Day 269 - 25 Jun 96 - Page 55
1 acid in the diet of these animals to the promotion of
2 breast cancer up to but not beyond a certain percentage of
3 the energy.
4
5 In other words, there is a requirement for linolenic acid
6 for growth. This is why linolenic acid is essential. It
7 is an essential nutrient which is required for reproduction
8 and growth. You can do the same kind of experiment. What
9 you need to do is to think about the control to this
10 experiment, because the control to this experiment is a
11 diet which does not have linolenic acid in it. So
12 effectively what they were missing was that these
13 experiments were being done in animals which were deficient
14 of essential fatty acids, so what was being shown up by the
15 experiments was the fact that the tumour required, as does
16 the young growing animal require, linolenic acid for its
17 growth.
18
19 And that, I think, puts Ip's work into its proper
20 perspective and that was the conclusion which the expert
21 committee came to in Rome.
22
23 Q. Would it not be peculiar if in the result.... You are
24 talking about the World Health Organisation?
25 A. And Food and Agricultural Organisation.
26
27 Q. Is it not peculiar if in the result, when, for example....
28 When was that FAO work published?
29 A. '94.
30
31 Q. Oh.
32 A. It is actually the end of '94.
33
34 Q. Well, I regret to say we do not have that either. Can you
35 summarise what its findings were in this regard?
36 A. Well, the question really that arose out of Ip's work
37 and Carol's work, and Carol was actually a member of the
38 committee, was does linolenic acid itself in the diet cause
39 cancer. That was the sort of question that was posed to
40 the committee. And I think that the conclusions they came
41 to was that the evidence from country to country was such
42 that there is a relatively uniform intake of linolenic acid
43 from one country to another throughout the world, but,
44 despite relative uniform intake, there was a huge variation
45 in breast and colon cancer and prostate cancer and the
46 incidence of this.
47
48 So they had to come to the conclusion that it was not
49 linolenic acid that was responsible for this huge variation
50 from country to country. And that put Ip's experiments
51 into perspective, that what he was really studying was an
52 essential fatty acid deficient animal which, when given a
53 carcinogen, would develop cancers providing it had growth
54 factors in the diet. If you did not provide the growth
55 factor, the tumours grew less well.
56
57 Now, you can do precisely the same experiments with
58 proteins. If you remove essential amino acids from the
59 proteins and/or a mixture of amino acids that animals are
60 given, you then do not have the conditions for growth and
