Day 254 - 22 May 96 - Page 28
1 MS. STEEL: Can you tell from the report itself whether those
2 quintiles have a very great difference between them or not?
3 A. I have to confess I find it quite difficult to know
4 because they emphasise the intake being less than 20 per
5 cent.
6
7 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Where do you get that?
8 A. If you look at page 356, my Lord, on the abstract, in
9 the conclusions they point out ----
10
11 Q. Yes.
12
13 MR. MORRIS: That might have been only 3 or 4 people for all we
14 know.
15 A. No, because they actually give more data about details
16 about that.
17
18 MS. STEEL: I was going to say that that is in relation to the
19 energy from fat table and not the one about energy adjusted
20 nutrients intake?
21 A. What they have tried to do there is to relate fat to
22 the total energy intake, and so the quintile No. 1 is 20
23 per cent.
24
25 Q. How can you draw that conclusion?
26
27 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Is that necessarily so, because let us accept
28 some of the people in the quintile 1 had an energy intake
29 from fat which was less than 20 per cent of total energy
30 intake, otherwise they would not be able to write what they
31 did in the conclusion in the abstract, it does not mean
32 that all people in that quintile were less, does it,
33 because they have actually looked back at the raw
34 information and even though there may have been, for
35 instance, 200 women or 500 women who had less than 20 per
36 cent, but that would still be considerably less than the
37 quintile?
38 A. Yes.
39
40 Q. If you have nearly 5,000 of them altogether.
41 A. If we can go on to page 360, there is a figure 1 there
42 where they have actually divided the numbers into greater
43 groups. You can see that those having less than 20 per
44 cent are 84, 20 to 25, 278, 25 to 30, 824, and so on.
45
46 Q. Yes, I see.
47
48 MS. STEEL: But the point is that that is about the percentage
49 of energy from fat whereas this one is about the energy
50 adjusted nutrient intake?
51 A. But in fact what they are trying to say is that in the
52 energy nutrients intake they are trying to relate the
53 percentage of calories coming from fat, that is the ratio
54 of energy -- it is a different method of expressing it,
55 I agree -- the ratio of energy from total fat intake to
56 total energy intake, so it is a proportion that they are
57 describing in table 2, and they have made the point that
58 they have done that because this is the formulation often
59 used to make dietary recommendations, but the only place in
60 which they accurately state the way in which they have
