Day 033 - 10 Oct 94 - Page 46
1
2 Q. McDonald's do not sell beans and nuts, do they?
3 A. Not to my knowledge.
4
5 Q. You said on page 17, virtually the last point, I will not
6 touch on the very last point: "An accurate description of
7 the effects of meat consumption would note its links to
8 heart disease, cancer (particularly colon and prostate
9 cancer)". Can you just summarise that sentence, just
10 embellish a little bit, a summary of your position?
11 A. Well, my feeling was that if McDonald's wanted to
12 provide accurate information to children, that rather than
13 suggest to them that by consuming items from the meat
14 group with regularity, not just with an individual meal
15 but twice a day, that these items be consumed, that
16 McDonald's ought to be describing the genuine effects of
17 these foods, particularly heart disease and cancer.
18
19 Now, I mentioned specifically colon and prostate cancer
20 because of the links with meat there. If we are talking
21 high fat generally, we would probably want to add breast
22 cancer as well as obesity and other health problems. My
23 reference here was simply to McDonald's misleading
24 advertising campaign.
25
26 Q. This is not a summary of your general case on the link
27 between diet and disease?
28 A. No.
29
30 Q. Just regarding that ad?
31 A. This is targeted to -- yes, this relates to the ad.
32
33 Q. We have reached the end of that statement for the moment.
34 We will go on to your supplementary statement. Then we
35 will look at some documents following that. In some ways
36 this is not the best way of doing things.
37
38 MR. JUSTICE BELL: You do it that way anyway.
39
40 MR. MORRIS: You have said in the first page of your
41 supplementary statement that there are some people who say
42 it is impossible to draw any conclusions about the role of
43 foods and the causation of illness. Would you like to
44 elaborate on that?
45 A. Well, we have seen this with virtually every serious
46 risk factor that has emerged in research where a certain
47 amount of evidence comes forth. Sometimes it takes a
48 substantial amount of time for evidence to be adduced. As
49 that process goes on, it takes a certain amount of
50 evidence before the great majority of researchers and
51 physicians are convinced that, indeed, there are risks
52 from certain exposures such as tobacco, various
53 carcinogens or dietary factors.
54
55 When the links between tobacco and lung cancer were first
56 suspected, only a minority of physicians thought that
57 those links were of sufficient magnitude that it was worth
58 advising the patient to curtail their use of cigarettes.
59 In fact, in an editorial, in more than one editorial
60 actually, in medical journals appearing in the early 60s,
