Day 309 - 03 Dec 96 - Page 05
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2 MR. RAMPTON: Yes.
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4 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Page 9. The point is, where you move from a
5 meal to what one eats in a day, because the first question
6 is whether McDonald's food is high in, et cetera, or low
7 in, et cetera. Provisionally, it seemed to me that that
8 should apply to a meal or what one actually eats, I will
9 call it 'additionally' if you like, but what is in front of
10 you as you climb into your car with a brown paper bag, or
11 what is in front of you if you go from the counter to your
12 table to eat it in the store, at the moment you move away
13 from that to how it affects what you eat in a day or what
14 you eat in a week or what you eat in a month, you are
15 moving on to the second question which involves diet, are
16 you not?
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18 MR. RAMPTON: It does, but it is the first stage of diet. What
19 I had in mind is really this: to calculate, for example,
20 what, as a proportion of the total calories in, for
21 example, a packet of olives, might be contributed by the
22 fat content really leads absolutely nowhere, because one
23 has no idea from that even, if one does not go the step
24 forward, what effect that is having on the consumer's fat
25 proportion for the day, and it did seem to me that, since
26 the word "high" was necessarily a word of proportion, it
27 had to be a proportion of something meaningful. The only
28 meaningful standard or comparison that I could find, which
29 is the first step of going on then to look at diet, is how
30 the fat content of that meal fits into the recommendation
31 for total fat, or total saturated fat as expressed as a
32 proportion of daily energy requirement. We do not have
33 (understandably) any recommendations, any sort of advice,
34 for the fat content of particular food items or particular
35 meals, so the word "high" being a word of proportion, it is
36 a proportional word, the fat content must be a proportion
37 of something, something that matters.
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39 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes. But, for better or worse, the meaning
40 which I have taken from the relevant parts of the leaflet
41 is, first of all, that McDonald's food is high in or low
42 in, and I can see that you may say, well, terms like a food
43 being high in something or low in something may not be
44 appropriate at the end of the day. But I see that at the
45 moment by the root of the question of diet. I mean, I see
46 no problem in saying that a food is high in something or
47 low in something.
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49 MR. RAMPTON: Nor do I.
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51 MR. JUSTICE BELL: A boiled sweet is a food, and no-one would
52 doubt that that is high in sugar; and, therefore, I do not
53 see any difficulty about saying that a cheeseburger is high
54 in fat or high in salt. The question is, how do you judge
55 "high in".
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57 MR. RAMPTON: Quite.
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59 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Then is there any difficulty in saying, well,
60 it is not what they were prepared for, but one has to have
