Day 031 - 05 Oct 94 - Page 13
1 both blood vessels and the brain, indeed for all membranes
2 and the organisation of cells in the body. The evidence
3 to date is that, essentially, the n-3 family of fatty
4 acids, which come predominantly from sea foods, are
5 protective. I think the important point is that it is
6 another parallel of the evidence between heart disease and
7 cancer, that the original Mr. Fit study in the United
8 States (which was the biggest study that has been done in
9 an attempt to prevent coronary heart disease) was not
10 particularly successful in its original aim, because it
11 was so large and because there was so much public
12 information being disseminated throughout the trial about
13 the relationship between diet and heart disease. They
14 were trying to keep two groups of people, one on the
15 prudent diet and one on the standard diet.
16
17 It was exceedingly difficult to do. It ended up with the
18 two populations with very little difference in blood
19 cholesterol levels, but what they were able to do was to
20 try to assess from this study whether there were any
21 factors that contributed to some people having heart
22 attacks in the course of the trial and some not.
23
24 The one factor which stood out quite strongly was that the
25 people who ate fish and sea foods regularly were the
26 people who had the least number of heart attacks. That,
27 of course, parallels the Japanese evidence and the Eskimo
28 evidence and the Inuit Indians evidence that basically
29 there is a significant protective effect of the n-3 fatty
30 acids which come from fish and sea foods.
31
32 Similarly, the experimental evidence showed -- there was a
33 medical research council trial in this country conducted
34 by Burr in Cardiff where he gave people fish and/or fish
35 oils in the test group, and these were people who had
36 already had a heart attack. He showed that you have a
37 significant protection against a second heart attack which
38 is expected in the group that had been given the fish and
39 fish oils.
40
41 So, when we look at the cancer evidence, we have basically
42 the same kind of story in the epidemiology because the
43 types of cancer that we are concerned about are the sorts
44 of cancers, like breast cancer, colon cancer, prostate
45 cancer. These cancers are consistently at a low level in
46 populations who have a high fish and sea food intake, like
47 Thailand people, like the Japanese and like the Eskimos
48 and the Inuit Indians. There is a consistency in the
49 epidemiology with the parallel between heart disease and
50 cancer in relation to this aspect of the diet.
51
52 This comes out from the experiments, to which I have
53 referred, by several authors who have shown that whilst a
54 high fat diet will promote cancer experimentally, or
55 promote the development of cancer experimentally, these
56 n-3 fatty acids are protective. I think that is an
57 important point for the issue of this court because, of
58 course, the meat animal products really do not have much
59 in the way of DHA present in them. They are very poor as
60 a source of n-3 fatty acids, particularly the DHA, which
