105. Dr. Aseem Malhotra: The REAL Reason for the Chronic Disease Pandemic

Speaker 1 Poor diets is responsible for more disease and death than physical inactivity, smoking, and alcohol combined.

Speaker 2 Cardiovascular disease is still the number one killer. So the biggest killer in the world has been confronted with one of the biggest medications in the world.
And it hasn't slowed down.

Speaker 2 In fact, it's gotten worse.

Speaker 1 The main pathophysiological process behind heart disease is insulin resistance. And there's no pill that is effectively targeting insulin resistance.

Speaker 2 During my career, we used large data. We were finding lots of trends that were not being echoed in mainstream medicine.

Speaker 1 Medicine itself is not an exact science. It's not like physics or chemistry.
It's constantly evolving.

Speaker 1 And in fact, 50% of what you learn in medical school will turn out to be either outdated or dead wrong within five years of your graduation. You're kidding me.

Speaker 1 This is how extraordinary and crazy this health misinformation mess is. When I was working on calls in the hospital, I was like, the food that was available wasn't the most nutritious.

Speaker 1 There's definitely something going wrong with the food environment here. We've got this obesity epidemic, but we're selling junk food in the hospital grounds.
That doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 2 More than 50% of Americans right now are pre-diabetic. What would you say are the suggested steps that they follow to get out of it?

Speaker 1 So if we go back to square one, and this may surprise a lot of people.

Speaker 2 You are in for a real treat. This guest, Dr.
Asim Malhotra, is a board-certified cardiologist, a world-renowned cardiologist. He's an author.

Speaker 2 He's a huge advocate of dietary and lifestyle changes, but he's also published clinical research and written numerous papers in the British Medical Journal and all kinds of other published journals.

Speaker 2 And this podcast was one of my favorite podcasts because we just got real, visceral, and raw about the corruption in our medical system, very often in our randomized clinical trials, and about what lifestyle choices you could make to completely change your trajectory to cardiovascular risk.

Speaker 2 In other words, if you have cardiovascular risk factors in your family, high blood pressure runs in your family, high cholesterol runs in your family, and you're worried and you don't want to go on statin therapy or you don't want to go on conventional therapy, this is the podcast for you.

Speaker 2 Please pay attention.

Speaker 2 Get a pen and paper out. I love this podcast.
I loved it so much that when we were done, the podcast, I did a short podcast with him afterwards because the post-podcast talk was so good.

Speaker 2 So enjoy this podcast, guys, and remember, it's just science. Hey, guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

Speaker 2 I'm your host, human biologist, Gary Brecca, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between.

Speaker 2 And today I have a very special guest on the podcast. I know I say that all the time, but this is an incredibly special guest, Dr.
Asim Malhotra. And Dr.

Speaker 2 Asim is a world-renowned cardiologist, an author, a huge advocate of lifestyle medicine. And I am really, really excited to run this podcast.
In fact, when my my team gave me the

Speaker 2 talent research on you, I said, no need. I've got this.

Speaker 2 I've watched his Rogan podcast. I've watched his documentary.

Speaker 2 I can't wait for you guys to listen to this podcast. I can't wait for it myself.

Speaker 2 We did an entire podcast in the kitchen

Speaker 2 before we even came into the podcast room.

Speaker 2 So welcome to the podcast, Dr. Maholcho.

Speaker 1 Gary, it's an absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 It's a pleasure to be here with you too. You know, interestingly, I got a call a few months ago from a good friend of mine in the UK, Dr.

Speaker 2 We call him Dr. E, Dr.
Mohenyat. And he and I have been friends for years.
And he is like, Gary, have you heard of Dr. Mohatra? And I said, you know, that name sounds familiar.

Speaker 2 He's like, you've got to check this guy out. You've got to have him on your podcast.
He speaks your language. I mean, he's right up your alley.
And

Speaker 2 so I went down

Speaker 2 the rabbit hole of everything, Dr. Asim.
And I got to say, man, I am extraordinarily impressed with your background,

Speaker 2 the fight that you've been on for humanity, your willingness to actually stand up and be criticized in the public square for going against the mainstream.

