Day 032 - 06 Oct 94 - Page 15
1 A. That specifically refers to consumption from that
2 particular lunch, does it not?
3
4 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
5
6 MR. MORRIS: I will ask you to draw some conclusions in a
7 minute overall. If we go to page 14, 6.8: "The
8 distribution of energy intakes is given in figure 6.1.
9 The main individual sources of energy in the diets of
10 British school children were bread, chips, milk, biscuits,
11 meat products, cakes and puddings, which together
12 accounted for about half the energy intake."
13
14 If there is any other sections you want to refer us to,
15 please do. Then if you can draw some conclusions from
16 these and the overall drift of the report.
17 A. Yes, I think the overall drift is what I would like to
18 focus on, which was that at the time this report was
19 published, which was several years after it was actually
20 undertaken, it confirmed to many people that children were
21 not eating as healthy a diet as they might. They were
22 certainly not getting an optimum diet. There were pockets
23 of children within that who might well be getting
24 seriously inadequate diets with certain nutrients falling
25 well below necessary levels, recommended levels; that
26 those pockets of children, in order to find out if there
27 were any particular target groups, tended to be children
28 who went out for their lunch time meal away from the
29 school, and children in lower social class categories --
30 here they are referred to as social class 5.
31
32 Q. While we are on page 14, there are sections 6.10 and 11
33 about fats. It may be worth -----
34
35 MR. JUSTICE BELL: How many social classes are there in that
36 register?
37 A. There is normally one to five, I believe that is the
38 case. It is the lowest. It is usually on parental income
39 levels. These would be low income families, the lowest
40 group.
41
42 MR. MORRIS: On the 6.10 section: "The distribution of fat
43 intakes is given in figure 6.3. About half of the fat in
44 the diets of the children was obtained from milk, chips,
45 meat products, biscuits, carcase meats, crisps and butter
46 (table 8). The food making the single greatest
47 contribution to fat intakes in the younger children was
48 milk (12 per cent of fat intake) and that in older
49 children was chips (11 per cent of fat intake)." Then it
50 talks about fats as a percentage of energy intakes. There
51 is a chart showing, I presume, the average fat intake as a
52 proportion of energy, is that correct ---
53 A. Yes.
54
55 Q. -- for all the children. Do those figures suggest
56 anything to you?
57 A. Well, the sentence just after the table, the table
58 referred to as "Fat as per cent of energy intakes", was
59 the sort of table that we were interested in at the time
60 this report came out. Approximately a quarter to a third
