Day 252 - 20 May 96 - Page 22
1 not the same thing as a public relations agent.
2
3 Q. Right. When you were talking about recommendations about
4 diet and heart disease, cardiovascular disease, whatever,
5 and how that changed over time, the advice with regard to
6 saturated fat has remained consistent has it not?
7 A. Yes, it has. If I could expand on that just a little
8 bit. People tend to talk about saturated fat and
9 polyunsaturated fat. There is a very simplistic way of
10 looking at fats. For example, animal fats in general tend
11 to be more saturated than vegetable fat but the composition
12 of mutton fat is really quite different from cow fat, which
13 is different from pig fat, which is different from poultry
14 fat, and now one looks much more closely at the composition
15 of fats, and although there is a high proportion of
16 saturated fatty acids that make up, say, cow fat, more than
17 sixty percent of the fatty acid that makes up the fat of a
18 dairy cow or a beef cow either have no effect at all on the
19 blood cholesterol level or actually reduce it. So that one
20 is looking at specific components of saturated fat, which
21 may or may not have an effect on blood cholesterol. So,
22 generally, to talk about the saturated fats and unsaturated
23 fats is really very vague. It is like talking about animal
24 fats and plant fats. One really cannot generalise.
25
26 Q. Right. But the effect of eating fat, the fat of a dairy
27 cow or a beef cow, overall, irrespective of whether
28 specific components affect it in a different way, its
29 overall effect is to raise the blood cholesterol level?
30 A. That would seem to be so if one looks at the data in
31 the report on cardiovascular disease. Countries that have
32 a high consumption of, say, dairy products and animal fats
33 tend to have higher blood cholesterols, but this is not
34 uniform and it certainly does not exactly match mortality.
35 I mean, we have mentioned earlier the French paradox, and
36 there the fats simply do not hold as far as fat and heart
37 disease are concerned. What this indicates is not that
38 saturated fat has have no effect at all, it indicates that
39 there are many, many factors that interact to cause
40 cardiovascular disease of which saturated fat is one.
41
42 Q. Consistent advice has been that a high consumption of
43 saturated fats increases the risk of heart disease. Is
44 that not right?
45 A. That is so, yes. That has been consistent for probably
46 thirty years. Not simply a high consumption, a diet that
47 is high in fat consumed over a lifetime is more likely to
48 cause heart disease than one that is low in saturated fat.
49
50 Q. And, as you say in your statement, there is an
51 international consensus on this?
52 A. Yes, yes.
53
54 Q. Dietary cholesterol, you mentioned about how that had
55 changed, but effectively the advice is now that dietary
56 cholesterol levels should be kept fairly low?
57 A. I think the advice, if I remember rightly from the
58 document, is that dietary cholesterol should not increase.
59
60 Q. Right?
