 subsequent breast cancer risk.
55
56 Those are the only comments I wanted to bring to the
57 court's attention on that study. I bring these examples
58 not to suggest that they are the only ones that have
59 looked at this, but simply to say they are important and
60 useful and representative examples.
