Day 030 - 03 Oct 94 - Page 16
1 Health: The Experts Agree". Do you want to say something
2 briefly on that?
3 A. First of all, the answer to your question is, yes.
4 The background to that is that in the middle 1980s I was
5 concerned that there seemed to be substantial controversy
6 on the issue of whether or not the experts agreed on the
7 relationship between what you might loosely call the
8 industrialised diet, which is to say a diet high in fat,
9 saturated fat, sugar, salt, and low in fibre, low in
10 vegetables and fruit, and chronic degenerative diseases,
11 or as they are sometimes called "western diseases",
12 because my impression was that that was not so. My
13 impression was that there was a concurrence of scientific
14 opinion. My impression was that the experts did agree.
15
16 However, no-one had ever done the work to discover if that
17 was so. A point on the word "expert". What is meant here
18 is not an individual expert; what is meant here is whether
19 or not, as the case reports, that expert reports which are
20 commissioned either by government or by authoritative
21 scientific bodies, whether their conclusions agreed or
22 not.
23
24 With respect to the court, it seems to me that the view of
25 an individual expert is really almost neither here nor
26 there. That is not the way it works in public health.
27 The way it works in public health is to see whether or not
28 there is convergence of view between expert committees
29 which are set up appropriately.
30
31 It was agreed -- to go back to the story -- in the mid-80s
32 that no such work had been done, so it was put to me that
33 I should do it. So over a period of about five or seven
34 years what I did was to collect a total of one hundred
35 expert reports, which, as I say, were either commissioned
36 by authoritative medical or scientific bodies or by
37 governments throughout the world, to see whether or not
38 they did agree.
39
40 Now, given that I had myself frequently published views to
41 the effect that the experts did agree, it was also
42 important to see what I wrote checked out. That was one
43 of the reasons why I decided to approach the Consumers
44 Association to publish the book, because, as you may know,
45 as the court may know, the Consumers Association are best
46 known as the publishers which have a verification system
47 which, in effect, takes any opinion out of the hands of
48 someone who prepares a report such as this, although this
49 was rather an unusual undertaking. So the facts and the
50 judgments in the book which were based on those facts were
51 independently verified by Consumers Association, and the
52 conclusion of the book stands as evidence in the title.
53
54 I should also say that the conclusions of that book have
55 not been challenged. Specifically, they have not been
56 challenged by the food manufacturing industry.
57
58 Q. Would you say that you are very aware of what the
59 international bodies and governmental bodies and medical,
60 scientific bodies do think on these kinds of subjects?
