Day 023 - 13 Sep 94 - Page 07
1 When they go out for a meal or preparing or buying food,
2 that is something which is a conscious act not to buy
3 meat. What I am getting at in some of the studies we
4 have been discussing is that the relationships of diet are
5 more subtle than that. This is one of the things that is
6 a problem in some of the control, you know, the control
7 groups in the case-control studies, that the people who
8 are willing to take part as controls are often people who
9 are interested in diet and what they eat, much more so
10 than perhaps the cases.
11
12 There is, therefore, this question mark about whether they
13 are truly comparable. It is the same with the cream
14 cakes, that people usually have to give up gorging on
15 cream cakes because they have been told to go on a diet or
16 want to lose weight. I think these are much more obvious
17 conscious things. Many aspects of diet are very subtle.
18
19 Q. Yes. But that would be similar to like giving up smoking,
20 things like giving up meat?
21 A. It may be.
22
23 Q. You agreed yesterday there was some evidence from some
24 reports giving a conflicting opinion on lung cancer and
25 smoking?
26 A. I think most of those reports have now -----
27
28 Q. You said it was a long time?
29 A. A long time ago. I think nowadays there is no doubt
30 amongst thinking -----
31
32 MR. JUSTICE BELL: A phrase which is used in another kind of
33 case is a responsible body of competent medical opinion.
34 Is there any responsible body of competent medical opinion
35 which disputes a link between smoking and lung cancer
36 today?
37 A. No, none at all.
38
39 MS. STEEL: It has been stated by some researchers that we are
40 at the stage now in terms of the relationship between diet
41 and cancer that we were at 20 or so years ago in terms of
42 smoking and lung cancer. Is that something you think
43 would be a fair statement?
44 A. I actually am not sure about that. You see, I think
45 if we go back to the 1970s and the 1980s, I think when
46 people looked at population studies and saw these
47 tremendous geographical variations of the incidence of
48 cancer, such as breast and colon, and also looked at
49 dietary habits, it seemed as though we had found a similar
50 sort of relationship between, say, fat and cancer, like
51 breast and bowel cancer, that we had with cigarette
52 smoking and lung cancer.
53
54 What has happened since then is that as the experiments
55 have been done to try to confirm this evidence, the
56 picture has become less clear. What I think people are
57 beginning to realise now is that there may be an influence
58 of diet on the development of these cancers, and it would
59 seem reasonable to think there might be. But the
60 influence of diet is much more subtle than had originally
