Cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra’s Interview on The Diary Of A CEO (Transcript)

They think of abdominal fat, they think about how strong they are, their muscles and things like that. Then a lot of the other things are very superficial measures of our health.

Because we’ve never really seen our heart and it’s similar to our brain, because we’ve never seen our heart or our brain, I think we typically devalue the role that they play in our overall health. But when I was reading some stats around heart disease and how many people die from heart disease, I was shocked.

So if we start there, can you give me a macro picture on why it’s important to keep our hearts healthy and how many people are dying because of unhealthy hearts?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Globally, it’s estimated and it’s on the increase – certainly by 2030, it’s estimated that about 23.3 million people will die yearly because of heart disease globally. That’s a huge number. Just to put it in perspective, it’s one of the leading causes of premature death in European men. It is the leading cause of premature death.

That’s why I think it’s so important, not just about people’s lives being cut short early, but also there is an associated morbidity, which means the quality of life deterioration that happens with people who are diagnosed with heart disease that may not be able to exercise very much because they get pain in their chest because of a blockage, or they may develop what we call heart failure, where the pump function of the heart is affected because of blockages or because of a previous heart attack that has survived, and therefore they can’t actually do the activity they want to enjoy. That’s way bigger – well, just as important as, of course, the premature death rate. So it’s a massive issue.

It’s interesting, Steve, that you mentioned the image side, where people think about excess body fat and big muscles and that kind of thing, and that also plays into a certain culture and mindset that I think detracts from us actually addressing the root cause of many problems with society today in our health, which is not related to image, actually. It’s about the basics of reducing stress, about our social interactions. To some degree, obviously, what we eat is linked to how we look, but I think it’s not something people really think about enough often until it’s too late.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How does it impact women? Because we mentioned it being the single biggest killer of men, I think, in Europe. What about women?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: It’s not as bad for women. Part of the reason for that, Steve, is – and traditionally, women on average, will live up to 10 years longer than men.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Right.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: The reason for that is that women don’t tend to develop heart disease the same age as men, but after the menopause, the rates of heart disease actually start to catch up. So even though women will live longer, it’s still a big issue with women as well. Absolutely.

Personal Loss and NHS Failures

STEVEN BARTLETT: Your mother passed in November 2018 after a bout of sepsis. It was interesting. I read this quote you’d said. I think it was on iNews. You said “you’re a GP that had dedicated 25 years of your life to the NHS, and ultimately you were failed by it.” How were you failed by it?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: In my mum’s circumstance, what happened was the system was under so much strain. She had suffered with a debilitating rheumatoid and osteoarthritis for many years. Initially, I think a lot of her health issues were rooted in her weight. She was addicted to ultra-processed food. She consumed a lot of sugar. I grew up in a household where there were just cakes and biscuits everywhere.

I was addicted to sugar, probably because of that as well, for some time, but it affected her health and I love my mum very, very dearly. It was heartbreaking to watch her suffer slowly over a number of years.

But the way she was failed by the NHS specifically is that I had already been campaigning for many, many years in terms of seeing how the system of the NHS was being put under more pressure, a lot of it by diet-related disease. There were so many opportunities for us that were being actually improve the system so that doctors could provide quality care to every patient to a good degree.

When my mum was admitted to hospital and she was sick with infection in the spine, she’d become so frail from her arthritis that her immune system probably wasn’t functioning properly as well because the hospital was under so much strain because we had not sorted out the root causes of the pressure on the system. They missed a heart attack for nine days.

It’s extraordinary, Steve. I remember they knew I was a cardiologist and it was our local hospital. My dad was local GP and he was considered a medical leader. He was loved and liked and respected massively. So even with all of that, they did everything they could to help her, but she became breathless one day. They treated her for infection with lots of fluid and they carried out a heart scan. It was decided, “let’s do a heart scan on her.” But nobody actually looked at the result of the heart scan and shared it with the team because they were so busy, they just missed it.

I get sent the results nine days later being asked, “what do you think?” And I immediately noticed that it was an echo, it was a heart scan looking at the pump muscle of the heart. That part of the heart muscle wasn’t working well. I said, “she’s had it. You’ve missed a relatively minor heart attack,” but enough to cause her to go into what we call heart failure within 24 hours. Fluid in the lung, intensive care, went into a coma and that was it.

So that was a failing of the NHS, but not because of the principles of the NHS, but because the NHS over the years, Steve, has lost its basic ability to care for patients because the principles of the NHS have not been upheld.

STEVEN BARTLETT: For anyone that isn’t aware, the NHS means National Health Service, which is the health service and system within the UK. I mean, just a few years later, your father passes in July 21st from a sudden unexplained heart attack at 73 years old. I mean, so there’s three members of your family that have ultimately died as a result of or closely linked to heart attacks. Your immediate family?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, to some degree, yes. All related to the heart. All related to the heart.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Was your father’s heart attack avoidable in your view, if you think about the lifestyle choices and things like that. You talked about your mother there. Was that avoidable in any sense of the word?

The Investigation Begins

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah. Interesting. So there are two components to my dad’s death. Strictly the post mortem findings didn’t reveal a heart attack per se, but for all intents and purposes, it can be seen that way.

So the first thing that happened was my dad, by the way, was a very fit man for his age, 73 years old, played badminton every week, had a bit of high blood pressure, but had got that better controlled after quitting sugar, partly because of all my campaigning. And he listened to me and he was very into eating healthy food. In fact, I consider myself to be extremely fit. I’m obsessed with exercise. I played a lot of competitive sport when I was younger, partly because of him.

And it was very unexpected when he called me up. It’s coming up to his anniversary, July 26, 2021. And he said, “Aseem, I’ve got some chest discomfort.” And I asked him to describe it. In medicine, 80% of your diagnosis, if you’re a good doctor, comes from the conversation. So the way he described his chest discomfort was a central heaviness going to his shoulders. So immediately think, this is heart. And I said, “You need to call an ambulance.”

He was a bit reluctant to call an ambulance for whatever reason. And then I said, “Okay.” I was in London, he was in Manchester, that’s where I grew up. And I decided to go and have a shower, get ready and get on the train. And he was ringing up his neighbors, who were both doctors. By the time I came out of the shower, I called him back and there was no answer. And I remember my heart just thinking, I really hope he’s not had a cardiac arrest. I thought, no, this can’t be. What’s going on? Kept ringing, ringing.

Eventually the neighbor who was a doctor who knew me, she answered the phone and said, “Aseem, your dad’s had a cardiac arrest. We’re doing CPR on him.” I know from national data and I’ve even written about this in the BMJ. The average response time, Steve, for many, many years, one of the things that we have done very well in the NHS, some of the best in the world, is our treatment of heart attacks and the speed of treatment and even cardiac arrests.

I knew the average response time was eight minutes. I said, “The ambulance will be here in eight minutes. Because of the timing, almost certainly he will have what we call a shockable rhythm in the heart is probably having an electrical disturbance and we’ll be able to shock him out of it. More than 50% chance he will survive.” This is, I’m thinking already like this.

10 minutes pass by, ambulance hasn’t shown. 20 minutes, nothing. 30 minutes they get there and I FaceTime them. They attach the cardiac monitor, it’s a flat line, he’s gone, nothing to be done. And of course that was, at that stage I was obviously devastated and I wrote in the Eye newspaper about how I screamed louder than ever screamed in my life.

The Medical Mystery

But to come back to that situation, first and foremost. So the first thing is if the ambulance had turned up on time, almost certainly it’s likely he would have survived. That’s the first thing. But the second thing in my mind is, why has he had a cardiac arrest in the first place? He was a really healthy guy in my family, as in on his side. There was no family history of heart disease. He had high blood pressure, okay, but that was about it, right? And he was otherwise pretty good.

And when the post mortem came back, there were three major arteries of the heart. Two of them had severe blockages. And I thought, this is odd because I knew his lifestyle. This is my area of interest and expertise, heart disease, specifically how it progresses, how you can reverse it, all that stuff, what medications can do, what they can’t do as well.

And I thought to myself, hold on. I knew his scan from a few years earlier. Something has happened in the last two or three years that has caused a rapid acceleration in the disease of the heart, right? In terms of the blockages getting very rapidly progressing. I thought, this doesn’t make sense.

And I thought to myself, was he just severely stressed? Stress can do it. Very severe stress can do it. He’d lost, obviously, my mum a couple of years earlier, but he was a very resilient guy. He was the vice president of the British Medical Association. He was still involved in medical politics during COVID. He was one of the faces on the BBC during the COVID pandemic, talking about how we should manage this, etc. So he was still very mentally active. He wasn’t a recluse sitting in the corner, he was still social, so doesn’t really fit.

The Breakthrough Study

And then a publication appeared in the journal Circulation, which is considered the premier cardiology journal, and a cardiologist called Stephen Gundry, who you may have heard of, he’s done a lot of work in lifestyle and lectin and stuff. So he had, and he actually had a very senior role in the American Heart Association. Very eminent published cardiologist.

He published an abstract where he looked at several hundred of his patients who had taken the COVID vaccines, specifically mRNA vaccines. So either Pfizer or Moderna, two doses. And what had happened was within eight weeks of taking those jabs, their baseline risk went from 11% chance of a heart attack in five years to 25% chance just within eight weeks. That is a huge jump.

Just to give you perspective, Steve, if I today decided that I was going to just consume junk food all my meals, right, I was going to smoke 20 cigarettes a day, I was going to stop exercising, I wouldn’t get anywhere close to increase within eight weeks. And the mechanism was for inflammation. And I thought, ah, I know heart disease is a chronic inflammatory condition linked to lifestyle. So if this is even partially true, it means that the COVID vaccines may be causing inflammation around the heart. And that means that many people are going to have an acceleration in heart disease. And that may explain what happened to my dad.

But that was only one bit of data. Of course, a good scientist knows, okay, it gets you thinking. It’s a hypothesis, potentially, obviously some data, but it’s not enough to make it more than likely at this stage.

The Whistleblower Call

And within two weeks, call it Providence or whatever else. I got a phone call from somebody who I know, I consider him one of the smartest cardiologists, very high integrity from very prestigious institution. And he called me up and he said, “Aseem, I’ve got something to tell you. I’m very upset.”

He said, “A group of researchers that I’m linked to in this institution had accidentally found, and this has nothing to do with blood tests or cardiac risk through a very high tech imaging of the heart modality they were using that there was inflammation of the arteries which would cause obviously potentially heart attacks. That was there in the vaccinated, but not there in the unvaccinated.”

“The lead researcher sat the team down and he said, ‘Guys, I just want to make this clear. We are not going to explore these findings any further because it may affect our funding from the drug industry.'”

Now, obviously people hearing this are going to think, wow, that sounds corrupt. This is something that has been a big problem within medicine for a very, very long time, which isn’t getting an airing. But it didn’t surprise me of that, but it was still quite shocking. But for me at that stage, Steve, it was okay at the very least, I should ask the question.

Personal Conflict and Going Public

And I was nervous about it. I had been. Someone took the jab myself. I went to Good Morning Britain and very early on when they were just offering it to high risk people to say that I think that this is probably safe and people shouldn’t be worried. And this is again, specifically to address people from black and ethnic minority communities because there was a lower uptake amongst those communities, partly also because they are often amongst some of the most marginalized members of society and they have less trust in authority and government. So you can see how the psychology plays in there.

And I convinced a friend of mine who’s a film director, Gurinda Chadha, who directed Bend It Like Beckham, you might know some of her movies. And we went on together in Good Morning Britain to say, “Listen, I think this is fine.”

So I had all of that. And so I was, in many ways, I was indoctrinated. And there is, and people don’t like to admit they’re wrong or think they’ve got it wrong. So for me to start turning or changing my mind or asking the question is not necessarily an easy thing to do. But I’ve done that throughout my career. So if anyone has the character, I know myself to be able to say, “Listen, okay, there’s new evidence here.” Whatever else, I felt I could do that, but I was still nervous and I thought, this is not something that I think the BBC are going to pick up on.

