Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1979 - Dr. Aseem Malhotra
Uploaded: 2023-04-29T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1979 - Dr. Aseem Malhotra' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-04-29. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1979 - Dr. Aseem Malhotra' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-04-29. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1979 - Dr. Aseem Malhotra

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
How are you?
How are you?
How are you?
How are you?
Good, man.
Welcome to America.
It's great to be here, like my 25th time.
Yeah, 25th time recently?
No, I mean, I was last here in November, actually.
Yeah, I was here in November.
But I have, you know, my closest family outside my immediate family,
who 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.
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?
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.
And how did you become this controversial COVID character?
Well, it's interesting.
My, I think, controversy with me probably started a 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, you know, 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, overprescription of statins,
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.
And that was, you know, 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 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.
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.
And 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?
Yeah.
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 demonized saturated fat in order to preserve sugar.
They were paid off by the sugar industry to do this.
Yeah, absolutely, Joe.
That's really the heart of the problem.
It's, 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, you know, in the sort of 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 Ansel 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 Ansel Keys, who did take money from
sugar industry, who later emerged, and silenced John Yudkin.
And for decades, we were under this false belief that it was saturated fat that
was a big culprit in 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.
So, you know, it was, it took about 50 years between the first links between
smoking and lung cancer that were published in the British Medical Journal,
before we had any effective regulation on tobacco control, you know, tobacco
control interventions, government interventions.
And now we know that when you look at the decline in death rates, specifically
death rates from heart disease in the last four or five decades, almost half of
that, Joe, can be attributed to reduction in smoking.
So these are things that weren't really fully accepted and understood at the
time.
And the reason for that, and this is really interesting, is the tobacco
industry adopted a corporate playbook.
You know, I call it a dirty tricks corporate playbook of planting doubt,
cigarettes were harmful, confusing the public, denial, and even buying the
loyalty of bent scientists.
So when there was people, doctors and public health advocates saying smoking is
a problem with the heart, scientists were paid to write articles in medical
journals saying it's not smoking, it's stress.
People who smoke are more stressed and it's nothing to do with the cigarettes.
So, you know, this is history repeating itself in a way.
And denialism, and this is another thing I find quite fascinating, I mentioned
this in some of my lectures as well.
As late on as 1994, the CEOs of every major tobacco firm went in front of U.S.
Congress and swore under oath they did not believe nicotine was addictive or
smoking caused lung cancer.
Right?
Yeah.
So, you know, all of that was thrown in.
So I, once I kind of, as a practicing cardiologist, as a regular frontline jobbing
doctor who was seeing, since I qualified, more and more people getting sick,
more chronic disease, I started to think, hold on, is there something we're
doing wrong as a medical profession?
Are we giving the wrong advice?
What's actually going on here?
And when I did that deep dive and went into the root cause of it, I then
realized that, you know, the system, unfortunately, had become increasingly
corrupted over many, many years by these powerful commercial entities whose
only interest, for legal reasons, is to abuse profit for shareholders, not to
look after your health.
Yeah, that's all they really are responsible for.
When you did this and you started to talk about diet and health and the
misconceptions or misinformation about diet and health, what was the pushback
like?
It was huge.
I think, you know, for me, the, so when I published a piece in the British
Medical Journal, so it was October 23rd, I'll never forget this, 2013, it got a
lot of attention.
At this stage, I'm what we call a specialist registrar in cardiology.
So I'm not a consultant.
I'm not top of my grade yet.
I'm still, I'm finishing my training.
I'm almost a fully fledged cardiologist.
I'm doing intervention, keyhole art surgery.
And the first thing that happened to me, Joe, which I haven't really spoke
about publicly before, is, imagine, front page of three British newspapers, a
lot of attention, and a lot of people were happy because suddenly, you know,
the front page headline was, butter is back.
Cardiologist says, eating butter does not cause heart disease, right?
I know that brings a smile to your face, and I know why.
I mean, you know, who doesn't like eating butter?
But it was true.
It was what the facts told us at the time.
So I published this stuff, but I also, what I did at the time is in that 800-word
editorial, I basically also went for one of the most prescribed drugs in the
history of medicine, which are statin drugs, because I had to make the link of
everything.
So if saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease, but we know saturated fat can
raise cholesterol, that means cholesterol isn't that important.
And if cholesterol isn't that important, why are we giving all these people
statin?
So I was able to scientifically and rationally put all that jigsaw together.
And in that piece, one of the things I wrote is I said that the side effects of
statins are underrepresented in clinical trials.
And the side effects usually are things like muscle aches and fatigue.
And this was also part of my clinical experience as a cardiologist.
I was seeing way more people, anecdotally, although, you know, I've managed
tens of thousands of people in my career in terms of patients.
I was seeing way more people with side effects from statins I had diagnosed
than what was actually in the published literature,
what was coming through in the medical journals where doctors were being told
side effects are rare, less than 1% chance of getting fatigue or muscle
symptoms.
I was seeing about 20%.
And there was a reference that I used in my article which suggested a recent
study in the community in the United States,
which suggested that one in five patients probably get side effects from statins.
Now, you know, that is, so we put that in the-
Can I stop you for a second?
Yes.
Is it because those side effects, fatigue, muscle soreness, things like that
were fairly mild?
Is that why they were underreported?
Great question.
So now we know the reason.
So first and foremost, when I ask a patient, a patient complains about side
effects, I ask them,
is this interfering with your quality of life?
So if they say yes, by definition, from their perspective, it's not mild.
It's something that's really just making them feel pretty, pardon my language,
shitty.
But the reason, Joe, that they were not reported, and that came out later on,
this is something I didn't know as a medical student, as a qualified doctor, as
a specialist,
is until then, is a lot of the clinical trials that are conducted that drive
guidelines,
these randomized trials where you give patients, you know, one group gets the
statin,
and one group gets a dummy pill, and they don't know whether they're getting
the dummy pill or the statin,
and then they're followed up, and you see whether they have less heart attacks
and what side effects they get,
is that there's something called the pre-randomization run-in period.
So before the trial actually starts, people are enrolled, and then if you get
side effects,
you are taken out of the trial before it starts.
So what happens is, yeah, so what happens is the end result of those trials
is therefore biased towards people who didn't get side effects.
And then even then, you know, so there's a big under-reporting issue now.
And they have no responsibility to report the people that were removed that
also got side effects?
Well, so what they do is very interesting.
They get around it.
It's slightly sneaky.
In one of these trials called the Heart Protection Study, 36,000 people were
removed from the trial before it began,
one of the largest statin trials.
And what they did was they mentioned this, but they said they used the word non-compliant,
suggesting that the patients didn't take the pills.
Oh, wow.
Well, that doesn't make sense because if you're going to enroll into a trial,
Joe