Day 024 - 15 Sep 94 - Page 44
1 misleading or deceptive. But we were reaching that in
2 order to determine whether or not the law had been
3 violated; that was our charge and that is what we were
4 doing when we wrote McDonald's this letter and when we did
5 the research necessary to come up with the conclusions
6 reflected in that letter.
7
8 Q. The specific menu items where the nutritional information
9 is given in that advertisement, you were saying you were
10 looking at the brochures. How did that compare with the
11 brochure? If you want, you could turn and look at the
12 brochure.
13 A. Well, what I was saying was we would use the
14 information that they had lowered the sodium in their
15 pickles by 21 per cent to consider against what net
16 reduction that possibly could have with respect to the
17 items on which their pickles were sold.
18
19 McDonald's did not sell a pickle. They are referring to
20 these dills, hamburger dill slices, I presume, that they
21 put on to their hamburgers, two maybe three slices of
22 pickle per hamburger, and a relatively small component,
23 one of the more insignificant ingredients of the
24 hamburger. So that lowering sodium in pickles by 21 per
25 cent would have a negligible effect on the sodium that was
26 present in the product in which the pickle was an
27 ingredient.
28
29 In other words, the lowering of sodium in one ingredient
30 in a hamburger would have a negligible effect on the
31 nutritional level of sodium in the hamburger itself.
32
33 Q. In terms of the chart, the four items, the four food
34 items, that are listed there, did the sodium content of
35 them appear to be typical of all of McDonald's products,
36 you know, fairly average, or what?
37 A. Well, I do not believe so. The products that people
38 traditionally consume other than the fries which is
39 laudably low in sodium are the other hamburger products
40 which are much higher in sodium than the regular
41 cheeseburger.
42
43 MS. STEEL: Can I just ask, do we need actually to go to the
44 brochure to compare it with the sodium content, or can we
45 just do that in argument with you later?
46
47 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes, you can do it in argument, but it
48 follows from the incorporation of paragraph (1) that
49 Mr. Gardner's evidence is that the four products listed,
50 regular fries, regular cheeseburger, six piece McNuggetts
51 and vanilla milk shake had not, in fact, had their sodium
52 content lowered in the past year. If that is challenged,
53 no doubt it will be.
54 A. Your Lordship, I did not mean to give that impression;
55 if so, I -- presuming they are telling the truth that they
56 lowered sodium in their pickles, then the sodium in the
57 regular cheeseburger which I believe did contain pickles
58 as an ingredient would perforce have been lowered, but it
59 would have been lowered in a relatively negligible way;
60 that pickles not being one of the prime contributors, I do
