Day 034 - 11 Oct 94 - Page 39
1 A. I was not attempting to say that. What I was
2 attempting simply to point out is that meat does contain
3 cancer causing substances. That is the main point
4 I wished to make, although I might point out also that,
5 regrettably, in medicine the use of qualifiers such as
6 "may" and "might" are used in common parlance perhaps
7 much more than they should be.
8
9 But the point I was trying to make with this was simply to
10 show that cancer causing substances are in fried meats
11 and, for example, when a hamburger is fried carcinogens
12 can be identified on its surface. When I had raised this
13 earlier I had the impression that, perhaps, this might be
14 a piece of new information, but I bring this along simply
15 to show that it has been quite well known and is thought
16 to be one of the mechanisms by which meat may cause colon
17 cancer.
18
19 Q. Why did the Surgeon General, do you think, spoke in terms
20 of possibilities? He obviously wanted to give what he
21 thought would be sound advice, but, if your reasoning is
22 right, by the time of his report there was an overwhelming
23 case for animal fat and breast cancer, was there not?
24 A. There was. Oddly enough, when people -----
25
26 Q. But he did not put it in terms of an overwhelming case at
27 all, did he? Is that fair?
28 A. It is hard for me to reconstruct what Dr. Koop might
29 have been thinking at that time. However, I can say that
30 when one looks at much of the data on breast cancer and
31 diet, as, in fact, Dr. Arnott did and others, they often
32 have talked about, is there a direct cause and effect
33 simply between diet and the breast cancer cell with no
34 intervening variables, or in the absence of looking at the
35 mediators for that causation; and there, there is
36 considerably more hedging about the degree of relationship
37 and the dozens and dozens of studies are looked at and, as
38 every observer notes, the association is found over and
39 over again.
40
41 But the data and the observations on the causal links
42 which I drew in numerous studies are, perhaps, a separate
43 matter, but are clearly causal nonetheless, even though
44 those people who have tried to look at the overall
45 associations have tended to not get into the mechanisms
46 with such detail.
47
48 MR. MORRIS: Can I just ----
49
50 MR. JUSTICE BELL: The fact is that the Surgeon General did not
51 speak in as positive terms as you would have done
52 yourself, did he?
53 A. Well, if I look at his last sentence in the first
54 paragraph of page 194, while it is not quite as
55 declarative as my sentences might have been or as the
56 other researchers we have reviewed, he is nonetheless
57 quite strong where he says: "But the weights of the
58 studies to date are strongly suggestive of the role for
59 dietary fat in the etiology of some types of cancer",
60 referring earlier to breast and colon among others, which