I had a good rapport with GB News at that point and I still do. And one of the presenters, Alexandra Phillips, was a friend of mine and I called her up and said, “Listen, we were doing.” She wanted me on anyway, I was doing regular health slots every few weeks. I said, “What do you want to talk about next week?” And I said, “I think let’s talk about this.”

Said, “Okay, go on GB News.” I say, the vaccine committee of the country should look into this. This is what I know, this is what I found. Whistleblower, all this stuff. I said, my dad died as well and this may be the reason for his death. And I just asked that question and of course, I didn’t expect it to go viral. It got millions of views and it was getting reach all over America and that kind of thing.

The Mandate Campaign

Strangely, by this point, Steve, I don’t if you remember, but Omicron wave had started and we were getting reports from South Africa, which was really reassuring, that from the doctor that discovered it that this doesn’t seem to be more harmful than the flu now. Great, okay, it’s mutated, it’s a different strain. This is really great news.

And then Sajid Javid, around the same time, the Secretary for Health had come out in Parliament and said, “We are now going to pass through legislation that the COVID vaccine needs to be mandated for healthcare workers,” despite the fact that the British Medical association medical colleges, we’ve never, in our country. One thing that’s really good, especially within the medical establishment, we don’t believe in mandating any drug. They do this in America, they’ve never done this here. And although they weren’t very vocal about it, they kind of were a bit relatively quiet. They weren’t supporting it openly saying that we should mandate. This is coming from this political decision.

I said, “This is very odd. At a stage now where we’re thinking there’s serious harm, we know it’s not.” And by that stage, 2021, November, most people were understanding now it wasn’t stopping infection, right. For most people, right. So I said, “This doesn’t make any sense.”

So I then started campaigning on this issue. And I started campaigning on this issue, was able to get into the mainstream news on this particular issue because around that time the Eye newspaper had published an investigation into the delay that led to my dad’s death of the ambulance service. Right. And I had also got privy to knowledge in that story that the Deputy Chief Nurse of NHS England had called me up and said there’d been basically a cover up by the government and the Department of Health to stop people knowing for months there were ambulance delays, doctors and members of public.

I thought, “This is unacceptable.” So I exposed this. It became a massive story, BBC News. And when the BBC presenter was saying, “Dr. Malhotra, what’s going on wrong with the NHS? Why is it failing? Why is this happening?” I said, “It’s multifactorial. But I said, one of the most important reasons is you failed. We failed for years to address the root cause of what’s driving stress on the system, taking on the excesses of Big Food and Big Pharma. But I said, right now we’ve got 80 to 100,000 NHS staff who are refusing to have the COVID vaccine. This would be a crisis. They’re going to lose their jobs. This mandate needs to be overturned. It’s not scientific, it’s not ethical.”

So I got that into the mainstream and ultimately we end up overturning the mandate.

The Professional Backlash

But there was a backlash Steve, behind the scenes and I’ve not been public about this before, so I’m going to tell you this for the first time because I think it’s time I tell this story.

Shortly after me going on GB News as a doctor who’d had the vaccine had been on Good Morning Britain to say it was likely safe and effective to then talking about we should maybe look into this and maybe pause the situation because of these heart issues that need to be investigated. I received an email from the Royal College of Physicians, this is the oldest medical institution in the world, saying, “Dr. Malhotra, we have received a number of anonymous complaints from other fellows that you, in reference to my GB News interview, that you are spreading anti vax misinformation and you’ve got four weeks to respond to this.” And they were saying all the different sanctions that could happen because of me doing this.

Right, Steve at that point I thought if we are going to get a pause on this vaccine and really investigate it, it’s because of such an indoctrination because so many people, billions of people around the world have taken this and therefore the battle to expose it is going to be harder than anything I’ve ever done. The only way in, my only chance is to get it published in a peer reviewed journal and then to get it into the news.

The Deep Dive Research

I spent nine months at that stage, literally eating, breathing, sleeping, speaking to two Pfizer whistleblowers, speaking to eminent scientists in expertise I didn’t have around immunology and vaccine development. Of course I had the understanding of cardiology better than anybody in this particular field, in this particular area.

And when I did that research and looked at it, I first of all concluded that there absolutely needs to be a suspension of the vaccine. Because what happened by the summer of 2022, and this is actually the most crucial and important piece of data on its own, which should have been enough to suspend it and actually suggest that it probably shouldn’t have been rolled out in the first place, is that those trials that were done by Pfizer and Moderna, which led to all the media reports 95% effective, the approval by the regulator, the rollout, the coercion, the mandates, they were reanalyzed by some very eminent scientists, including associated with the BMJ, one of the world’s top epidemiologists, and they published in the journal Vaccine, which is the premier journal for vaccines.

And they were able to get new data that was made available on Health Canada’s website and the FDA in America’s website. And what they did in their reanalysis of the original high quality clinical trials is they found, Steve, you were more likely to suffer serious harm from taking the vaccine at a rate of 1 in 800. That meant hospitalization, disability, or a life changing event. Then you were to be hospitalized with COVID. And this is during the early phase, right? This is during the most lethal strain.

The Vaccine Harm Rate: A Critical Analysis

STEVEN BARTLETT: For all age groups.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes, absolutely. Well, they put all age groups together. So on average in all age groups. That’s a very good question. But what’s missing is that actually, okay, is there a benefit that’s greater than harm in certain age groups? But we can indirectly answer that in a second.

So that was original trial. So on average it was more harmful than beneficial. Okay, but even before talking about all age groups, Steve, a 1 in 800 harm rate for a vaccine is completely unacceptable in the sense that we have pulled other vaccines in the past for much less harm.

The swine flu vaccine was suspended globally because it was found to cause Guillain Barre syndrome, a debilitating neurological condition in one in a hundred thousand people. Rotavirus vaccine was pulled in 1999 because it was found to cause a form of bowel obstruction in children at 1 in 10,000. So you’ve already got a harm rate of 1 in 800, irrespective of. Right. So that first and foremost should be a red flag to say, hold on, this is too much.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When they say harm rate, how do they. What’s the range of definitions of harm?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Well, in this one, they categorize serious harm as it caused you to be hospitalized. Yeah, it caused a disability or something that was life changing. Now, of course, that can incorporate lots of different things. But of those, and I spoke to the lead researcher I know work with him on other things. 40% of the serious harms were actually related to clotting disorders like lung clots, heart attacks, et cetera.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I want to make sure I’m super clear here because I don’t understand the data you’re citing. So you’re saying that they found 1 in 800 people would have serious harm or harm.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Serious harm?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Serious, serious harm. One in 800 people in the trials.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: One in 800. Yeah. One in 800 serious harm. Right. Now, just to give you perspective so you can balance it out. Just because this is important, the question you’ve asked is really important.

We didn’t have any good real world data at that point on can we separate vaccinated from unvaccinated to look at what the hospitalization rate would be for Covid, for example, in people who took the vaccine versus the people that didn’t, according to age group, that data. In the whole world, the only country to make that data available was the UK and they did that in the beginning of 2023, so January last year.

And what did that show after two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, Steve, if you were over 70, so this is the highest risk group, you had to vaccinate 2,500 people to prevent one person being hospitalized with COVID And this was.

STEVEN BARTLETT: With the different strain, the Omnicom strain, because the original strain was.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, it was. They didn’t. Yeah, it was. You’re right, it was with the Omicron strain. So that was still. But it gave us a ballpark figure that even that. So it’s, it’s like so say a patient comes to me and says, “doc, what are the benefits of this drug as a prevention, whatever else.” And I say to them, “well, if you take this, there’s a 1 in 2,500 chance it will help you prevent you being hospitalized.”

I’ll be honest with you, Steve. I mean, in medicine, in all the drugs I’ve used and all the data I know about, different medications and heart disease, et cetera, that figure, I mean, it’s a very serious issue. But that figure is a joke. I mean, there’s nothing of that of such poor. And then when you get under the age, when you get to people under the age of say 50, you’re talking about having to vaccinate maybe several hundred thousand to prevent one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that relevant for that, the first strain of COVID as well, because. Or do we not have the data on that?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: We don’t have that data on that. We do. In my paper, which I published, actually, we did have some data on Delta and if I remember correctly, the data on the over 70s. There’s also problems with this a little bit because it’s not corrected for other factors such as socioeconomics, et cetera. Risk factors might make people more vulnerable. So if I remember correctly from that paper, if you’re over 70, that was about 1 in 250. Delta was the worst strain actually. So about 1 in 250. Okay.

British Heart Foundation’s Position on Vaccine Risks

STEVEN BARTLETT: On the British Heart foundation website, I’m sure you’ve read this. Just to read out what they say on there, it says that up to 1 in 10,000 people with the Pfizer vaccine might experience are at risk of myocarditis or pericarditis. If I pronounced that correctly, up to 1 in 10,000 people for the Moderna vaccine and it’s not possible to estimate other vaccines because they’re not frequently used in the UK.

All three of these COVID 19 vaccines are MRNA vaccines designed to target the Omnicom strain. And at the top of this it says the risk of myocarditis or pericarditis after COVID 19 vaccine is very low. How do you respond to that? Do you think you agree with that?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: No, I don’t agree with it at all. I think there are a number of layers to respond to this. I think the first thing to say, Steve, is the British Heart foundation, with the greatest respect to them and they do a lot of good work overall, is still part of the so called establishment which has been blinded for years to actually even address so many issues on health when it doesn’t suit the interests of big Pharma.

And I can say that categorically because I know one of the chief advisor to heart disease for the British Heart foundation with the greatest respect to him is a guy called Professor Rory Collins at University of Oxford. And they have said similar things when it comes to statin drugs, which we’ll talk about later. But that person, the people who advise them are people who are heavily funded and linked to pharma taking their institution, taking hundreds of millions, for example. So there’s a huge bias there to start with. That’s the first thing.

But for me, what the British Heart foundation are not doing is actually countering and I would love them to counter that because I’m very open for the debate here, is that you’ve got a reanalysis of and they know this the best way of determining serious harm from any drug is actually looking. One of the best ways is the highest quality level of evidence, which is the randomized control trials, which is where led to the approval when you’ve got an independent reanalysis this in a peer reviewed journal saying more harm than good from the beginning, that in itself.

And then we look at real world data, Steve, there’s so many other bits of data that they are ignoring. Basically to answer your question, they’re ignoring lots of other data which is very clear whether it’s autopsy data, whether it’s other studies that came out of Israel that showed, for example, this was published in a journal called Nature Scientific Reports. And again they ignore this, they don’t talk about it. So it’s like, hold on guys, this is, you’re ignoring, you’re not even mentioning this data they show.

And this is really Most disturbing in 2021 there was a 25% increase in heart attacks and or cardiac arrests in people aged between 16 and 39, which was associated with the COVID vaccine, but not associated with COVID.

Separating Pandemic Stress from Vaccine Effects

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do they tease out? I was thinking about, you know, the increase in heart related conditions around the pandemic and following the pandemic and in much of your work and I think in this book, I can’t actually pronounce the word. Pop diet. Yeah, the poppy diet. You talk about how these other sort of lifestyle factors like community, friendships, relationships, stress, mental health, being sedentary, sedentary, all of these things can contribute to heart problems.

So when I think about the pandemic, I go, people weren’t seeing their friends, we were stressed more than ever. People were losing their jobs, they were furloughed, they had mental health, you know, we saw the mental health stats explode. Yeah, all the factors there that are linked to heart disease. So how do we know that it wasn’t those factors of the pandemic that caused an increase in heart related issues? And how can we tease that out from the vaccine?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Really good question. Because remember I also said that early on, before I realized the vaccine might be playing a role, I actually thought that was the most likely explanation of the increased heart attacks, lockdown, stress, poor diet, etc.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’d expect to see an increase.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: You would, you would. And I think it has played a role, Steve, for sure it has played a role. But then when you look at the quality of data to say how much of a role that’s played, that it’s on a different level. When you look at the vaccine, when you look at the plausible mechanism, you look at the types of people that are dying, young people and stuff like that, it doesn’t fit, I’ll be honest.