Speaker 2 And I really would recommend every single person listening to this podcast, I'm going to put a link to it in the notes below. Watch Do No Farm.
That's B-H-A-R-M, the documentary that he put together.

Speaker 2 It's all in layman's layman's terms. It is absolutely eye-opening.

Speaker 2 I watched it once, listened to it a second time while I was driving. Fascinating documentary.

Speaker 2 It will actually lay the foundation for you for what is causing the chronic disease pandemic in this country. And I thought it was fascinating.
Your Rogan podcast was also excellent.

Speaker 2 I listened to that whole podcast. So I'm really excited to get going with you today.
You know, I often start my podcast because

Speaker 2 with a similar theme, and I think that you fit this theme because I feel like a lot of the most impactful

Speaker 2 people in the world, the most passionate, the most purpose-driven people in the world that are following the calling are doing so because they solved a real problem in their life.

Speaker 2 They had a real issue.

Speaker 2 There was some tipping point, loss of a loved one, they overcame addiction,

Speaker 2 they solved a health crisis that they were having on their own, and now they're out serving humanity the way that you were, the way that you are.

Speaker 2 What was it, if any, what was the tipping point in your life, that aha moment as a practicing cardiologist, as a

Speaker 2 traditionally trained allopathic physician that made you open your eyes and say, wait a minute?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a great question, Gary. I think there's probably been a number of events that have happened in my life that have shaped me in my journey, not just one.

Speaker 1 A few key ones that come to mind certainly was when I was 11 years old, my older brother,

Speaker 1 who was 13, he got viral myocarditis. He just had a tummy bug.
And within six days, he went into crashing heart failure and died.

Speaker 1 So that was initially, and that obviously was quite a big event for our family. You know, my parents were both doctors, almost helpless to do anything for him.

Speaker 1 And that was my initial interest, certainly, in wanting to think about pursuing a career in cardiology.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, as things evolved over time.

Speaker 2 Wow. That's that's

Speaker 2 incredible.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, my brother had Down syndrome as well. And I think, you know,

Speaker 1 everything for me comes back to basic human values

Speaker 1 and about compassion for other people.

Speaker 1 And because both my parents were doctors, that was kind of almost a culture within our household that my primary duty in life was to help others or do something for the community.

Speaker 1 And of course, looking through the health lens, that's ultimately why I decided to pursue a career medicine. But I was most fascinated with cardiology, probably because of my brother's death.
And

Speaker 1 as that evolved for me as a doctor, having qualified in 2001 from Edinburgh Medical School in Scotland, and then sub-specializing in cardiology and then interventional cardiology, I was noticing more and more patients coming in with chronic disease.

Speaker 1 We're giving them more pills, more pressure on the system, noticing my colleagues in the National Health Service feeling more stressed out.

Speaker 1 And I'm somebody that can think ahead and analyze things quite quickly.

Speaker 1 And I, you know, once I realized, I saw a pattern, I thought, if this continues down the same trajectory, we're going to get into a situation where our healthcare systems are going to collapse.

Speaker 1 And we might even be in a situation where we won't even be able to provide timely care for acutely ill patients. And the worst scenario of that, and we'll come back to

Speaker 1 my initial journey and my epiphany moments, ultimately culminated in my father, who suffered an unexpected cardiac arrest in the summer of 2021.

Speaker 1 And despite

Speaker 1 the fact it was witnessed with two doctors doing CPR on him and calling 999 in the UK, I know it's 911

Speaker 1 and expecting while I was on the phone, the ambulance to turn up in eight minutes for him to be defibrillated because he was in the best potential situation to survive.

Speaker 1 And the ambulance took 30 minutes and he died.

Speaker 1 And that was a reflection ultimately. And I investigated it and I wrote about it, and it became a big news story.

Speaker 1 But effectively, the healthcare system

Speaker 1 was under so much pressure that the ambulance crews were not meeting targets for treating heart attacks. So I never expected that to happen.
But to come back, certainly I think

Speaker 1 one of the key moments for me when I got involved in the public sphere as a activist in terms of improving public health and tackling obesity was I remember in the summer of 2010,

Speaker 1 a patient came in in the middle of the night.

