#1979 - Dr. Aseem Malhotra

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience. Welcome to America.

Aseem Malhotra (0:18)

It's great to be here, like, my 25th time.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

25th time recently?

Aseem Malhotra (0:22)

No, I mean, I was last here in November, actually. Yeah, I was here in November. And, but I have, you know, my closest family outside my immediate family.

Unfortunately, have all passed away now, are in California. So, you know, since I was a kid, I'd probably come over and meet them and, you know, come over to San Jose and like every other year.

Joe Rogan (0:43)

So for people who don't know who you are and what you do, could you please just tell us your credentials and what your occupation is?

Aseem Malhotra (0:51)

Yeah, so I'm a consultant cardiologist. I qualified from Edinburgh Medical School in Scotland 2001 So I've been a practicing physician now for well over 20 years. My initial early career, Joe, is I specialized in interventional cardiology. So in layman's terms, that's keyhole heart surgery, stents, if you like.

And then over the past few years, for different reasons, which we'll probably get into, I focused more of my work on prevention.

Joe Rogan (1:19)

And how did you become this controversial COVID character?

Aseem Malhotra (1:24)

Well, it's interesting. My, I think, controversy with me probably started much, many years ago.

Probably I became sort of, I broke into the mainstream around sort of 2011 initially, because I wrote an article, which was a front page commentary in the Observer newspaper, which is part of the Guardian Group in the UK. Basically, as the cardiologist was saying, why are we serving junk food to my patients in hospitals?

And that was after I'd met with Jamie Oliver, who I'd written to. So that's how I kind of started campaigning on the issues around obesity at that point. And not shortly after, not long after that, Joe, I then had sort of went into a deep dive to try and understand why we had an obesity epidemic. So what was driving that? What was the role of cholesterol in heart disease, over prescription statin, saturated fat? And essentially that culminated me publishing a piece in the British Medical Journal in 2013, October, basically, which was titled Saturated Fat Is Not the Major Issue, and suggesting we should be focusing on sugar, we got it wrong on saturated fat, we're over-medicating millions of people on statins, cholesterol is not that bad as a risk factor for heart disease, and that's really where I sort of broke into the mainstream, that was, you know, the BMJ Press released it, it was front page of three British newspapers, I was on Fox News Chicago, CNN International, and that's really when I started my kind of activism and to try and fight back against medical misinformation and a kind of deep understanding that what was driving poor health for many, many people was biased and corrupted information that was coming from two big industries, big food and big pharma.

Joe Rogan (3:08)

And that's fairly controversial still today, but backed up by data now. Like the talk about saturated fat and the fact that sugar is terrible for you, now that we know because the New York Times published that expose of those initial scientists that were bribed, I believe it was in the 50s or the 60s, do you know the whole story? Of course you do.

Where they were basically given about $50,000, which is not that much money, to ruin everyone's idea of what's good and bad for you because they demonize saturated fat in order to preserve sugar. They were paid off by the sugar industry to do this.

Aseem Malhotra (3:52)

Yeah, absolutely Joe. That's really the heart of the problem. I would describe it as the corporate capture of medicine and public health. And it's been going on for decades, yet I think only now, and certainly we'll get into it around the COVID vaccine stuff, I think only now more people are really becoming aware of it. And I think one of the things I discovered when I looked into the whole issue about saturated fat and sugar, et cetera, is in the 50s, 60s and 70s, there were two scientists who were really at war around what was driving heart disease, because heart disease really started to increase in the United States from 1920 and peaked around 1960 and 1970 in terms of death rates from coronary artery disease. And Ancel Keys was the American physiologist from Minnesota who said that saturated fat was a culprit. And then there was John Yudkin, who was a British endocrinologist, nutrition scientist who basically said that it's sugar.

But because the sugar industry was so powerful, they were able to put all of their resources and energy into supporting Ancel Keys, who did take money from sugar industry later emerged, and silence John Yudkin. And for decades, we were under this belief that it was saturated fat that was a big culprit with heart disease. And the other thing to add into this, which wasn't fully accepted or known at the time, was the now acknowledgement of the impact of smoking.