My personal view, it is the primary driver, without any shadow of a doubt in my mind. And a personal view of the excess deaths, as a scientist, I’ll say it’s a likely significant contributing factor, but probably the most likely because another aspect to all of this is what we call pharmacovigilance reports.

So these are reports that are done by members of the public when they have an adverse reaction to any drug. And it’s not easy to fill in. You fill in these, what we call yellow card scheme. You can get it online and you send it off to your doctor or to, you know, the regulator, those reports. And I’ve, throughout my career, I’ve never seen the extent, like, for example, I’ll give you an example, after 9.7 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was ultimately pulled. Right. AstraZeneca, of course, was also one of the COVID vaccines. There were 800,000 in this country. 800,000 yellow card reports.

Now, some of them are not going to be serious, serious. But people don’t fill in a yellow card report if you’ve had a bit of a fever after having a vaccine, they felt quite ill, ill enough. So that’s already. And then within that it’s estimated maybe one in five of those from other data would suggest serious harm. So other data from reporting and with the. So with about, I think 30 million doses, if it was probably about 30 million doses of Pfizer, we had about 500,000 yellow card reports in this country. Right. Which is still a lot. You know, it’s one in 60 yellow card reports.

Now, they’re all not going to be super serious hospitalization, death, whatever else. But when you put all of the data together, Steve, that it paints a picture that makes it look as clear as day that anybody doubting, you know, it should be. The evidence should be this is the primary cause of the excess deaths until proven otherwise. That’s the level of evidence, Steve. But it’s just being ignored. It’s being ignored and I can talk about why it’s being ignored.

The Net Effect of Vaccine Introduction

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things I’ve been sort of gaps in my head that I’ve been keen to fill is do you believe that if we hadn’t have introduced the vaccine, more or less people would have survived Covid? Because I’ve got close friends of mine that got Covid and I watched them go from very healthy looking people to basically skeletons. Good for actually a good friend. One of the CEOs of my company, his dad went from being a very healthy man to being basically looking like a skeleton and almost died. And then I’ve got. I know of other people that did die. So I think in the grand scheme of things, when we think about vaccines, was it a net positive that we had a vaccine?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: There is from everything I know now, I’ve slowly and reluctantly come to the conclusion that the COVID vaccine introduction has had a catastrophic overall net negative effect on the population and society.

And let me just caveat this because you’ve mentioned the fact that people suffered from COVID and I’m not denying that I’ve got patients, Steve, that I see that have had long Covid that weren’t vaccinated. Okay. And have suffered quite badly. Most of the most serious aspects of COVID happened early on in 2020 and predominantly affected the elderly. We’ve got all of that data now that’s been reanalyzed by one of the world’s top scientists.

And even looking back now, essentially, if you were under 70 even from the beginning, your risk of serious harm from COVID is in the ballpark figure of the flu. Right. And even I actually was wrong. I wrote an article in European scientist in April 2020 because I actually initially started making a lot of noise about why we’re not talking about lifestyle with COVID to help people mitigate, you know, improve their immune system.

And I said, you know, talking to a friend of mine who works in the busiest ER in Americ in New York, who I’ve done work with, and he said, “aseem, this is. I’ve never seen anything like this is devastating. Some of my colleagues are dying.” So I have no doubt that at the very beginning, in the early strain of the virus, it was really bad, especially for vulnerable people, people with obesity, et cetera.

The Unusual Nature of COVID-19 Symptoms

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I remember getting Covid. I was actually on the top floor of this building and I remember I’ve never experienced anything quite as bizarre as the symptoms that I had when I got Covid. The fact that at 3am in the morning I don’t take medicine. So at 3:00am in the morning, I’m lying flat on my floor ordering ibuprofen on Ubereats because my back, I just had the most bizarre back pain. And so I was having to lie flat on the floor because I couldn’t even lie in bed. It was so bad.

And just this weird set of symptoms that I’d never had before. My partner, she lost her smell and taste and it was so unusual. It was so unusual. There’s not been a time in my lifetime that people have lost their smell and taste en masse. So when you hear it compared to the flu, you go, this was not the flu, this is something different.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes. No, the symptoms are very different. And I think now it’s accepted that we won’t go into a lot of detail, but I think one of the reasons as well, it was human engineered, you know, almost certainly the evidence points it being a lab leak. Right. So it had a very. You’re right. It was very different to any other virus.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That used to be a conspiracy theory.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: I know, right now it’s not a conspiracy theory. I know, I know, exactly. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you hear that lab in Wuhan that were messing around with viruses and then we decided to put the blame on like a market store. But I think now the general consensus is that it probably came from that lab in Wuhan.

Treatment Approaches and Missed Opportunities

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve spoken to, in fact, I spent time with actually the scientists that first went public with it, who identified it. Guy in America, sorry, in Australia. So, yeah, that came from lab. But so I think it had these different strange things, loss of smell, etc. But in terms of serious illness, it was there at the beginning.

Now, when you look back, I think essentially there were vulnerable elderly, but, you know, who suffered, especially people in nursing homes. There are a lot of deaths there, but there’s so many other components to this. So one is, did we institute the correct treatments? A lot of people were killed because they weren’t managed properly in ITU, you know, in terms of putting people, intubating them, putting on respirators when they didn’t need it. And that in itself has a risk. Some of the wrong treatments were given.

There were other treatments, now that we look back, that probably would have been helpful. Things like ivermectin, which I know has been a bit controversial, but it’s very safer than paracetamol. Right. So first, do no harm. Okay. But it may have done some good. And a lot of people and doctors around the world that used it in several thousand. There’s a doctor in South Africa that used it in 14,000 patients, including many elderly. Not a single one died from COVID. And this is early on. So all these things that we missed, we missed the lifestyle intervention. So all those things are there.

Understanding Vaccine Statistics: The Problem with Relative Risk

But by the time you get to the end of 2020, the beginning of 2021, there are so many things that happen, Steve, that you have to think about before you introduce a vaccine. One is what is the state of the virus right now? And it already mutated to some degree and become less lethal. There is natural immunity, which we know is very powerful. Right.

But the issue with the vaccine is, and certainly it was probably there from the beginning. We know that when one looks at the original trials, there was a. And this is what the drug companies have done for a long, long period of time. They will mislead people using statistics about the benefits. So use something called relative risk reduction. Let me just explain this, because we can apply this to statins as well, is they presented the benefit as a 95% protection against infection. Remember that figure? 95%, right. And it was what we call relative risk reduction.

So if you’ve got, for example, two groups in a trial, say 100 in one trial in one group and 100 in another. And let’s just say, let’s give you an example, statins. And you’re following them up over five years to look at a drug to see if it benefits them in preventing having a heart attack. In one group, they get the dummy pill and you follow them up over five years. And in the people who got the dummy pill, in fact, you didn’t do anything different. Two of them suffered a heart attack. In the other group, the other hundred people that were followed over five years who got the pill, the drug. Right. Only one suffered a heart attack.

So you’ve reduced the heart attack risk by 50%. Right. Two to one. Right. 50%. But you’ve only prevented one heart attack. You’ve treated 100 people, but you’ve prevented one heart attack out of treating 100. Yeah. Does that make sense? So that’s a 1% absolute benefit. In other words, when you explain that to a patient, when I ask, when I have engage in sort of, we’ll call informed consent, shared decision making, when they ask me what drug, I’ll say, “this gives you a 1% chance if you take this drug religiously, of preventing a heart attack.”

The Reality Behind COVID Vaccine Efficacy Claims

Now, you apply that to the original COVID vaccine trials, which, by the way, have so many other problems with them, because even those trials were conducted and analyzed and designed by the drug industry. I mean, this is one of the biggest myths that needs to be busted, Steve, out there. For most doctors as well as members of the public, medical knowledge is under commercial control. But most people don’t know that.

So what happens is they did the trial, but let’s just talk about what the results, their results showed us and 95% relative risk reduction against infection. They didn’t show any reduction in COVID death, by the way, in that trial. Right. They just said prevent from infection. But we then presume it may then prevent. Right. Reduced death rates. The absolute risk reduction from infection at the beginning was 0.84%. 1 in 119. So that’s how many people you need to vaccinate to prevent one infection, which actually people were not told. So imagine you’re thinking, should I take this vaccine, say, “well, Steve, there’s a less than 1% chance that it’s going to prevent you getting infected.” People weren’t told that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But it then reduced my chance of getting seriously ill, right?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: No, but we’ve then talked about that, haven’t we? Like as in when you look at the data, certainly beginning of 2023, that was looking over the previous year 2022, you have to vaccinate 2,500 people to prevent one person getting serious ill with COVID. Right. If you’re over 70 with the second.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Strain, with the other strain, you do.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: The strain and it may have been better. Steve, you’re right, it may. It probably was better, but it’s still. Numbers are still much smaller than what people were led to believe. And by the way, Steve, the narrative at the beginning, they kept changing the goalposts. Remember, it wasn’t about preventing serious illness and death. It was all about preventing infection. You are not in America. You’ve seen it all over CNN. Rachel Maddow, and she’s saying it so passionately. “If you take this vaccine, you are not going to get Covid.” And calling anyone who questions it being a science denier. I mean, Jesus Christ.

Assessing Overall Impact: Would Fewer Deaths Have Occurred?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So my last question on that before I say, what I was going to say is do you think there would have been less deaths overall if we hadn’t have had a vaccine?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You think there would have been less.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Deaths by now when you look at it. So I think over time. So where we are now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if we hadn’t have introduced the vaccine for that first strain of COVID you think there’d be less deaths?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Okay, okay. If I was to. I still think that if, okay, this is very nuanced but important. If the vaccine had only been offered to the high risk people at the beginning, say the over 70s or people with multiple risk factors. I think there is a case to be made. Right. I’m going to counter that in a minute though. But there is a case to be made that there was overall benefit versus harm.

But there’s a problem. One, there wasn’t true informed consent. Right. Because those figures, those numbers weren’t given to people about the prevention of infection, etc. Right. And two, if you have an average serious harm rate of 1 in 800, any scientist, even regulators, would have said, “hold on a minute, this is way too high, this is too risky.” And this is, by the way, Steve, only the short term. Because remember, this vaccine didn’t go through what other vaccines have gone through, which is five to 10 years of safety testing.

So if you throw all those caveats in and use informed consent, I can guarantee you with all of my knowledge, expertise, experience with patients, when you engage in these conversations, most of those elderly people will probably have still refused it. But yes, I think there is a case to be made that the benefits may have outweighed the harms in those high risk people at the very beginning, in the short term, absolutely.

Media Influence and Information Sources

STEVEN BARTLETT: You know, when I think about Rachel Maddow and what she said on TV about, you know, that it’s going to stop the spread of infection, et cetera, I can have a degree of empathy because if that’s the information you’re being fed and you are a public facing broadcaster and it’s being fed to you by scientists and it’s being fed you by the NHS and whoever else and you know, very credible people that you’ve been raised to believe and to trust. If you’re a public facing broadcaster, what else are you going to say? You’re not going to say the opposite. It you’re not. But you can’t sit on the fence. Your job is to broadcast, it’s the news.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I have, and I think you did the same you said earlier, you went on Good Morning Britain or something.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Instead of saying, and I’m not blaming Rachel Maddow here, I’m just saying that the indoctrination that came through the mainstream media was so strong through people like Rachel Maddow. And why is that important? Steve? I had a conversation with the chairman of the British Medical association in December 2021 when I was campaigning to overturn vaccine mandates for healthcare workers. He had access to Sajid Javid. I had a previous rapport with Matt Hancock, but he had obviously.

And I spoke to his name’s Shah Nagpal and I explained to him everything I knew about the vaccine after looking at data at that point, I hadn’t published at this point, but I went through it in a logical way. Chairman of the BMA, by the way, not just some random person. And he said, “Aseem, no one appears to have critically appraised the evidence on the vaccine as well as you have. From our two hour chat, most of my colleagues who are in senior policy, medical positions, establishment positions, are getting their information on the benefits and harms of the vaccine from the BBC.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s super difficult.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Isn’t that extraordinary, though?

