Day 253 - 21 May 96 - Page 17
1
2 The point is that whether or not it is difficult for people
3 to change their diets, the reality is that the type of food
4 that you eat, not just your energy intake and energy
5 expenditure, but the type of food you eat, because of how
6 well it will fill you up and so on, can and does affect
7 obesity?
8 A. I think the only way in which diet is likely to affect
9 obesity, and this is something that is beginning to be
10 recognised, and when I say "recognised", it is becoming a
11 topic for exploration for research, it is a hypothesis, but
12 most studies or surveys have shown that people who tend to
13 be overweight have a slightly higher proportion of fat in
14 their diets than people who are not overweight. Likewise,
15 people who are thin tend to have a higher proportion of
16 sugar in their diets than people who are overweight.
17
18 There is an inverse relationship between sugar and fat. If
19 you have a high fat diet, you have a low sugar diet and
20 fat, one can argue, could induce obesity, not because of
21 any feeling from other components in the diet, but because
22 when you consume fat, it is simply deposited and it stays
23 on deposit until you require it for physical activity.
24
25 If physical activity is not forthcoming, the deposit gets
26 larger from day-to-day. Fat does not signal to the body
27 that it is actually consumed whereas carbohydrate does. So
28 one could argue that the evidence suggesting that people
29 who are overweight tend to eat diets with rather more fat
30 in it, that there would be an association between a high
31 fat intake and obesity.
32
33 Q. Thank you. Just one point about what you said earlier:
34 When you were talking about a high sugar diet, that would
35 include all types of sugar and not just kind of sugar that
36 we add?
37
38 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Not just free sugar?
39 A. Well, yes. This is a matter I feel strongly about.
40 Apart from sugar, which is incorporated in foods, and added
41 to tea and coffee, and put on grapefruit and so on, the
42 other kind of sugar which is naturally incorporated in the
43 structure of food which has been labelled "intrinsic"
44 represents about 6 to 8 per cent of total sugar, and the
45 moment you start eating a piece of fruit, by definition,
46 your intrinsic sugar becomes non-milk extrinsic sugar and
47 the whole thing is a nonsense and the only way to look at
48 it is to look at total sugars in the diet, not used in
49 these terms, which is not designed to identify sugars in
50 relation to health but simply the sources of sugar in one's
51 diet. They have been grossly misused. I talk about total
52 sugar.
53
54 MS. STEEL: Thank you. I think I have almost finished. There
55 was just one bit I forgot to ask you about yesterday which
56 was in the "Risk Factors for Stroke" section. It is on
57 page 94?
58 A. Which one?
59
60 Q. It is "The Nutritional Aspects of Cardio-Vascular Disease"?
