Day 033 - 10 Oct 94 - Page 06
1 spontaneously report that there was a link between dietary
2 fat and cancer when asked an open-ended question about
3 that, indicating to us that, perhaps, 80 per cent of women
4 had never even heard there might be a link, suggesting
5 that they were unable to make any informed decision about
6 what risks they might care to take.
7
8 That suggested that perhaps physicians and others, the
9 food industry, advertisers, might do well to get the word
10 out a bit more strongly, not so that people are forced to
11 one type of diet or another, but so that people have
12 information to make their own choices. Obviously,
13 everyone's diet will be a little bit different. Even
14 vegetarian diets, while they are quite helpful, they can
15 be dangerous or they could be poorly designed if one chose
16 quite an aberrant diet, but people need to have
17 information to make these choices. That was the goal of
18 that study.
19
20 Q. Just a couple more questions: You have made various
21 presentations to medical bodies. Do you want to
22 particularly inform us about the one you made to the
23 American Public Health Association?
24 A. Yes. The American Public Health Association, I was
25 invited by them to give a talk related to what federal
26 nutrition guidelines ought to be. I was asked to make a
27 presentation and also to convene a panel of other experts
28 to give their opinions, and did so. The American Public
29 Health Association is the leading public health body in
30 the United States.
31
32 Q. Are you a member of any task forces currently?
33 A. The American Institute on Cancer Research (which is a
34 very large non-profit cancer research sponsoring body in
35 the United States) asked me to serve on a task force to
36 define what the role of prevention of cancer might be in
37 health care. I served on that panel and helped draft its
38 report.
39
40 Q. Can you briefly say what the Physicians Committee for
41 Responsible Medicine is, when it was formed?
42 A. It is a non-profit organisation that was formed in
43 1985 to address the issue of preventing chronic disease,
44 which makes particular reference to diet, but also other
45 factors such as tobacco. Secondly, we have dealt with
46 research issues, ethical issues, in both human research
47 and animal research. We have looked also at medical
48 care. There are problems of provision of medical care in
49 the United States and we have addressed those to a degree
50 as well. The original intention -- well, my original
51 intention with the Physicians Committee was to have a
52 small group of physicians, rather like a think tank, if
53 I may use that term, that would review the literature and
54 devise materials that might be helpful to the public or
55 might be influential.
56
57 However, we grew a bit larger than I had anticipated
58 initially. We now have over 3,000 physicians who belong.
59 We have also had considerable interest from the lay public
60 who have asked to subscribe to our materials. We publish