The Challenge of Information During Crisis

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think it’s really difficult because if you’re dealing with lots of people dying en masse and it’s happened very, very quickly and people are just dropping dead and you’re seeing hospitals being overrun.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: You’ve.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Got to tread carefully with the information you’re putting out there. So if the scientific information comes in early and maybe a little bit soon, before it’s really been vetted and triple checked, saying one thing and you’re desperate for answers, I can, I can see why a group of people would say, “okay, this is the best information,” and then to go against that information could potentially cause tons of harm. So I can also imagine why a group of people would be really slow to then change their mind away from that, because you’re dealing with like.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: And Steve, I was that person too. So I’m with you on that 100%. I think where I’m taking this is the system. If it had been more transparent early on, and this is where I’ve been, you know, banging my head against a brick wall to some degree for about a decade, if there was more transparency in the system, we would have had better information even from the beginning.

But that information was kept commercially confidential because of the system that really is geared towards supporting the interests of Big Pharma, not in the interests of people’s health. And that. And if that. And that’s the key point here. Here, right? This is. We’re looking back over time thinking, “how did this happen? How do we allow this to happen?” We need to go deeper, say, “how do we stop this happening again in the future so we have better information?” That’s all I’m saying.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think it is malicious at, like a government level, do you think?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: No.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You don’t think it is?

The Political Landscape and Medical Misinformation

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Not at all. I know many politicians, very senior people, cross party. Some of them I call my friends. Many of them come to me for medical advice. In fact, one of them lost £100 on my Pioppi diet with Tom Watson, the deputy of the Labour Party.

And these genuinely, by and large, are decent people that want to do the right thing, but they are also fed misinformation by lobbyists. They take as expert opinion or information stuff that has been curated for the purposes of the interests of big food or Big Pharma.

When I campaigned on getting the sugar tax introduced, I wrote articles in the BMJ and I started writing every newspaper. And I remember, I thought, “We’re going to win this.” Because the front page of the Daily Mail was “Sugar is the new tobacco.” And that put pressure on the then Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, because the Mail then decided they were going to go right. And of course, that government, Conservative government, are particularly influenced by what the Daily Mail writes because they are traditionally one of their supporters.

But there was a story around that time where they exposed, and it was on the front page that government ministers, in terms of obesity strategies, “How do we solve the obesity epidemic?” had had 99 meetings with representatives of the food industry and not a single meeting with a public health doctor, for example. So I know how that happened. The system should be more transparent to make sure that they understand that. Those politicians. But many of them were shocked when I told them this information. They trust me.

One of them was a former government minister’s sister who said, “Aseem, this is…” She’s shocked by it, but now understands it. They were captured as well. But we all… We were in a state of fear, Steve, as well. Let’s not underestimate that. At the very beginning we were all scared. We didn’t know what we were dealing with. And of course we have to have empathy for ourselves. When you’re in a state of fear, for albeit, I think it was a big error to some degree and everybody was scared. And I don’t think it was malicious to create that fear initially. It stops us being able psychologically. It inhibits your ability to engage in critical thinking. And all of us were in that position.

The Risk of Future Pandemic Response

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there a risk now that if there was a deadly virus that broke out across the world, people are so scared of vaccines now that they would not go and get it? Because there’s something I was saying to my friend the other day. I was like, “We’ve gotten to a point now where I think so many people are skeptical about vaccines that if something does come from another lab somewhere and it is really fatal and the government stand on that podium again and say, ‘Hands, face, space,’ whatever it was that slogan. And they say, ‘We need you to all go get this vaccine.’ Who’s going to go get it?”

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah. No, I agree. I don’t like that situation. I don’t want us to be in this situation.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But you’re right, there will be another pandemic.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: There is a big risk. And the way around that is… And this is what we’re taught as doctors. It’s one of the things that is ingrained into us, a medical school, is that when you make a mistake, you tell the patient. Patients are very forgiving if they think and know that you acted from a place of good intent because mistakes happen, things go wrong. This is what we need as a mea culpa. I would be willing to do that. I mean, in some way I was partly responsible certainly at the very early stage to support a vaccine rollout. But I know that the most important thing for me to do when new information comes available and medicine, again is not an exact science, it evolves. But let’s play that out.

The Consequences of Admitting Mistakes

STEVEN BARTLETT: Let’s play that out. So if we had a situation where the, I don’t know, the scientists that said really positive things about the vaccine, that it was side effect free or whatever, they come out now and they say “We were totally wrong.” And they say “We got it…” So let’s play out that scenario. What would happen the next day on social media?

Is everybody who was criticized or critiqued or lost their job or was, I don’t know, in some way penalized for their views that there might be side effects that we’re not talking about would immediately go to their base of their audience and say, “I told you so.” The conspiracy theorists on the Internet who are really extreme that believe that there’s a group of people wearing tin hats that have come up with this idea, they would be empowered.

And what you then have is a situation where another pandemic rolls in from a far away land. Those people said, “Listen, you know those people that…” You see what I’m saying? It would, in my mind, it would fuel the narrative that vaccines are bad and less like people would be less likely to take them. Because we’re not driven by facts, stats, graphs and figures. We’re driven by emotion. Yeah, it’s much more powerful than just if a scientist standing there and showing me a graph, it’s how I feel which matters the most. And if I felt like I was betrayed and lied to, there’s no chance that I’d run down and get another jab or something in my arm.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: It’s an uncomfortable truth that needs facing those, Steve, because if we don’t face it, these problems are going to carry on. We’re not going to improve the situation by ignoring it and sweeping under the carpet. So there will be that. You’re right, there will be that backlash. I myself have had that. I’ve had people, I got heckled, a talk I gave on this for the first time when I spoke at it in London, saying “I was part of it all, you’re a liar,” all this stuff. Yeah, absolutely. I got expletives were thrown at me and I understand where that emotion comes from.

But at the end of the day, the only way we can progress and evolve is just accepting but that, because we want to… Then it’s not just about saying we got this wrong. It’s actually explaining to people and saying, “Okay, we thought we were doing the right thing. These are problems in the system we weren’t aware of. Most people are not aware of this. We need to resolve this and move forward.” With greater transparency and over time. Now. Okay. Within the immediate aftermath, of course, there’s going to be that emotional reaction. There’s going to be a backlash. If there happened to be a pandemic within a short space of time after that admission. Yes, it may well be that people aren’t going to go and take vaccines.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But why should they, Steve? Vaccines can save your life.

Traditional Vaccines vs. New Technologies

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: No, no, no. I’m talking about anything new I’m not talking about… So, yes, absolutely. Traditional vaccine. I mean, I’m still a big subscriber and supporter. Let me just make this clear, which is for vaccines. In my paper that I wrote, I said, estimates suggest vaccines have saved 4 to 5 million lives a year and a serious harm rate of vaccines. I think there’s… Of course there’s going to be. Nothing’s completely safe. No drug is. Pharmacology is completely safe. But just in terms of published data. Probably still an exaggeration, but still it gives you a comparison. Serious harm rate for traditional vaccines. Vaccines one to two per million.

STEVEN BARTLETT: People aren’t very smart, though, including me, when it comes to… When I hear the word vaccine. I think all vaccines. You think we don’t know what a vaccine is?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: No, I know.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it’s just a word. It’s like if you said to me, “Dogs are savaging one in 800 people.” The average person might not… The average person might not think if that’s a Chihuahua or like a German shepherd, we just heard dogs. And then there’s going to be a fear of dogs. And I think the same with the vaccines. We don’t know the difference between different vaccines. We just think they’re all the same. So if you tell me that vaccines are causing X, Y, and Z, I’m going to go, “I don’t care if someone offers me a flu shot or a whatever thing or whatever.” It’s the trust that’s been eroded in the system, and it’s my trust in the word vaccine that’s been eroded.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, no, and it’s unfortunate. It’s unfortunate that that has definitely showed. There has been a dent and a change, I think an uptake of things like MMR, malaria vaccine. Because of this.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It saved my life. When I was a kid. I got…

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: My…

STEVEN BARTLETT: All my family got malaria. We were in Africa, so they all got pretty bad malaria. And so we… Yeah, my pretty… Pretty serious as well. I think I almost died of malaria. I hear from my mother.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Steve, the thing is with those vaccines, they went through many, many years of safety checks. And this is an important thing. People… I think we shouldn’t underestimate people’s intelligence and their ability to understand and forgive as long as we communicate it in the right way. I have these conversations all the time with my patients. I give them numbers, I talk through it. When I talk about statin drugs, for example, I say, “I’m going to give you these numbers. But there are lots of caveats here. One, the data has never been independently verified,” and I give them all this and I give them alternatives, etc. I do this all the time. And patients want that. They want more information in a way that they can understand. And of course, yes, they want to trust their doctor. But again, it’s all it comes down to. Ethics, values, intent and doctors not admitting their mistakes is a very, very bad place to…

Addressing Professional Criticism

STEVEN BARTLETT: The Chair of the Clinical Cardiology at the University of Edinburgh, Professor Mark Dweck commented that on your opinion, saying “The COVID vaccines, the COVID vaccine opinions you have are misguided and, in fact, dangerous. The vast majority of cardiologists do not agree with your views and they are not based on robust science.”

Now, if you’re someone listening to this, now, I’ve got your opinion and I’ve got this guy’s opinion. The Chair of the Clinical Cardiology at the University of Edinburgh. I’ve got the NHS saying that vaccines are safe and extensively reviewed in both adults and children, and that the Independent Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency is continually monitoring the safety of COVID vaccines and reports of side effects are very rare. And then I’ve got your view. How do I, as someone that’s hearing this in this ear and this in this ear, figure out what to believe because everyone’s so compelling, everyone’s got data.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Well, you just ultimately got to go with your own intuition, Steve.

STEVEN BARTLETT: My intuition’s always going to side with fear because I’m a human being, maybe.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: And this stuff works. I’ll come on to this. And this was a bit of a hatchet job by the Guardian. Interestingly, I’ve written 19 op eds for the Guardian observer newspaper over the years, but you know how this journalism works. They’ll move on. A couple of things, just a couple of facts to throw back at you first, and then what you’ve raised is really interesting historically and something that I’ve learned from this sort of backlash.

Mark Dweck, with the greatest respect to him, what wasn’t disclosed in the article is that he has taken money from Pfizer, he’s been funded by Pfizer. And that’s factual. You can look that up. That’s one thing. So that’s the bias. More important than that, the MHRA, which was described as independent… Yes. Is not. The British Medical Journal BMJ did an investigation published in the summer of 2022. And I presented this data on the MHRA at the British Medical Association annual conference, where the president of the BMA was there, the chair of the BMA was there. And they were gobsmacked and they didn’t… They couldn’t believe. And this is why this information is so important. These facts are so important. Even I was shocked when I read this.

Our medical regulator in this country, MHRA, gets 86% of its funding from Big Pharma, which is a huge bias. So they’re not independent. So those are two facts that should… At least if I threw that back, you say, “Hold on a minute, then should I believe all this now?” What was the purpose of that article? Of course, it was to undermine my credibility. I’m exposing, essentially something, for all intents and purposes, pretty horrific, reluctantly, on the BBC, with 25 million views or whatever else.

But people that inspire me have been through far worse. And I’m an activist that want to expose injustices. The likes of Mandela, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, one of the lessons from them. And even in public health advocacy, as soon as your work threatens an industry or an ideological cabal, you will be attacked, sometimes unrelentingly and viciously. And that was really a hatchet job.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about the second part of the quote that he says that the vast majority of cardiologists do not agree with your viewers abuse. Is that true? Well, in your opinion.

The Reality of Speaking Out Against Medical Orthodoxy

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: He’s giving his opinion, but actually from every cardiologist I spoke to has basically said, “Aseem, you’re doing great work, but they won’t speak out.” And this is part of the problem, right, is that people are turning a blind eye.

I had one cardiologist who met me in the street, right? This happens all the time. And he said, “I read your paper.” He said, “I can tell you now, although they weren’t admitted publicly, all the cardiologists in our department, and they know you and they trust where you come from and your integrity. None of them are having any more Covid vaccines because of you. They’re onto it.”

