Day 031 - 05 Oct 94 - Page 38
1 fats.
2
3 MR. JUSTICE BELL: If one sees on a label "fat" and then a
4 quantity, and underneath of which saturated fat and then a
5 quantity, the trans fatty acids are not in the saturated
6 fat?
7 A. That is correct, your Lordship. There has been -- the
8 health professionals have for a long time wanted the
9 government to make it clear that the trans fatty acids
10 should be labelled as well. Part of the reason for this
11 is that there are now firms which are producing vegetable
12 fats for cooking which are hard fats, and they are
13 produced by hydrogenation. So they trying to make out a
14 case that these are vegetable fats, so they must be good
15 for. But because they have destroyed all the nutritional
16 value of the vegetable fat by hydrogenating it, they
17 become very equivalent to the sort of saturated fats that
18 we get in large quantities from beef animals.
19
20 MS. STEEL: Hydrogenated fats are the solid ones?
21 A. The saturated fats are solid. When you hydrogenate
22 polyunsaturated fats, you end up with solid fats as well.
23 You do, of course, have partially hydrogenated fats which
24 are halfway houses depending on the requirement of the
25 industry for solidity or softness.
26
27 Q. The breakdown of the fatty acids in the Big Mac, you
28 mentioned in your statement that the beefburger is the
29 opposite of the recommendations made by the Chief Medical
30 Officer. Could you just explain a bit more about that?
31 A. Well, if one looks at the proportion of fat (and these
32 are McDonald's own up-to-date data) that 48.5 per cent of
33 the energy is coming from the total fat; whereas the
34 recommendations are for us to get down to 30 per cent of
35 the energy, with intermediate of 35 per cent and saturated
36 fats of 23 per cent of the energy, the recommendation of
37 the World Health Organisation is between 0 to 10 per cent
38 of the energy.
39
40 So all of these figures for both total fats, saturated
41 fat, are considerably above the recommendations for the
42 prevention of the diseases that we are concerned about.
43
44 The other side of the coin which is also interesting is
45 that if one looks at the n-3 fatty acids, that they are
46 very poor providers -- these meals are very poor providers
47 of the n-3 fatty acids which we know to be protective. So
48 we have, on the one hand, a high proportion of the types
49 of fats and fatty acids that people are recommending
50 should be reduced and, on the other hand, we have very low
51 proportions of the types of fats and fatty acids that
52 people are recommending should be increased.
53
54 That is why I say it is, in a sense, the converse of what
55 is being recommended. In the framework of my first
56 statement about the intrusions of such concepts, if you
57 like, into developing, and other countries where these
58 diseases are not a problem -- if you were to, say, take
59 the big Mac and compare it with the Japanese meal of tuna
60 fish and prawns and replace the tuna fish and prawns by
