Day 256 - 04 Jun 96 - Page 82
1 This is a chart entitled "Dietary Recommendations to Reduce
2 Cancer Risk in Industrialised Countries".
3 A. Right.
4
5 Q. Do you have any evidence to suggest that those
6 recommendations are not really out of the concern of cancer
7 but are out of the concern of other health things, such as
8 heart disease, or whatever?
9 A. What I am reading here in that table, according to the
10 title at least, it says "In reference to specific cancer
11 risk". I do not know actually which documents they are
12 referring to here.
13
14 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I was not making a point against you at all.
15 I was just trying to explain what I understood the section
16 meant. I think I particularly had in mind the Grey Books,
17 as I call them, the COMA Report. But why do you not direct
18 Professor Campbell to the particular parts of the table
19 that you want?
20
21 MS. STEEL: Say, for example, the third column, limit or reduced
22 total fat percentage of energy, and then under Europe, for
23 Europe and the US they are both approximately 30 per cent.
24 I take it, from what you have said today so far, that you
25 would believe it should be stronger than that. But, to
26 your knowledge, those recommendations - say, for example,
27 in the United States of America, are they specifically made
28 in relation to cancer? The reference is actually in the
29 first column, 45, 46 and 47, and they appear on page 178.
30
31 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes, but which part is it?
32
33 THE WITNESS: Yes, I know those three references, actually. The
34 only one there that was based on original research is, in a
35 sense, original review of the literature, was number 45 and
36 that is the Green Book that you have. That is the one that
37 I was an author of. Then 46 and 47 are basically some
38 summaries of number 45, without getting into any new
39 analysis and interpretation of the data.
40
41 MS. STEEL: From their titles they appear to be about cancer?
42 A. Yes.
43
44 Q. About cancer risk?
45 A. Right.
46
47 Q. And reducing cancer risk; is that correct?
48 A. Exactly, they are all references to cancer. That is
49 right.
50
51 Q. You said, when we were talking about causality, about
52 smoking. Is the situation that a direct cause and effect
53 has not been shown for smoking, but that the association is
54 considered to be causative? Is that a fair summary?
55 A. Yes. I mean, what we are talking about here is -- when
56 one uses the word "causality" in a strictest possible
57 sense, in a rigorous way, I mean, we really should be doing
58 things like actually given the cause to the individuals to
59 see if we get the effect and then control it for all the
60 other things while we are doing it. Of course, in the case