But, Steve, this is a problem. Only a small minority of people are willing to speak out. I have a platform where I’m able to articulate it and do so, but that is my duty and responsibility. This is just a reflection of what is ultimately a big pharma tyranny.

You know, I know you’ve interviewed Jordan Peterson, who I admire greatly, and Jordan Peterson says “when you have something to say, silence is a lie.” And, you know, tyranny emerges when people are afraid to say what they think and when everybody essentially lies all the time by being silent, that’s when the tyranny is complete. This is exactly where we are.

But I do want to mention something, if you don’t mind, like, I have to go through this right, myself, and it’s not easy. You get all this stuff and people checking credibility. And I remember when that Guardian hit piece, which was like the top story that day, I actually felt in many ways mixed feelings, but I felt, “ah, over the target here,” right? Because Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” So the point is these things work, Steve. But, you know, the truth is the truth.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what is the reality then of your life going through that? Because, you know, if you get attacked from all angles, you’ve not got immediate family there, you’re reading stuff about yourself online all the time, your colleagues are turning on you. What’s life like if I’m a fly on the wall in those hard moments?

The Personal Cost of Truth-Telling

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Very deep pain. To have the knowledge and deep understanding that in my view, we are dealing with one of the greatest likely corporate crimes, medical mistakes, damage to people’s health, people are suffering, people are dying, people have got all sorts of problems because of this vaccine.

To have that deep knowledge and understanding and to not be able to see any great progress or enough progress for this to be resolved or to be improved. That suffering around me gives me very deep pain more than anything else.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: I think inherently I’m just very sensitive to that around me. That’s just the way I am. I think it’s part of my innate nature. I’ve always been like that.

You know, on the positive side, there are a lot of good friends around. I haven’t got immediate emotional support, if that makes sense right where I am, but there are hundreds of thousands of people that support me, certainly who follow me on Twitter and people come and meet me in the street.

I randomly bumped into this doctor in the street who I didn’t know, an older doctor, quite well known, I won’t name him. And he got really emotional in the street and he met me and he said, “Dr. Malhotra, thank you for everything you are doing with all of this.” And I said, well, you know, I tried to be humble with it. I said, “I’m just a medium for a message. I’m doing the right thing.” He said, “No, what you’re doing is extremely brave and I’m with you 100%. And I know the vaccine killed one of my colleagues,” and he was very honest, frightened to speak up. But that gives me fuel. Right. And this happens constantly. So I think there is definitely something that I get from that.

Summarizing the COVID Vaccine Position

STEVEN BARTLETT: So let me summarize your position then, because I want to move on to. I want to talk about statins and heart disease, particularly high cholesterol, because I got told by my doctor I have high cholesterol. To summarize, your position is you believe that vaccines themselves are net good for the world.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Some of the greatest achievements in medicine are traditional vaccines.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No doubt you believe that the COVID vaccine at the start, when administered to certain age groups that were most vulnerable. There’s an argument to say that it was a net positive.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, I think there was an argument.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that you believe after sort of 2022 or 2021, when the variant changed to another, I think it was called Omicron, wasn’t it, that at that point it certainly became a net negative. Is that your view?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: I would think probably earlier, Steven. The only reason I’ll say that is anecdotal evidence, of course, is my dad had a cardiac arrest in the summer of 2021. He was 73. Right. And he could be considered in a high risk group. So I think that if one is to make that case, I would say, well, it depends what we’re talking about as well. In terms of COVID, yes, right? The net benefit in terms of COVID and COVID deaths. But the problem is what’s the point in preventing someone getting Covid if six months later they’re going to die of a cardiac arrest? You see what I mean? So we’ve got to look at it in that nuanced way.

But yeah, I think there is a case to be made that if it was just given to certain high risk groups overall, there may have been a net benefit at the beginning, but where we are now and where it’s continued and the mandates and all the stuff that extended it to many more people taking it and that almost certainly was being fueled by Pfizer. And that’s been shown that they were giving money to grassroots organizations in the US to promote the mandates. Right. This is after the data they received showing that it wasn’t preventing infection and causing serious harm. Right.

So this is a problem with the system. I’m not blaming individuals here. This is something we’ll talk about with statins as well. Is that the system, the corporate capitalist system or the way capitalism is actually being implemented is in its, in many ways. And this has been diagnosed by forensic psychologists, the corporation as an institution is psychopathic when it comes to making money. That means they have callous, unconcerned for the safety of others, repeated lying, conning others for profit. And this is unfortunately, this is the root of the problem.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you also believe that there is a chance as well. And it’s likely that the impacts of the lifestyle changes, the lockdowns, the stress, the mental health issues, the removing people from being able to see their loved ones, the sedentary lifestyles also contributed to the rise in heart related conditions and heart disease.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: 100%. It’s played a role, a smaller role, but it’s played a role 100%.

Understanding Heart Disease and Heart Attacks

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I want to talk about heart disease because I don’t even know what heart disease is. And also I don’t know what a heart attack is. I think we kind of all just assume we know, but what’s heart disease and what’s a heart attack?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: So heart disease, the conventional description or explanation of heart disease is disease that affects the blood vessels of the heart essentially. Okay, that’s coronary artery disease we call it. That’s what most people, when they talk about heart disease, that’s what they mean.

So that disease that affects the blood vessels leads to buildup of something called plaque, which is furring, if you like. Okay, like plaque. So plaque is furring of the arteries like a blockage. Okay? Right, a blockage. That blockage is made up of cells of immune system, it’s made up of cholesterol. Right.

And over time that those blockages can either suddenly like a pimple building up and a pimple getting bigger and bigger and bigger, or even a small pimple suddenly bursting and the contents of that plaque. Right. The response to the blood having contact with the contents of that plaque that has built up over time suddenly causes a clot to form. And if the clot blocks the whole artery, then the blood supply is completely cut off to the heart muscle.

So the purpose of those blood vessels is to supply the heart muscle with blood so it can contract. So if you have a blockage that is there for several minutes, completely cutting off the blood supply, depending on where it is, it will cause that area of the heart muscle to lose its oxygen supply and nutrients and die and scar. And that leads to cell death. But of course, the heart muscle is quite big, so it could be a very small heart attack. Could be a big heart attack. And then so heart attack specifically is death of any region of the heart muscle because of a blockage.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, I’m going to the death of the cells. I’m trying to play this back to you.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Correct me where I’m wrong. So you get this buildup in your artery.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But due to a bunch of factors which we’ll go about. The buildup explodes.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Flows through the blood, blocking the artery at some point.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And then that blockage in the artery causes a cell in the heart, some areas in the heart to die because they’re not getting oxygen.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Exactly. So you’ve basically cut off the blood supply. So it’s cutting off the blood supply to whatever area because there are many branches. It depends where the blockage is. You cut off the blood supply if it’s cut off long enough. Those cells, every cell in our body needs oxygen to survive. Right. Then that part of the heart muscle will die and become scarred.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it dies and becomes scarred in about seven, eight minutes.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: You say it can be. Well, it can take, you know, 15 to 20 minutes. It depends on different factors, but within minutes. Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how does that feel from minute one till minute ten?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: So the classic symptoms of a heart attack. Right. That is a central, what we call crushing heaviness or pain, that can travel, radiate, we say, in medical terms, to the neck, the jaw. It can go into the shoulders, it can go into the back. That’s the classic symptoms. Or down the left arm.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you’re conscious at this point?

Understanding Cardiac Arrest

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes, you’re conscious. So a cardiac arrest just means the heart stopping. Ultimately, actually, we all have a cardiac arrest when we die. The last thing to go is our heart. Right. But one of the most common causes of a cardiac arrest, certainly prematurely, not because of old age, for example, is. And this is random.

So you can have a heart attack and you can be conscious and have pain and you get to hospital and you get diagnosed and you might have a stent put in, or you might be put on blood thinners or whatever. In a certain proportion of people. And it doesn’t depend on the size of the heart attack. So you can have a big area of the heart muscle that’s damaged or a small area of the heart muscle damage. And it’s random, that it can cause an interruption in the normal electrical activity of the heart.

The heart has electrical circuit that allows it to pump in a regular rhythm, that circuit can get interrupted. And then the heart muscle that’s pumping like this, right, because it’s pumping all the blood around your body to your brain, everything else suddenly starts quivering, right? And that’s known as ventricular fibrillation. That’s when you see on all the movies or on TV shows and stuff like that, when they start shocking people. And that shows on the heart tracing as a kind of squiggle like this. Okay. Right. And that is what we call a shockable rhythm.

If you deliver a shock, you know, often 200 joules, right. Is delivered with a defibrillator that will often restart the heart into a normal rhythm, and then the patient can be managed and treated, for example. So that’s. But that quivering of the heart causes basically the heart to stop pumping blood around the body. The heart’s still moving, but it’s not enough to pump blood around the body. And if that’s going for a very long time, Steve, not long. You know, for example, in my dad’s case, it may have been similar, 20 or 30 minutes. Then eventually, then, you know, that will even stop and patient dies.

The Scale of Heart Disease

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I read some stats from a different source that said in the UK, one in eight men and one in 14 women die from coronary heart disease over the course of their lifetime. And that nearly 50% of all US adults have some type of heart disease. And before the pandemic hit in 2019, 12 children died every single week in the UK from cardiac arrest. So, I mean, this is.

Cholesterol and Statins: The Real Story

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: This is.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If anything’s going to kill me, it’s probably this.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes, most likely.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how do I stop it?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Right. How do you stop it? How do you even reverse it?

STEVEN BARTLETT: How about some statins?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So, okay, let me just say this. My doctor, I got my lab results back at, like, three days ago, and he told me a couple of things. One thing he told me is, you got low vitamin D. I said, fine, yeah, I get it. I’m in a room all day.

The second thing he said is, your cholesterol’s high. He said your bad cholesterol is high. And I don’t really know what to make of that, but he said your bad cholesterol is high and I need to get that down.

My father takes statins, which I know a lot of people take statins. I think it’s like 200 million people are taking statins globally. So because I have you here, what do you think of the advice I was given, which is just to get my bad cholesterol down, and how do I prevent myself ending up on either statins or having a heart attack?

The Traditional Cholesterol Theory

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Okay, so on the statins issue and the cholesterol issue, traditionally, Steven, for decades and even now, one of the primary focus within medicine, within cardiology to combat heart disease was to get your so called bad cholesterol LDL as low as possible.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So LDL means bad cholesterol.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: It’s called low density lipoprotein, which is the bad stuff. Well, it’s thought of conventionally as a bad cholesterol. Right. And the reason for that is the earlier studies that were done on the correlation that was found between high cholesterol and heart disease revealed at very high levels of total cholesterol there was a very high prevalence of heart disease.

But those levels of cholesterol, and we’re talking about going back from studies that started in 1948, that went over three decades, where they found cholesterol being associated with heart disease was only really there at very, very high levels. That’s the first thing.

The second part of it, and why they thought that getting it as low as possible was the solution, is that people who had very low levels of cholesterol tended not get heart disease. Right. Total cholesterol less than 4, LDL less than 2 millimoles. Let’s just say that for argument’s sake, less than 2 millimoles per liter.

And by the way, just so people understand this, you would have got a red mark probably saying that your LDL cholesterol is high if it’s more. Now the guideline suggests if it’s more than 3 millimoles per liter in your blood, the measurement that is considered high. But we’ll tear that, we’ll tease that apart in second.

Now, the thinking was that, okay, if people with low cholesterol are not getting heart disease and people with very high levels of cholesterol are getting heart disease, and that was total cholesterol above 10, for example, right. And LDLs above 7 or 8, massively high, right. Then, or more likely to get heart disease at significant numbers. The thinking was that the lower the better. So all these drug trials started.

The Missing Piece: Genetics and Other Factors

But there’s one thing missing. First and foremost is that most people’s cholesterol, Steven, LDL is genetic, 80% of your cholesterol. Because cholesterol is a very. So why have we got it? It’s a very vital molecule in the body. It’s. Without cholesterol we would die. It’s required for maintaining the integrity of cells and cell membranes. It’s required for hormone production. Right. It has a role in the immune system. So it’s really important. Vital molecule in the body.

