Day 266 - 20 Jun 96 - Page 36
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2 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Can you ask any more? The witness has said
3 she has not had time to read it an digest it. I know that
4 Mrs Brophy is a biochemist, but some of these paragraphs
5 are enough to make some people go into an immediate mental
6 fog are they not? Look at data cooling, initial analysis.
7 It is clearly the sort of thing you have to read very
8 slowly and more than once to understand it.
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10 MR. RAMPTON: I am not standing up for the paper's conclusions.
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12 MR. JUSTICE BELL: No.
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14 MR. RAMPTON: I merely suggest to the witness that it is
15 imprudent, and I address this to you Mrs. Brophy, it is
16 imprudent to proceed upon the basis that the world is flat,
17 if I may put it like that, because very often it turns out
18 not to be, and that anybody in your position, anybody
19 responsible for the health of the public, must keep a ware
20 eye on received wisdom in case it should turn out to be
21 wrong do. Do you agree with that?
22 A. Absolutely, but in terms of this particular case we are
23 working on consensuses that have existed for 20, 25 years.
24 So when there is that level of information I think you can
25 give the correct advice. I think it would take, you know,
26 many, many thousands of papers to be published before
27 anything was overturned, and particularly on something like
28 this where the consensus has existed for a number of
29 years.
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31 On the particular issue of salt, it has always been
32 the general advice to reduce salt, that there has always
33 been a debate about whether that result should be universal
34 for populations or whether it should just be applied to
35 individuals and there is always that debate in any health
36 promotion activity. Do you target your information at
37 particularly susceptible individuals or do you look at the
38 population as a whole as a health promotion issue, and that
39 has always been an issue and there is always going to be a
40 debate about that.
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42 Q. Yes, and it is prudent, sensible, wise, to give advice to
43 the public even if you are not certain which may protect
44 against certain consequences for their health of certain
45 kinds of diet, is it not? Even if you are not certain?
46 A. Well, in terms of the actual advice, if I go back to
47 reducing fat, increasing fibre, decreasing salt, decreasing
48 sugar, the evidence is so overwhelming and so accepted
49 within, by everybody, by every government in the world, by
50 everybody who works in that field that, you know, that is
51 where the consensus lies.
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53 I mean, looking at something like, if you pooled all
54 the results in the world you would probably find 99 per
55 cent of the results published would support that view in
56 terms of the broad consensus of healthy eating that I have
57 just outlined.
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59 Q. Can I just show you a short passage? You talk about 'every
60 Government in the world'. If I accept that, say, published