Speaker 1 I was working as a cardiology registrar, so I was essentially the, you know, one below the top tier in the hierarchy of being cardiologists, trained in intervention, heart extents, for example.

Speaker 1 And I was on call. Patient comes in in his 50s, acute heart attack.
We treat him with emergency scenting.

Speaker 1 He,

Speaker 1 you know, I go back to bed. I was on call, right? Next morning, I'm doing the ward round and I'm giving him advice on the pills we're going to put him on, you know, blood thinners, a statin,

Speaker 1 telling about following a healthy lifestyle. Right.
And while I'm talking to him about healthy lifestyle, the hospital serves him a burger and fries.

Speaker 1 And he looks at me and he says, doctor, how do you expect me to change my lifestyle if you're serving me the same crap? Pardon my language

Speaker 1 that likely brought me in here in the first place. And for me, I just thought, you know, this is just crazy.
You know, we, I was looking around in the hospital.

Speaker 1 I mean, I also, I think a lot of it, you know, you talk about personal stories, Gary. I am definitely somebody who I would describe myself as a foodie, right?

Speaker 1 I learned to cook when I was 16. My dad taught me to cook.
You know, I was famous in Edinburgh Medical School for cooking the best Indian chicken curry. You know, we'd have scores of people coming.

Speaker 1 I love Indian food. I like the butter chicken.

Speaker 3 That's my favorite.

Speaker 1 So I had an interest in food myself anyway.

Speaker 1 And I was thinking when I was working on calls in the hospital, I was like, the food that was available wasn't the most nutritious.

Speaker 1 And yet, you know, know, half of the staff, I mean, half of the NHS employees now, and I'm sure this, the figures are probably similar in the United States, are overweight or obese, right?

Speaker 1 So I was thinking, this is, there's definitely something going wrong with the food environment here.

Speaker 1 So the next day after this patient story, after I, you know, experienced this, had this conversation with the patient, I thought, you know, somebody that had inspired me at that point, who I thought was, was really, you know, doing his best to help tackle child obesity was Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef.

Speaker 1 Yes. And I had to contact a friend of mine who worked for the Times at the time, a newspaper, and I asked her, do you have the email address for Jamie or his PA? And said, sure, why do you want it?

Speaker 1 I said, well, I think he's done great work on highlighting the problems with school food, right?

Speaker 3 Children's food.

Speaker 1 He should get involved in the campaign to improve hospital food. So I wrote this email one afternoon in my lunch break.
Didn't expect a reply.

Speaker 1 And then six weeks later, I get a reply from his PA saying, dear Rasim, thank you for contacting us.

Speaker 1 You know, I said to him, I said, you know, you've done so much great work and hostel food is full of junk. And he said, Jamie would be thrilled to meet you.

Speaker 1 Please come and meet him on this date and we can have a talk and bring some of the doctors together. So when that happened, I've someone, Gary, that's always enjoyed writing.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 my dad was a prolific writer. I think maybe I got those genes from him, you know, about NHS stuff and medical politics.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And I started writing when I was at, you know, my school, which was a very prestigious school in the UK, I started writing articles when I was 16 for the school newspaper.

Speaker 1 We won national awards for that. So I had this kind of, I think, interest in writing.

Speaker 1 And I'd written some articles for The Guardian before about junior doctors and medical training.

Speaker 1 So I'm going to meet Jamie and I get introduced to the health editor of the Guardian newspaper over at dinner. And he said, this sounds like a really good story.

Speaker 1 But he says, it sounds like a great campaign the Guardian newspaper can get behind, like improving hospital food, right?

Speaker 1 Because there's a, as almost like one of the ways to highlight and tackle the obesity epidemic, you know, we've got this obesity epidemic, but we're selling junk food in the hospital grounds.

Speaker 1 That doesn't make any sense, right? We have to, we have to start in our own backyard in the terms of the health profession. So

Speaker 1 I went to meet Jamie and he said, in the end, what happened was the Guardian didn't start a campaign, but he says, listen, why don't you write an article?

