Day 030 - 03 Oct 94 - Page 32
1 MR. RAMPTON: I can, perhaps, help to some extent. One of them
2 is "smoking kills"; another is "smoking causes heart
3 disease"; another is "tobacco seriously damages health",
4 which is, of course, a slander on tobacco. You have to
5 smoke it first.
6
7 THE WITNESS: I think Mr. Rampton to some extent is making the
8 point I was trying to make there too: I think the
9 reasonable construction on those statements, which
10 obviously must have been considered carefully by the
11 Department of Health before they were put out in
12 advertisements and on cigarette packets, is that it is not
13 claimed that smoking one cigarette is going to doom you to
14 lung cancer. The point by analogy is made about fat or
15 about fatty food. It is not -- no-one has ever seriously
16 proposed that consuming one item of fatty food is going to
17 be of significance one way or another to the diet. The
18 relevant point is the contribution that food or that meal
19 or those series of meals makes to the general diet in an
20 individual or a population.
21
22 MR. MORRIS: So in the same way would it be fair to say that
23 you could say a diet, for example, high in fat causes
24 cancer in one way, but not strictly -----
25
26 MR. JUSTICE BELL: You have to let the witness give his own
27 evidence. If you want to ask him how he would express it,
28 then please do.
29
30 MR. MORRIS: What I am trying to say is that ----
31 A. I think I would be a little bit pernickity about
32 that. As I have already indicated in the case of smoking
33 and cancer -- I think in the case of smoking and cancer,
34 what the government has chosen to do is to make really
35 rather highly coloured statements which can be attacked in
36 the secure knowledge that they will be not attacked by the
37 cigarette manufacturers in the general climate of opinion
38 now.
39
40 But I myself (and possibly Mr. Rampton too) is not
41 entirely happy with the statement saying "smoking kills".
42 You can see the argument against that. A child could have
43 one cigarette and be terrified that they will die as a
44 result. I would prefer a less dramatic statement in the
45 case of diet and heart disease and diet and cancer as
46 well.
47
48 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Take a moment to think about it, Mr. Cannon,
49 and then see if you think you can helpfully express what
50 you see to be the consensus with regard to diet of the
51 kind you have described and cancer of the breast and bowel
52 and colon, which is what I am mostly concerned about.
53 A. What I would like to do, my Lord, in my position, as
54 chronicler here rather than as a research scientist, is
55 read out a statement which was agreed recently by all the
56 United Nations members present at the Rome International
57 Conference on Nutrition.
58
59 Q. Is that the one we have at the end of your statement?
60 A. Yes, it is.
