Day 031 - 05 Oct 94 - Page 08

     
     1        was not with total fat intake because the Spaniards,
     2        Portuguese and other Mediterranean countries ate just as
     3        much fat as did we, but it was a different kind of fat
     4        because it was olive oil as opposed to largely animal fat
     5        and industrial copies of animal fats, fats that were
     6        mostly saturated.
     7
     8        So, the relationship that came out of that very clearly
     9        was that the link with mortality from heart disease was
    10        closely associated with the amount of saturated fat eaten
    11        in the different countries.
    12
    13        Essentially, the same kind of evidence has appeared,
    14        I think, for cancer in this respect, that there is a link
    15        between total dietary fat, but it is not just dietary fat
    16        because, as you see from the bottom figure in enclosure 1,
    17        if you plot the incidence of breast cancer against the
    18        intake of vegetable fats, then there is really no
    19        correlation whatsoever.  There is, however, a correlation
    20        with animal fat intake, which is the graph in the middle,
         and that is largely associated with meat fats.
    22
    23        That is one of the pieces of evidence which, I think, came
    24        out at that time.  At the same time there was the evidence
    25        that emerged with regard to the migration studies; that
    26        the Japanese, for example, migrated at the end of the
    27        last, or at the beginning of this century in large numbers
    28        to the United States of America, and their children have
    29        now, of course, grown up in Hawaii and in California and
    30        other sunny parts of the United States.  Their children
    31        now have the same mortality from cardiovascular disease,
    32        breast, colon and prostate cancer as do the people in the
    33        United States of America; whereas their cousins, who have
    34        remained in Japan, have remained at a very low incidence.
    35
    36        But, unfortunately again, we have the same phenomenon that
    37        in Japan there has been an increase in westernization of
    38        foods.  I refer to the memorial to the first cow that was
    39        slaughtered in Japan in 1931 for human consumption.
    40        I have a photograph, if anyone would like to see it, of
         the memorial.
    42
    43   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  I think we can probably do without the
    44        photograph, but does that mean that a cow was not
    45        slaughtered to be eaten in Japan before 1931?
    46        A.  That means, essentially, there was no commercial
    47        slaughtering of animals, land based animals, cows' beef
    48        for human consumption in Japan before 1931.  And, of
    49        course, not much happened from that time to World War II,
    50        but after World War II there was a substantial change in 
    51        the Japanese diet and the Japanese are now growing very 
    52        much taller than they were.  You have only to walk down a 
    53        street in Tokyo to notice that the older generations are
    54        very much shorter than the younger children who are
    55        wandering around the streets.
    56
    57        With this there is concern amongst some people that the
    58        excellent Japanese health record is being disturbed at the
    59        same time, and there is a report to which I refer showing,
    60        between the 50s and 70s, a doubling in the incidence of