Speaker 1 I can have a look at it and pitch it, you know, to the Guardian of the Observer newspaper. So I wrote this article about my meeting with Jamie.
Jamie said, Asim, listen,

Speaker 1 I'm very much behind what you're doing, but he had so many things going on. I think he was going to Australia for a different campaign.
He said, listen, I can give you supportive quote,

Speaker 1 but I can't get involved in campaign right now.

Speaker 1 So I wrote this article and suddenly it becomes, I think this was February 2011, it becomes a front page commentary of the Observer newspaper, which is a huge impact newspaper in the UK.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 And it was called, I meant hearts, then I see our hospitals serve junk food to my patients.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 see the hospitals serve junk food to our patients.

Speaker 1 So that's where things really took off for me in terms of getting into the public sphere. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And that was really a moment where I got really, you know, went down the track of looking into really the root cause of the obesity epidemic.

Speaker 1 How, as you know very well, Gary, for a very long time, how we got the dietary guidelines wrong, how there was an oversupply of excess sugar.

Speaker 1 And then I was involved with the BMJ and writing articles to really expose and bring it to the mainstream where sugar was a major issue.

Speaker 2 I mean, the British

Speaker 2 medical journal, I mean, which is a very prestigious journal,

Speaker 2 you know, a New England journal of medicine, a very, very prestigious journal.

Speaker 2 I remember, you know, in the documentary,

Speaker 2 you begin to go against the grain, which is very interesting because, you know, my audience knows I come from a big data background and I'm not licensed to practice medicine like you are.

Speaker 2 I have all the respect in the world for people that are.

Speaker 2 But during my career in mortality, we used large data as a predictor of mortality. And in these large data pools, we were finding,

Speaker 2 you know, lots of

Speaker 2 trends that were not at all what you would hear in the mainstream. They were not being echoed in mainstream medicine.

Speaker 2 So, you know, high LDL cholesterol is, you know, this major risk factor for cardiovascular disease. We need to, you know, the lower the better

Speaker 2 for LDL cholesterol. But then we had mortality data that was the polar opposite and not an insignificant amount of mortality data, mortality data on, in some cases, hundreds of millions of lives.

Speaker 2 And so we actually knew that the opposite was true: that actually people that had lower levels of triglyceride and healthy HDL and still had elevated, what you would consider clinically elevated levels of LDL cholesterol were actually living longer.

Speaker 2 And we were seeing less reporting of things like hormone disruption,

Speaker 2 D3 deficiency,

Speaker 2 you know, muscular pain, chronic fatigue,

Speaker 2 complaints of brain fog, things like that, that you would think were the opposite based on what was going on in the literature. And I certainly wasn't qualified to comment on that.

Speaker 2 I wasn't out there on the front lines like you were. But

Speaker 2 you noticed this trend too. I mean, you've published papers on it and written about it

Speaker 2 and even been crucified for it. And I want to walk people through

Speaker 2 this

Speaker 2 obsession with randomized clinical trials that we seem to have built an entire medical system on.

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 another fascinating point that I've seen echoed in your work, in Casey Means, and Callie Means' work,

Speaker 2 I think the world of that brother and sister combo,

Speaker 1 is that

Speaker 2 we're not actually seeing all of the data.

Speaker 2 You know, the data is seen by a very, very, very small group of people. And that small group of people then goes and says, here's what's in the data.

Speaker 2 You know, I think the analogy used in your documentary was, I'm going to look through the telescope, and then I'm just going to tell you guys what I see.

Speaker 2 And then you go tell the world, but I'm not letting anybody else look in the telescope.

Speaker 2 And talk a little bit about that because for the people that are not in the know, even for physicians, even myself that spent 20 years in that space, I did not know that that data was, you know, not really being made available.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, it's a really, really good point you raised, Gary. So if we go back to square one for the layperson, and this may surprise a lot of people,

Speaker 1 medicine itself is not an exact science. It's not like physics or chemistry.
It's a social science, a science of human beings. It's constantly evolving.
And in fact,

Speaker 1 the father of the evidence-based medicine movement, Professor David Sackett, Canadian epidemiologist, actually said that, and this is actually true, this has been shown in data to be true, 50%

Speaker 1 of what you learn in medical school will turn out to be either outdated or dead wrong within five years of your graduation. Wow.
The trouble is nobody can tell you which half. So

Speaker 1 you have to learn to learn on your own.