You can change the profile of the cholesterol. There are different components. There’s something called triglycerides, which is a BL and HDL, so called good cholesterol and LDL through dietary changes. But predominantly it’s genetic initially. Right. So this is a thing. So does that. So one could then question, maybe those people in those original studies had genetically high cholesterol. But that doesn’t mean the cholesterol was the problem. There may have been something else that hadn’t been measured that we hadn’t discovered.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yet that was genetic, that was causing.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: The heart disease, but it happened to also be causing a raised LDL. And the same time, people with low cholesterol, they may have had something else. Right. They may have had other factors that we now know actually are linked to heart disease. And it’s nothing to do with the cholesterol. So that’s the first thing.

The next question is, does lowering cholesterol. So the question to you is, does lowering your LDL make any difference? And for many, many years, there was a mantra that was pushed by the medical establishment that there was a linear relationship. The lower your LDL, the less likely you are to get heart disease.

In fact, there was a commentary written by one of America’s most well known eminent cardiologists. He was the editor of the American Journal of Cardiology. His name was William Roberts. And he wrote an article in 2011 to try and push the cholesterol message further. So more people take cholesterol or drug statins. And it was called “It’s the Cholesterol Stupid.”

And there’s a line in that, which I mention in my book, where he said, “You can be an obese, diabetic, sedentary smoker, but as long as your cholesterol is low enough,” in other words, total LDL cholesterol, “you will not develop heart disease.” Think about that for a second.

Now, I’m just putting that to you, Steven. Now, you hearing that, does that sound plausible to you?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Right. It doesn’t, does it? It sounds a bit strange, doesn’t it? Right. And I thought, this is odd. I started looking into this in a lot of detail probably 2010, partly because was by the end of the, by the late 90s, the people who had discovered the relationship with very high LDL cholesterol, which is actually, by the way, genetically linked to a condition called familial hyperlipidemia, affects 1 in 250 people. Right. Whose people’s cholesterol is sky high.

Those people who got the Nobel Prize for this discovery said they predicted the almost the eradication of heart disease in the world by the early 2000s because we had discovered these drugs called statin drugs that lower cholesterol and are shown through clinical trials to prevent heart attacks and strokes and death, which we’ll come on to. Right, so you’ve got the combination of that.

The Pre-Statin Drug Trials

But before statins came onto the market and have been prescribed now to 200 million people. One of the things that isn’t talked about enough is that there were lots of trials done. So you’ve got this hypothesis now we think we’re right here. We’ve discovered that very high cholesterol in the population has got a strong link to heart disease. And we’ve discovered that very low cholesterol doesn’t give heart disease.

But by the way, what’s interesting is for 95% of the population in the middle, there was no relationship with who was going to develop heart disease and who wasn’t, depending on the based upon their cholesterol. Okay. But they thought, let’s develop these drugs to lower cholesterol and we prevent heart attacks.

So all the drug trials, Steven, before statins came on the market, it did not show any benefit. So you’ve got the trial where you’ve got someone with high cholesterol and another person with high cholesterol. One person gets a drug, the other person doesn’t. You follow them up. The person on the drug massively lowers the cholesterol. No prevention. Heart attacks over several years. Like, hold on, what’s going on here? Maybe we did the trial wrong. Let’s try again. Let’s try again. Let’s try again.

Statins are produced, okay. A different type of cholesterol lowering drug and suddenly you start seeing benefits heart. Oh, great, we’ve solved it. Then we can make this case that the lower cholesterol are better.

Two problems with that the first one is that statins actually have other properties other than lowering LDL cholesterol, they are also anti inflammatory and they have anti clotting properties. What’s accepted now is we know heart disease is a problem, is a, it’s a clotting problem linked to chronic inflammation. So it means the benefit of statins, which I will give you in a second, right. Is probably more likely because of those properties, because other studies, when we did other drugs on cholesterol, there was no benefit. Does that make sense? Am I making sense now?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. So it’s targeting the inflammation and the clotting.

The Real Benefits of Statins

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Exactly. So the question then is what is the benefit of statins? So the first thing to say, and this is where the controversy has happened, is that what I’m about to tell you is again based upon drug industry sponsored trials where the raw data on those trials with the benefits I’m going to tell you has never been independently verified.

So what I say to patients, and I’ll say this to you, is what I’m about to tell you is likely my opinion, an exaggerated benefit, but it’s still a benefit. I’m going to tell you if we trust the drug companies completely, this is a benefit you’re going to get.

Steven, if you’ve not had a heart attack, forget about high cholesterol for a second, right? This applies to everybody. If you’ve not had a heart attack or you have not been diagnosed with severe blockage, right, You’ve not got that. Right. And you’d know if you did because you’d get symptoms of chest pain, doing exercise, then the benefit of a statin for you over a five year period at best is 1 in 100 in preventing you having a non fatal heart attack, a non disabling stroke, but will not prolong your life by one day. So that’s the first thing.

Now when you do studies where you give patient that information in that transparent way, more than 2/3 of them, most of them will, and my experience as well say, “Doc, those odds don’t sound great. I want to prevent heart disease, but I don’t fancy taking,” and this is before, by the way, we’ve talked about side effects.

The Side Effects Controversy

Where the controversy has happened, which I’ve been heavily involved in, is in my experience with patients and also other data that’s out there, a large proportion of patients will suffer quality. Let me be clear here, it’s not about serious, right? Quality of life, limiting side effects, right? That means most commonly fatigue, muscle pain can be erectile dysfunction, sleep disorders, but stuff that makes you not feel good, like this is not a good way to live. The good news is it’s reversible, usually within a couple of weeks of stopping the statin or reducing the dose. Okay.

So that controversy led to me publishing an article in the British Medical Journal in 2013, where me and another and a Harvard doctor in a separate article said we believe that the side effect rate is probably in the order of 1 in 5 people, 20%, which is quite high of those sort of side effects. Right.

And that caused a bit of backlash because the group of researchers in Oxford who take money from Big Pharma, who write the guidelines around the world said this is going to scare people. Stop them taking statins and people will die. But that for the low risk people, no one’s going to die because there’s no benefit in mortality.

Now, for high risk people, those are people who’ve had a heart attack. The benefit of a statin is better. So, Steven, okay, so let’s say for example, some patient comes in, they’ve had a heart attack and I’m telling them the benefit of the statin if they take it religiously every day for five years, because that’s how long the trials last, where you can give them that information.

The benefit of preventing a further heart attack is 1 in 39, about 2.5%. One in 39. And the benefit in prolonging their life is 1 in 83. Right.

The Life Extension Reality

There’s another way of looking at the stats though, based upon, again, industry sponsored trials. All of the trials that have been done on statins and people might ask a question, they don’t often ask this, but they may ask the question, how much longer am I going to live? Right. Like, okay, let’s just throw this question to you.

Say you’ve had a heart attack, you survived a heart attack, doctor says take this drug and, and over a five year period, how much extra life extension would you hope or hope it would add over that five years? You can, you know, you can do it over whatever, 20 years, but just say five years to how much longer would you hope to live from taking that statin?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so over five years then. I’d say maybe a year. Okay, 25% more.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Okay, fine, that sounds pretty good.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 20% more.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah. Okay. The actual figure, not disputed from industry sponsored trials. Right. 4.2 days. Just over four days.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that because they haven’t done it over a long enough period of time?

The Real Numbers Behind Statin Benefits

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: No, I mean if you then extrapolate it out, if you presume the benefits are going to keep going on. You could then argue well over 10 years it’ll be 8 days and over 20 years it will be 16 days or whatever. Right? So that’s the information.

So the reason I’m telling you this, Steve, is that this information is important. I’m not just a doctor, I’m a potential patient. I asked myself, what would I want to know, right? I’m here to try and improve my quality of life and my health. What is important to me? What is important to patients? This information is important, especially Steve, because it’s not that I’m saying don’t take statins, but a lot of people would say, “Okay, I’ll take the drug, right? And if they don’t get side effects, why not? You know, it might be a bit of a lottery, but why not take the drug?”

And people say that to me and that’s fine. And if they get side effects. But the thing that’s missing, Steve, is, and this is where we come on to the question you asked me about how to prevent heart disease. Is there an alternative that doesn’t give me side effects, improves my quality of life, and likely is going to help prevent, stop me getting heart disease? So what is that?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Lifestyle changes?

The Root Cause: Insulin Resistance

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Absolutely. So 80% of heart disease is linked to environment and lifestyle. Okay, so what is the core, most important biological phenomenon in the body that leads to heart disease? Which is not disputed, but it doesn’t get much of a. There’s no market for the message because there is no, you can’t commodify this. This is an interesting thing, right? But it’s really important information. It’s called insulin resistance.

Insulin is a very important hormone in the body. Released by the pancreas, helps maintain blood glucose within certain ranges. So our cells can function optimally. All right. Over time, if your insulin is chronically raised too high or if your cells become resistant to them for whatever reason, that is the most important driver of the development of these so called plaques, these furrowing, these blockages in the arteries.

So what causes insulin resistance and how can you compensate, combat it or how can you prevent and potentially stabilize and even reverse? We’ve gotten to reversal as well, because that’s a fascinating area. Most important components, diet. Okay. I would say in big figure terms now probably 50% of heart disease around the world can be linked to poor diet.

The Sugar Demonstration

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so let’s start with diet then. I’ve actually got a bag of sugar that I brought with me because when I think about insulin, glucose, bad diet, the first thing my brain thinks about is sugar. So I’ve got this bag of sugar here that I brought with me and I’ve got two. Look at us, we’ve written sugar on it and covered up the brand because they didn’t pay us. But if there is a sugar brand that would like to do a brand deal, please get in touch. We’re big fans if we need to be. What I actually would like you to show me is how much sugar do I need to function and to be healthy?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Okay. The amount of sugar that you need to function and be healthy is zero. There is no nutritional requirement whatsoever of this, what we call added sugar or table sugar. None at all.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I don’t need any.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: You don’t need any. And the reason for that is, very briefly, our bodies need glucose to survive, but you don’t need any dietary source of glucose to survive. Right, because people go on what we call ketogenic diets and they literally eliminate all starch as well, which also contains glucose from their diet. Your body will make it itself from fat and protein.

So in terms of diets, there is no value from sugar whatsoever. It can give you energy, of course. Yes, but you can get energy from other things. But there’s no nutritional value whatsoever. Zero. So from a health perspective, there is zero requirement for dietary sugar.

The Shocking Reality of Sugar Consumption

STEVEN BARTLETT: So when we say that Americans are consuming a lot of sugar every day, are we talking about added sugar?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, we’re talking about. So the way that. So the World Health Organization now after I was involved in this campaign, you know, and there was a lot of attention on it, they revised their guidelines. So they recommend a maximum limit for the average adult of actually six teaspoons of either. So maximum limit, okay, which you don’t need it. But maximum limit. Because after that, that’s when the health consequences start to accumulate. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Okay?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So that’s the maximum daily limit.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Maximum daily limit. Okay. But just to give you an example, let’s not. Let’s so one sugary drink. We don’t name any brands. Right. You wouldn’t have to. Would often a 330ml. Let’s say the most famous sugary drink in the world.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I have no idea who you’re talking about.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Would have nine teaspoons in one of those. Right? And that’s just in the 330ml. Imagine going to the cinema and having half a liter, whatever else. Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Jesus. So one can has nine teaspoons of sugar in it.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which is.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah. Which is so four. Yeah, absolutely. Nine. So four grams is one teaspoon.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. Which is well above the daily recommend.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: It is now one chocolate bar.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Like a standard sized chocolate bar. What we grew up with about the same.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Leave chocolate out of it.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Right. Well listen, you have dark chocolate.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I love chocolate. Right, yeah.

Hidden Sugar in Our Food Supply

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: You know, for children, the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the average four to eight year old child. Think about kids as well, they’re the most vulnerable to a lot of this, probably these problems of sugar. They recommend a maximum limit of three teaspoons. Yeah. Now the average person in this country, in America is consuming at least 20 teaspoons.

