Day 031 - 05 Oct 94 - Page 09
1 breast cancer in Japanese women during that period of
2 time.
3
4 So, it is that kind of migration evidence -- migration
5 evidence was not just the Japanese, but it was people who
6 migrated to Australia. There were Jews who migrated.
7 There are several bodies of migration evidence which,
8 essentially, all tell the same story; that moving from a
9 low incidence country to a country with a typical western
10 type diet, you take on the disease patterns of the country
11 to which you move. You take on the disease pattern for
12 cardiovascular disease, if I remember correctly, faster
13 than you take on the disease pattern for cancer. I think
14 most people who have looked at this evidence would say
15 that the primary cause of these changes in the migration
16 populations is due to the change in diet.
17
18 MS. STEEL: In terms of change of diet, is the sort of typical
19 western diet now pretty much the same as it has been for
20 centuries, or has that changed as well?
21 A. It depends how far you go back. We have published
22 quite a lot of evidence on the change in diet, but we have
23 taken the view that it is very difficult to say what
24 happened in 1930 compared to what happened in 1940 or '50,
25 because we do not really have precise records. We can
26 make good estimates as to what was going on at the earlier
27 part of the century in relation to what is happening now.
28
29 It was, of course, the Ministry of Food during the war and
30 the interest in food that arose, and one has to remember
31 that the Ministry of Food was created during the war
32 because of the recognition at that time of the links
33 between health and nutrition, because of the experience of
34 the First World War that coalition government was not
35 going to have any of the problems that their fighting men
36 experienced during the First World War. There was a very
37 deliberate move to not only get all the experts they could
38 have together during the war to advise the government and
39 to ensure the security of good and nourishing food to not
40 just the fighting forces, but also to the population,
41 because they were concerned about the health of the
42 children that were going to grow up to replace the men and
43 women that were going to be killed in the front line.
44
45 In fact, it is quite interesting that during the war the
46 mortality from cardiovascular disease actually fell,
47 despite the alleged stress and strain that the population
48 was under at that time. It was after the war that it
49 began to go up again when the Ministry of Food was
50 disbanded, and the emphasis came for fast weight gain in
51 crops and animals and cheap food because of the privations
52 that people had experienced.
53
54 With that one exception, it is really difficult to go back
55 in time with any degree of accuracy. One of the things we
56 did was to make the argument that it is only a 120
57 generations since we, in England, have walked out from the
58 Stone Age, and it is only about five generations since the
59 Industrial Revolution, when really the major changes
60 occurred as the introduction of chemical processing of