Speaker 1 So if you start from that position, then you can get an open mind to how data and information can be potentially corrupted. So

Speaker 1 the cholesterol issue is, I think, the major issue in helping us understand why we are where we are with our pandemic of chronic disease.

Speaker 1 And you're absolutely right.

Speaker 1 The dogma and the mantra from medical school training, and even now amongst doctors and cardiologists, is LDL cholesterol, so-called bad cholesterol, is the most important maybe risk factor for heart disease.

Speaker 1 And the lower, the better.

Speaker 1 I started questioning that

Speaker 1 in 2012, 13,

Speaker 1 partly because one of the drugs that is widely prescribed in cardiology are statin drugs. And statin drugs, lower cholesterol, but specifically lower LDL.
And they were thought to be, you know,

Speaker 1 the best that we have in medicine to prevent heart attacks, et cetera, strokes, and or cause mortality.

Speaker 1 But when I broke that data down, the first thing that, you know, I understood, which was not something I was trained to do in medical school, is the absolute benefits from these so-called randomized trials that are done by drug companies of the statin drug in individuals is very, very small.

Speaker 1 So, for example, if you have not had a heart attack

Speaker 1 or not had a diagnosis of a severe blockage in your coronary arteries, the benefit of a statin over a five-year period, okay, on non-transparent data, by the way, we'll come back to that.

Speaker 1 So, this is likely best case scenario, right? Is one in 100.

Speaker 1 So, that means there's a one in 100 chance if you take that statin religiously and you don't get side effects, it'll prevent you having a non-fatal heart attack or stroke without prolonging your life.

Speaker 1 Most patients are not told that. But actually, that's the most ethical way of engaging in informed consent, right? For lots of reasons.

Speaker 2 It's not going to prolong your life. There's a one in a hundred chance that this is going to do anything good for you.

Speaker 1 And most people in the world taking a statin drug, Gary, which is estimated to be prescribed between 200 million and 1 billion people worldwide,

Speaker 1 are not going to get any benefit. And they're not even told that.
This is how... extraordinary and crazy this health misinformation mess is.

Speaker 2 The whole reason for informed consent you know,

Speaker 2 is to not explain the randomized clinical trial to the patient, but to give them informed consent, like data like that, so they can actually make an informed decision. Absolutely.

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Speaker 1 So the second part is, well, okay,

Speaker 1 is it true that lowering LDL by diet or drugs will reduce the risk of a heart attack, stroke, or death? But let's just focus specifically on heart attacks.

Speaker 1 So myself and two other cardiologists in 2020 published a paper, a systematic review in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine to actually look to see whether this was true based upon the totality of evidence from drug trials, okay?

Speaker 1 Drug trials and some diet trials, and put it all together. Because the mantra was: the lower the better.
We found no clear correlation. Wow.
It's complete nonsense, Gary.

Speaker 2 And this is in the published data, which means that this is not even the data you don't have access to. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 This is in the data made available, which is the shiniest, you know, brightest form of the data that's being put forward to

Speaker 1 100%. So then, if that's true, right? If LDL lowering doesn't prevent heart attacks and strokes, how do statins work even for that small benefit?

Speaker 1 And I had figured out partly because in cardiology, it's well known when patients come in with heart attacks, we don't even measure their cholesterol. We just put them on hydrostatins.

Speaker 1 And this was going on for years. And

Speaker 1 the word, you know, amongst cardiologists was, well, actually, they have anti-inflammatory properties. They have Clark stabilizing properties.
So I knew that already.

Speaker 1 And in fact, there is mechanistic data showing that they have slightly anti-clotting and anti-inflammatory effects, right? Before we get into side effect issue.

