Day 030 - 03 Oct 94 - Page 39
1 A. Of course not.
2
3 Q. Just going to a point which came up before lunch: When I
4 asked you about foods that were worse nutritionally than
5 the average diet would be a negative contribution, would
6 it also be a negative contribution in terms of the
7 recommended dietary guidelines?
8 A. If the composition of that foods were, from a
9 nutritional point of view, worse than the food that is on
10 average eaten, yes, again, of course.
11
12 Q. But as applied to the dietary guidelines, would it be even
13 worse?
14 A. Yes.
15
16 Q. But dietary guidelines generally are -- what is the word
17 -- can you just sum up the dietary guidelines, how they
18 relate to the average?
19 A. Let me give you an example of fat or saturated fat, if
20 you like. If you go into a shop -- I really need a
21 calculator to work this out but the figures make the point
22 -- on average in this country the amount of fats as a
23 percentage of total calories consumed, total energy
24 consumed, is about 40 per cent, that is to say, of every
25 five calories people on average consume two for fat.
26
27 The recommendation from government there, well, it varies
28 a little bit, but it tends to be between about 33 and 35
29 per cent. The contribution in the national average diet
30 from saturated fat, it depends which year you are talking
31 about, but it is very close to 20 per cent, that is to
32 say, about one in five of all calories on average consumed
33 in this country are from saturated fat and the
34 recommendation there from government is to cut consumption
35 of saturated fat by much more than that.
36
37 Q. One more question before we move on to the references
38 specifically: McDonald's have said in this case that
39 their food can be considered a healthy part of a balanced
40 diet. Would you like to -----
41 A. Do they say healthy part of a balanced diet or part of
42 a balanced diet?
43
44 Q. All right, can be eaten as part of a balanced diet, would
45 you -----
46 A. That sounds rather more like it. Well, when sections
47 of the food industry who are manufacturing products that
48 are in the sense already defined unhealthy wish to defend
49 that position from a nutritional point of view, what they
50 tend to say is there is no thing as healthy food, there is
51 only healthy diet, there is no such thing as unhealthy
52 food, there is only unhealthy diet, which in a sense is a
53 truism, inasmuch as it is argumentative, it is misleading.
54 The point that, say, manufacturers of chocolate
55 confectionery -- not to name any in this court, irrelevant
56 to this case -- would make would be similar. They would
57 say: "It is all right to eat this sort of food once in a
58 while, possibly as fun food, as long as everything else
59 you eat makes up for it" which, of course, again is
60 obviously true unless an individual in question is
