Day 266 - 20 Jun 96 - Page 36


     
     1
     2   MR. JUSTICE BELL:   Can you ask any more?  The witness has said
     3        she has not had time to read it an digest it.  I know that
     4        Mrs Brophy is a biochemist, but some of these paragraphs
     5        are enough to make some people go into an immediate mental
     6        fog are they not?  Look at data cooling, initial analysis.
     7        It is clearly the sort of thing you have to read very
     8        slowly and more than once to understand it.
     9
    10   MR. RAMPTON:  I am not standing up for the paper's conclusions.
    11
    12   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  No.
    13
    14   MR. RAMPTON:  I merely suggest to the witness that it is
    15        imprudent, and I address this to you Mrs. Brophy, it is
    16        imprudent to proceed upon the basis that the world is flat,
    17        if I may put it like that, because very often it turns out
    18        not to be, and that anybody in your position, anybody
    19        responsible for the health of the public, must keep a ware
    20        eye on received wisdom in case it should turn out to be
    21        wrong do.  Do you agree with that?
    22        A.  Absolutely, but in terms of this particular case we are
    23        working on consensuses that have existed for 20, 25 years.
    24        So when there is that level of information I think you can
    25        give the correct advice.  I think it would take, you know,
    26        many, many thousands of papers to be published before
    27        anything was overturned, and particularly on something like
    28        this where the consensus has existed for a number of
    29        years.
    30
    31             On the particular issue of salt, it has always been
    32        the general advice to reduce salt, that there has always
    33        been a debate about whether that result should be universal
    34        for populations or whether it should just be applied to
    35        individuals and there is always that debate in any health
    36        promotion activity.  Do you target your information at
    37        particularly susceptible individuals or do you look at the
    38        population as a whole as a health promotion issue, and that
    39        has always been an issue and there is always going to be a
    40        debate about that.
    41
    42   Q.   Yes, and it is prudent, sensible, wise, to give advice to
    43        the public even if you are not certain which may protect
    44        against certain consequences for their health of certain
    45        kinds of diet, is it not?  Even if you are not certain?
    46        A.   Well, in terms of the actual advice, if I go back to
    47        reducing fat, increasing fibre, decreasing salt, decreasing
    48        sugar, the evidence is so overwhelming and so accepted
    49        within, by everybody, by every government in the world, by
    50        everybody who works in that field that, you know, that is
    51        where the consensus lies.
    52 
    53             I mean, looking at something like, if you pooled all
    54        the results in the world you would probably find 99 per
    55        cent of the results published would support that view in
    56        terms of the broad consensus of healthy eating that I have
    57        just outlined.
    58
    59   Q.   Can I just show you a short passage?  You talk about 'every
    60        Government in the world'.  If I accept that, say, published

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