Madam, - Many industries have sponsored research as part of a policy of blunting the impact of adverse findings associated with their products. For example the tobacco industry kept secret its own findings, dating from the early 1960s, that nicotine was addictive and that smoking probably caused cancer. To protect its interests the industry funded special "public science" in universities in the UK and US. When eventually in 1994 the details of the industry's campaign to confuse the public about tobacco smoking became known it tried many ways of suppressing the information.
The problem of conflict of interest in relation to the food industry is discussed at length by the breast surgeon RM Kradjian who, in his book Save Yourself From Breast Cancer, gives examples of what he suggests are dubious research findings linked to funding from the dairy industry. In the last chapter of his book he concludes: "Much of our highly varied and profitable food supply has been found to be dangerous. The people who furnish this food and who are enriched by its sale do not want you to know this. They have generously contributed to scientists who have supported and are willing to continue to support their products. If those scientists suddenly have a change of heart and seriously challenge the safety of that food you may be certain that the bulk of the food industry financial support will promptly disappear.
"Whom are you going to believe? Those with no financial gain from the sale of food and with the backing of the world's scientific literature? Or are you going to follow those who at times devised flawed studies and reaped millions of dollars in support from the industries that they fail to seriously criticise? You must decide, and your health will be substantially determined by your decision".
Similar views about the dairy industry have been put forward by Prof Colin Campbell, perhaps the greatest nutritional scientist ever, John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America, and Dr Justine Butler, in her report White Lies.
For these sorts of reasons I do not refer to studies funded by the dairy industry although I have referred, on our website www.cancersupportinternational.com, to some of the serious scientific flaws in some of their latest offerings.
It is not only the IGF-1 in milk that promotes cancer. In my book on prostate cancer, under the heading "Milk - What a Cocktail", I list all the growth factors, many of them implicated in promoting different cancers, that milk contains and which are protected during digestion by casein. Dairy foods are also the main source of powerful animal oestogens in our diet. In experiment after experiment in his book The China Study, T Colin Campbell showed convincingly and reproducibly that casein, which makes up 87 per cent of cow's milk protein, promotes cancer.
Before replying further in defence of her industry I suggest that Hilda Griffin of the National Dairy Council (November 2nd) reads some of the excellent books, some of which I mention here, written by non-aligned independent scientists like me. - Yours, etc,
Prof JANE PLANT, Imperial College, London SW7.