Day 038 - 19 Oct 94 - Page 25
1 additives is rather tricky. A study upon which Professor
2 Walker and many of his colleagues rely is a study conducted
3 under the auspices of the British Government's Department
4 of Health, conducted by Elspeth Young of High Wycombe and
5 Maurice Lesoff in London.
6
7 One of the points I recognise they make is that most people
8 who are intolerant to food additives are also intolerant to
9 some foods; typically those might be something like dairy
10 products, milk dairy products, shell fish, some soft fruits
11 and so on.
12
13 Now, if you are going to estimate the true frequency of
14 intolerance to additives, it is necessary first to persuade
15 your sample population to adopt what we call an exclusion
16 diet, namely, a diet which excludes all those things to
17 which they are intolerant, not just the additives; whereas
18 my reading of the Young and Lesoff study is that they did
19 not put the individuals they were studying on an exclusion
20 diet. Therefore, the signal for which they were supposedly
21 searching was likely to be smothered by reactions to foods
22 to which they were also intolerant. Therefore, that study
23 amongst many others I think systematically underestimates
24 the true incidence.
25
26 I have been in contact with some researchers in a hospital
27 in the University of Verona who are, I believe, adopting
28 what I take to be the appropriate methodology, but I have
29 not seen the final results of their study.
30
31 So, if I am pressed on the incidence of intolerance to food
32 additives, my answer would be that I do not think anyone
33 knows what the real incidence is yet. The studies which
34 have been conducted seem to me to be seriously flawed.
35 They typically come up with answers that the incidence is,
36 say, fewer than one in 1,000, maybe one in 10,000. I have
37 heard it alleged by some people, on the other hand, that
38 the incidence may be as high as 50 per cent of the
39 population or 20 per cent of the population. I suspect
40 that those are overestimates. I do not know what the true
41 figure will turn out to be in the UK population or in the
42 Italian population, but I would not be surprised, simply
43 drawing on my experience and the enormous number of people
44 who contact me reporting adverse effects to additives, if
45 the true figure was somewhere in the order of not less than
46 one per cent and not more than five or eight per cent. But
47 the figures of one in 10,000 or one in 50,000 I find very
48 implausible.
49
50 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Can I just understand that? That is relating
51 to the additives we are considering, or some of them, is
52 it, or some additives somewhere?
53 A. The class of additives suspected of provoking acute
54 reactions of intolerance are larger than -- do not
55 precisely overlap with the group we are looking at. But at
56 least four of the ones we are looking at are amongst the
57 group of compounds suspected of provoking such acute
58 adverse effects.
59
60 Q. Amongst the additives, what?