Now when we talk about sugar, we’re talking about the word they use is “free sugar.” So it means this sort of sugar added right to foods. But it also includes fruit juice, honey and syrups. Same effect on your body. Whole fruit is fine. But if you think about it, a glass of orange juice for example would usually have the juice of six oranges. You couldn’t eat six oranges that easily. You’d have one orange for example. And there’s fiber and the fiber has a counteracting effect in terms of the way that the glucose and fructose is absorbed in your body. A lot of it’s to do with the rapid increase in the bloodstream of blood glucose.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Glucose.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: And that causes huge spikes in insulin. And the problem with that over time of course is you get chronic raised insulin and heart disease. But also interestingly, the more rapidly you have a food that causes a glucose spike, the more quickly you’re going to get a crash because insulin goes up quite quickly and it causes to come down and it drives hunger. So that’s another problem.

So the food industry I think knew for a long time, that’s why in America, and it may be similar here, 70% of foods purchased in supermarket in America will have added sugar because they, that it increases the palatability and the consumption. Of course they’re there to sell food, not look after your health.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you said 20 teaspoons is the average for an American.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: At least 20 is probably much higher.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m going to have to ask you to show us that.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I can see what that looks like in a glass. It’s disgusting. That’s disgusting. When you see it like that and you don’t realize that you’re having that much sugar in a day. But I mean, technically that’s what, two cans of fizzy drink.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, yeah. But the thing is, a lot of the sugar that’s being consumed are in foods that people wouldn’t think have sugar in them. They’re not the usual junk food, your cakes and biscuits and whatever else. You know, they’re in things even marketed as being healthy, low fat foods, et cetera, low fat yogurts.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So could you just summarize what we have here then? These two glasses?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah. So this is the maximum daily recommended limit by the World Health Organization of sugar consumption, after which you then start to see increases risks of disease. And this is what, at least I think what most people are consuming at the moment.

Ultra-Processed Foods: The New Tobacco

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you hopeful that there’s something we can do about this at a society level?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Well, I think one important step was the fact that we, you know, this levy on sugary drinks definitely would have some impact, partly based upon what we learned from Big Tobacco. You know, Steve, you know, 50% of. It’s interesting, crazy when you think about it now, in 1970, 50% of adults in the UK were smokers, right? We’ve got that down to about 17% now. But massive reduction, right?

And it happened, education was important, but the real intervention that had more impact than anything else was actually taxation of cigarettes. And it had twofold effect, of course, you make it a little bit more expensive, you know, you know this with your business background, right? It’s going to reduce the consumption, but it was a way of also increasing awareness that this is harmful.

So I think that the sugar stuff is ongoing. I think a lot of people have awareness on it, I think now, which is linked to sugar. And I’ve written about this. We need to treat ultra processed food, which a lot of the ultra processed food has added sugar as the new tobacco. Right? This is more than 50% of the calories in the UK and more than 60% of the calories in the US of people’s daily consumption is coming from ultra processed foods, essentially described as if it comes out of a packet industrially produced and you can read more than five ingredients, usually with additives and preservatives. It’s ultra processed and best avoided.

And all of the research that’s been done only points in one direction. And I think there are at least 32 different conditions or diseases now that are associated with the consumption of ultra processed food. That is the major issue. So because this is a predominantly an environmental problem, right, our food environment is saturated with this stuff. Even hospitals Steve. I mean, I. The first campaign I got involved with is trying to get this stuff out of hospital. I was like, “Hold on, we’re treating patients with obesity related conditions, yet we’re serving them junk food in hospitals.” The staff, 50% of NHS staff are overweight or obese.

The Metabolic Health Crisis

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the probability that if I’m. Because when I talk about ultra processed foods as well as the sugar, what’s the probability that if I’m having that much sugar a day, the big glass, that I’m going to end up in your practice with some kind of heart disease?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: I wouldn’t be able to give you a figure, but you’re definitely significantly increasing your risk.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, if that’s the average American, then what’s the average American’s chance of ending up in. I guess causation needs to be established.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, of course, and it depends what else they’re having as well, but it’s definitely putting them at significant increased risk of type 2 diabetes. I think the figure now in America, if I’m not wrong, is that a third to a half of adult Americans now are pre diabetic.

So to answer your question in a better way, because we’re already there, unfortunately, the way to understand insulin resistance on a personal level, in terms of measurements, body measurements, is something called metabolic health. And there are five components which are very easy to measure, of metabolic health, okay?

It’s your waist circumference, right? It’s your blood triglycerides, which is a form of the cholesterol being above 1.7 millimoles. Okay? It’s your HDL cholesterol, the good cholesterol, being less than 1 millimole. It’s being pre diabetic, having a HbA1c of more than 5.7% or being pre hypertensive. So your blood pressure is above 120 over 80 average.

If you have three of those that are abnormal, you have something called metabolic syndrome, puts you at the highest risk of heart disease. And at least 50%, if not more, of patients admitted with heart attacks will have metabolic syndrome. But all those five parameters being in the normal range, in America, only one in eight adults have all of those in the normal range. And only one in four people aged between 20 and 40. Think about that for a second.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So seven out of eight, yes, adults.

The Impact of Dietary Changes on Heart Disease

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Will have abnormal metabolic health. If we, within a year, if we just shifted a little bit, people’s eating habits, and let’s say we eliminated ultra processed food, we got people to eat more nuts and seeds, oily fish, you know, whole fruit and vegetables. It’s been estimated that you would half the death rates from heart disease globally within one year, from 20 million to 10 million.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’d be out of business as a heart doctor.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: There’d still be a lot of people to treat, though. We’ve got to help the other 10 million as well. But I think the other thing as well is what it does, Steve, is it shifts the age. So instead of someone dying prematurely, having a heart attack at the age of, say 65, they’ll live to 85. So all we’ll be doing as doctors, we’ll be managing older people. But that’s fine. We’ve improved longevity, improved quality of life as well.

Stress: The Silent Killer

STEVEN BARTLETT: You refer to stress as a silent killer.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: It’s something we’re not addressing, I think, as a society. So to put it in perspective, when you look at risk factors for heart disease, the major ones are smoking, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure. The risk of heart disease linked to stress, chronic stress of more than a moderate degree is actually the same as being a smoker or having high blood pressure or having type 2 diabetes. And most people, I think, are not managing it.

Certainly of all the patients I see, all the heart patients I see, invariably all of them have had over the preceding years before their heart attack, stress levels are quite high. What’s the mechanism? So from an evolutionary perspective, acute stress can be a lifesaver, right? If we were running away from a saber tooth tiger, then what happens is the body produces clotting factors and inflammatory markers, factors in the blood that if we were attacked, they help reduce the risk of us bleeding to death.

Now imagine that happening with chronic stress. You’ve got a low grade, what we call chronic inflammation and clotting factors increase. And that’s been shown actually in a study that was published in the Lancet a few years ago, where they did an MRI of the brain of young, healthy adults, and they followed them up, but they looked at their subjective stress scores. They did questionnaires to measure their stress level subjectively.

They correlated that with looking at the amygdala in the brain, which is the emotional center. And then they looked at clotting factors and they even looked at heart attacks further down the line and there was a perfect correlation with the subjective stress score, the amygdala lighting up, the clotting factors in the blood, the inflammatory markers in the blood and heart attack. So we’ve got the mechanism.

Reversing Heart Disease Through Lifestyle

So if that’s the case, Steve, there must be a way of curbing it. Well, how does one do that? Well, the two most important causes of stress in society are work and relationship stress. So those are things people can potentially work on. But one of the interventions that I use with my patients is actually breath work and meditation.

And one of the most extraordinary bits of research I came across, and it’s in our documentary as well because we go into a bit more detail on it, I had to go and see it for myself to believe it, actually properly believe it. A cardiologist in India for more than 20 years has been through a lifestyle approach, has been reversing heart disease.

So he did a study called the Mount Abu. This is a place in northern India where he’s got a huge community and a hospital. People come to see him there and he puts them through this lifestyle plan which in this study was, they’re devout Hindus, so it was a high fiber vegetarian diet. It was two 30 minute brisk walks a day. And something called Raj yoga meditation for 40 minutes, which is a form of breath work. But it’s also a bit of a spiritual transformation as well. It’s about understanding where your anger comes from and all that kind of stuff. So it goes quite deep.

And anyway, he followed these people up who were diagnosed with at least 50 to 70% blockages in their arteries. They had heart disease. For some reason they didn’t want to have a bypass operation or a stent or they couldn’t afford it and they wanted this lifestyle plan. So he put them on the lifestyle plan. He repeated their angiograms after two years. He looked at the arteries again and on the people that had adhered to the plan, there was an average reduction of the blockage of 70%. 70% became 50, 50 became 30.

This is unheard of. If you ask any cardiologist, “Can heart disease reverse?” They’ll say no, I’ve never even seen it, it’s not possible. But he showed this to be the case. He then looked at his data in a bit more detail and said, was it the diet, was it the exercise or was it the stress reduction? Of course they’re all important, but the only independent factor for the reversal of the blockages was 40 minutes of Raj Yoga meditation per day.

Now I asked him, he published this data in what we call an observational study. It wasn’t what we call a randomized trial where it was more rigorously done. And he said, “Why have you not done the randomized trial?” He said, “I have, years ago.” And he showed me the data and I was like, wow, why don’t you publish this anywhere? Couldn’t get it published.

He invited a senior cardiology society in America to invite them to India so he could present his data. He presented his data to them and they basically thought it was fascinating. But between the lines they said to him, “We can’t publish this because it will affect our stent business.”

The Business of Heart Disease

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what’s a stent business?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Stent is basically the heart stents. I remember Steve, when I first wrote an article, the first mainstream media article I wrote in 2011 was in the Observer newspaper. I’d met Jamie Oliver having written to him, saying, “Can you sort hospital food out?” And then I ended up writing an article called “I Mend Hearts. Then I See Our Hospital Serve Junk Food to My Patients,” basically saying, listen, we’re going to tackle this obesity epidemic, tackle heart disease. We need to sort the diet out.

And I remember one of the cardiologists who I knew, a senior cardiologist, I was still a junior doctor at this point, kind of tongue in cheek, but many truths are spoken in jest, said “Aseem, this is going to affect our stent business,” as in operating on people, as if it was a bad thing that I was saying that we should basically prevent heart disease.

There’s a cultural problem here, Steve. This is a dirty secret, if you like, within medicine, unfortunately, amongst establishment figures is that they have become so wedded and so close to these tyrannical corporations or their own self interest that we’re missing a big trick here in terms of what we can really do for patients.

The Pioppi Diet and Daily Heart Health Routine

STEVEN BARTLETT: In part, your other book here that I have, I still can’t pronounce this word.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Pioppi Diet. Pioppi.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Your Pioppi Diet, I guess serves to address many of these issues and to make sure that our hearts stay healthy. What I wanted you to do for me is if I’m endeavoring to have good heart health intervention, what should my daily routine look like in an optimal situation? If I follow the diet that you came up with, but also if I’m thinking through all of the potential things that can cause bad health.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Sleep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I wake up. So I sleep for seven hours.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: So at least seven hours sleep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Great. Okay.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Eating real food.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. So breakfast is how many meals a day should I have?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Well, two to three. Whatever suits you. When you feel hungry, eat till you’re full.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Not 7, 8, 9.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: And also I suppose if you’re doing activity, then you may. But the most important thing is to avoid the ultra processed food and not to have too much starch.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about fasting?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Controversial area, mixed data. I think that I have patients who feel benefit from fasting and other people feel more stressed. It depends where you are in your life. If, for example, you’re very active and your sleep isn’t good, actually fasting can make your stress levels worse, which is not good. It causes cortisol to increase and there is some data showing that happens. So it depends where you are. But I’m not averse to fasting. It depends, see how people feel.

Optimal Foods for Heart Health

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so I’ve woken up, I’ve had seven hours of sleep. I’ve eaten breakfast, which was whole foods.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah. So I would say, whole fruit and vegetables, ideally a mixture of low sugar fruits if you can. Ideally, berries, mixed berries, for example. If you can get at least five to seven portions in, that’s great. The foods that are thought, the anti inflammatory foods that have got a reasonable body of evidence behind them are things like extra virgin olive oil as your base fat. Nuts and seeds, tree nuts, almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, for example, oily fish. At least a couple of times a week. And then I would say minimizing the starch and the sugar.

And the rest of it doesn’t matter. You can have, I have heart patients ask me whether they can eat a steak. I say absolutely, it’s not going to cause, it’s very nutritious. If you want to have a steak two or three times a week, no issue. Saturated fat in the diet isn’t a problem. I busted that myth. So butter, cheese, for example, red meat is not going to have any adverse effect on your heart.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so I’ve eaten my breakfast.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: You want to enjoy your food as well, right?

Managing Stress and Exercise

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. So that’s my sleep, taking care of my meals that day. Taken care of. What else do I need to be thinking about to optimize heart health?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Well, I suppose you’ve got to think about what level. It’s very subjective, if you’re stressed and if you’re stressed, then you need to think about what can you do about it. And there are different things. Some people find exercise is good, some people do yoga, they do Pilates, some people do breath work. So try and find. I have an app called Calm, which I listen to. I do at least 20 to 30, sometimes 40 minutes of breath work every morning when I wake up, it’s the first thing I do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m going to do both. I’m going to do breath work and I’m going to go for a long workout. Is there such a thing as too much exercise?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, unfortunately, yes. About 11% of elite athletes by the time they reach 50 have scans that show very severe blockages or heart disease. And I think, Steve, to be honest, it might be genetic predisposition. But I think a lot of those people, I have some of these people coming to me who don’t know why they’ve got diagnosed with heart disease.

And I remember one lady I saw a few months ago and she was running something crazy, like five to ten miles a day, but on only four hours sleep. And she was young and otherwise didn’t have diabetes or anything else, but had heart disease, had developed heart disease. And I said this is probably because of this.

So I think that when you look at heart disease and optimal levels of exercise, it is actually the one thing I think the guidelines are right about is probably that 150 minutes of moderate activity a week. So I follow my own advice and I will, I used to run, but running can be quite damaging to the knees, especially as you get older. So I cycle and do exercise bike and whatever else. And I will get my heart rate to about 115 beats a minute for 30 minutes, five times a week.

The Exercise Paradox: When Too Much Movement Becomes Harmful

STEVEN BARTLETT: One study found that marathon runners experience a frequency of heart attacks and strokes similar to people who already have heart disease, suggesting too much exercise is harmful, which is in your book Statin Free. And another stat here is athletes who do more than one hour of intense exercise per day four times have four times the frequency of breathing infections per year compared to those who do moderate activity.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Well, that’s the other thing about over exercising. It depresses the immune system. That’s well known and in fact if you look at the communities around the world known as the blue zones, Steve, where people have high longevity, these people weren’t pounding it in the gym, they’re just outside. They were gardening, they were moving. You don’t need to be doing all of that kind of stuff. People do it for different reasons. I mean I do it sometimes also for mental health.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Didn’t you publish an article, you co-authored an article for the British Journal of Sports and Medicine called “It’s time to bust the myth of Physical activity”?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah. “Physical inactivity and obesity. You can’t outrun a bad diet.” That was the title of the article and the point was, and we make it very clear at the beginning that exercise has many benefits for health, but weight loss is not one of them. Because most of what determines your weight gain, almost all of it is to do with what you eat.

And that discussion or that thinking whether it was about burning calories actually came from the food industry. They manufactured that. Coca Cola, McDonald’s, they would push this. Even the Olympic Games 2012, they were the main sponsors. Because for them, they want to distract from their unhealthy products and say, well, the obesity epidemic has been driven by people not exercising.

The Perfect Day: The Power of Human Connection

STEVEN BARTLETT: So on that day, on this perfect day that I’m creating in my mind, I’m eating well, I’ve moved, but not too much. I’m doing breath work in the morning, I’ve slept seven hours a day. And the last thing that from looking at your 21 day immunity plan is socializing.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, so important. I think one of the most important aspects for mental health, physical health is the quality of our relationships, friends, family. People may laugh at this, but actually I actually prescribe hugging to a lot of my patients, especially couples. There is definitely some benefits from that in terms of reducing cortisol levels.

I think that’s an issue in society in general. We have been conditioned in a way to think that we can just be dependent on ourselves as individuals and we don’t need other people, but actually we do. This is how we evolved. Partly because it helps us feel safe hugging. It activates parts of the brain, the protection, soothing mechanisms of the brain. And I think that is just an extra element of it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And it reduces cortisol and all those things. So it’s going to stave off heart attacks. If we hug, we have less chance of having a heart attack.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: It’s not just about that. I think it’s also good for the immune system. So the people that did the original cold studies on cold viruses, this was done, I think in early 2000s, fascinating study. They inoculated people with a cold virus. So they put the traditional cold virus into people’s nasal passages. And they looked at who developed symptoms of a cold and who didn’t.

Before they did that, they did these questionnaires based upon several different aspects of people’s social life. Are they involved in community activities? How often do they meet their friends, what’s it like with their partner, et cetera. And the people who had the highest scores, only one in three of those people developed a cold. And the people on the other side that were more lonely and were interacting with other people who didn’t have good quality relationships, two out of three of those people develop colds. So it’s not just about heart disease, it’s about the immune system as well.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Overall health makes you think, doesn’t it? Loneliness really is killing us. We need to try and do more to end the epidemic that is loneliness, because the stats seem to suggest it’s going one way and it’s not a good way.

Truth, Trust, and Society’s Health Crisis

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: And part of that issue as well, Steve, which is something we need to think about with what’s going on in society, is we’ve got a worsening mental health crisis, we’ve got less trust in government. One of the ways societies progress is people being able to trust each other by people not being afraid to speak the truth.

And more than ever, and certainly I’ve seen it in medicine, we have got to a situation and the COVID vaccine is a microcosm of something much bigger where people are afraid to speak the truth. And that gives us an element of uncertainty, distrust, and it makes us more stressed.

So what this means, what it comes back to, is ultimately part of the solution to the mental, physical, social, well being crisis. Heart disease is thinking about acting from a place of virtue and ethics. Thinking about your intentions, being honest, not manipulating other people for money. This is unfortunately where the capitalist system or the current economic system has taken us and the corporatization of human beings as a result, and that is very detrimental to our physical and mental health.

Father’s Wisdom: The Foundation of Character

STEVEN BARTLETT: What was your father’s name?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Kash.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Kash. “Son, never change your loyalties.”

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, loyalty was very important to him. I was brought with those core values about honesty, integrity, being loyal to people, how to be a good human being, how to be the best version of yourself. Steve. That’s what it’s about, for your benefit and for the benefit of others.

STEVEN BARTLETT: He said that to you when you were younger and you were considering switching football team. He told you to never change your loyalties, and you just. I’ve got the eulogy you wrote for your father when he passed away here. And it’s interesting some of the words and phrases that you used in the eulogy to him, because they seem to be quite pertinent to our conversation today. “The ultimate purpose of knowledge is to reduce human suffering, and that true wisdom to achieve that end only comes from dialogue.”

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, that was a Socratic quote. “True wisdom comes only from dialogue.” Understanding others starts from understanding oneself. And to get to a greater truth, one has to be able to question one’s own beliefs. And to get there, to achieve that, you have to engage with other people and have discussions, but from a place of compassion where you are open to listening to other people.

Because we can only get to a greater truth if you listen to all different sides on a particular issue, and that comes from having that conversation. So I think that’s a huge component of it all, which I think we’re losing, Steve, in society, there’s so much polarization.

The Importance of Open Dialogue

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I completely agree. And it’s difficult, obviously, because conversation can be fatal. It can be especially medical conversation, conversation about things like vaccines or health information. So it’s very delicate information. But what can also be fatal is the lack of conversation that is not seeing ideas collide.

And it’s interesting, as someone who speaks to a lot of health professionals on this podcast, I’m not an expert in health, and people will often criticize me for that and say they said this thing wrong or this thing wrong. But I think the place that I’ve got to now is to present every opinion that I can.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And hopefully to will people to be able to make up their own minds. And I hope I tried to present some of the other side of the at least the rebuttals so people can be curious. And we don’t, we’re not pushing in any particular direction. I’m no bloody dog in the fight. I don’t know.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: And I’m not. I want to have that conversation, Steve. I think part of the problem with all of this is that that conversation isn’t even happening. We want to have that conversation. We want rebuttals, we want accountability. Yeah, but the ignoring of even the conversation that for me is unforgivable.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s a shame. I think podcasts are doing a good job of kind of. Well, I think a lot of them are doing a good job of just having that conversation. Yeah, because it’s long form and there’s, I mean, there’s a comment section so people are going to discuss below. And there’s lots of podcasts, there’s lots of information being thrown out into the world.

And everything we talked about today will be linked below, as much of the links as we can. So if anybody is curious about anything we’ve discussed or any stats, you’ll send me your stuff?

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Absolutely.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I’ll link it below and I’ll link the NHS and the British Heart Foundation and anyone else below. So people can have a think about that. But I am a big fan of conversation and I’m a big fan of having both sides of an argument and trying to make my own mind up on things and find the nuance. I find the truth is usually somewhere in the middle.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah.

Historical Perspective on Revolutionary Ideas

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I think it’s important because one of the things I think we have to reflect on is some of those amazing people you talked about, like Martin Luther King. And I don’t know whether it’s the suffragettes or Gandhi or whoever it might be, their ideas in their time were received equally horrifically. And now those are things that we all consider to be true and very important as it relates to maybe science or just social issues on equality.

So with that in mind, we have to also be humble to the fact that an idea that might be important might at first offend us, it might trigger us, it might be counter to the public narrative or to the current available science. But I don’t think it should be censored.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: No. And I would say that people listening to this just think about one thing. One of the reasons that we seek the truth and greater truths is that “a life lived in darkness has no meaning.”

The Quality of True Superstars

STEVEN BARTLETT: We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re going to be leaving it for. And the question left for you is of all the most amazing superstar people you have met in your life, what was the quality that made them superstars? And can it be taught.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: A love for humanity. That was the quality that made them superstars. And whatever they were doing it was to give back to society in some way, whether it was entertainment, whether it was music, whether it was sport, but based upon a love for humanity.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Stands up to be true. I just went through a list of superstars that I know of in my brain and I think that’s certainly the case. And it’s funny because the people that I think of as real superstars aren’t necessarily famous. They’re not rich, they’re not anything like that. They’re just the best people, the ones that I really aspire to be more like.

DR ASEEM MALHOTRA: But the one that made them stand out for me, the one quality that made them extra special in those particular people was despite them being so excellent, is they had a huge, a wonderful humility about them.

Closing Remarks and Recommendations

STEVEN BARTLETT: And they can find you everywhere, especially on Twitter. Big Twitter following and your books as well. I will link your books below in the description for anybody that wants to read them.

These two books in particular, the one that I can’t pronounce. The Pioppi Diet: A 21 day lifestyle plan, Lose weight, Feel great and drastically reduce your risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. And A Statin Free Life: A revolutionary life plan for tackling heart disease without the use of statins. Two that I’d certainly really, really recommend.

Thank you Dr. Aseem. Thank you for the work you do, the way that you do your work and thank you for having the courage to be a loud counteracting voice in society where we do need counteracting voices. I don’t think anybody can ever argue with that.

And the way in which you do it and your intentions of doing it I think are wonderful and I think they’re a real credit to the two wonderful people that raised you. So thank you for your time today. Thank you for doing the work that you do. I’m going to continue following it.

I follow you on Twitter and I’ve been following you for many, many years. I think, I believe and I very much enjoy consuming your information because I know that you don’t. You have. There’s a certain fearlessness with you that is going to deliver what is true regardless of consequence.

And that is a useful source of information to have in my world where I’m trying to advance my thinking and I care more about progress and truth than I do something feeling comfortable. So I highly recommend everyone go check you out on Twitter as well.

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