Speaker 1 So the likely benefit of statins is nothing to do with LDL lowering. It's to do with that mechanism.
But the fear of cholesterol and the business of

Speaker 1 glowering cholesterol with all these other drugs and the new ones coming on the market is based upon, it's a trillion-dollar industry, right?

Speaker 1 So you can understand from a financial perspective, the drug companies don't want this information to get out.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 It would destroy the cholesterol lowering business. Right.
Now, if we were to argue that, okay,

Speaker 1 let's lower cholesterol, it may benefit you, and it's not going to do any harm. Okay, you can make an argument for that, right?

Speaker 1 But as you know, Gary, actually, the opposite seems to be true. I published a systematic review in 2016 in the BMJ.
I was

Speaker 1 one of a co-author of many scientists around the world to look at in older people over 60, was there, first of all, any correlation with LDL cholesterol in heart disease? We found none at all.

Speaker 1 We found an inverse association with LDL, cholesterol, and all-cause mortality.

Speaker 1 In other words, the higher LDL statistically, the less likely you were to die, something that you obviously knew for many, many years. We did.

Speaker 1 And the reason for that, and people say, well, how is that possible? Cholesterol has a very important role in the immune system and LDL specifically.

Speaker 1 And older people are more vulnerable to dying from infections. And even we know there is an association with low cholesterol and cancer, partly through an immune mechanism.

Speaker 1 So that's probably where the benefit is. Wow.
So I honestly tell patients that when they come to see me in cardiology with their cholesterol, I said, My purpose is to lower your risk.

Speaker 1 I have no interest in lowering cholesterol for the sake of lowering cholesterol. Right.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 interestingly, now they're tying these,

Speaker 2 you know, this hyper deficiency or hypodeficiency in cholesterol driven by statins, as there are links now being

Speaker 2 drawn to

Speaker 2 early onset of all kinds of mental conditions, you know,

Speaker 2 dementia, Alzheimer's,

Speaker 2 you know, hormone disruption. And we knew in the mortality space that if you actually had slightly elevated levels of LDL cholesterol and you went on a statin, we would reduce your life expectancy.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, a few years ago, I started reading

Speaker 2 the peer-reviewed studies where there was no reduction in all-cause mortality. So they started saying,

Speaker 2 you know, taking out the reduction of all-cause mortality as a benefit and just really myopically looking at that one chemical,

Speaker 2 you know, and its capacity to reduce one compound in the body and saying that's the panacea of,

Speaker 2 you know, saving us from cardiovascular risk. But, you know, again, it could bring, you know, as we go back to big data,

Speaker 2 we can, you can chart the trajectory and the incidence of use of

Speaker 2 statins in modern medicine. And you can look at all-cause mortality, or you can look at the rates of cardiovascular disease.
You can look at the rates of heart attack.

Speaker 2 Cardiovascular disease is still the number one killer of human beings, I think, globally, certainly in the United States and Europe.

Speaker 2 But so the biggest killer in the world

Speaker 2 has been confronted with one of the biggest medications in the world, and it hasn't slowed down. In fact, it's gotten worse.
It hasn't.

Speaker 1 You're absolutely right. In fact, actually, again, the BMJ published a paper to look in Europe.

Speaker 1 Had increase in statins over a decade, for example, given to millions more people, had any effect on reducing cardiovascular mortality, and there was no effect.

Speaker 1 So, another way of looking at the statistics as well, Gary, is

Speaker 1 if you take an average or a median increase in life expectancy, I remember, you know, when I give lectures to doctors and general practitioners, there are literally gaffes in the audience.

Speaker 1 And I say, if you've had a heart attack, let's say the benefit is better. If you had a heart attack for an individual,

Speaker 1 your

Speaker 1 preventing a non-fatal heart attack in the next five years is one in 39, and mortality is about 1 in 83. The numbers need to treat.

Speaker 1 Still doesn't sound that great, but still much better than people, you know, one in 100.

Speaker 1 But if you look at the statistics differently, how much longer would you expect to live once you've had a heart attack, say you're in your mid-50s,

Speaker 1 taking a statin over a five-year period? And the BMJ did this analysis, again, looking at drug industry-sponsored research. Okay.

Speaker 1 And they found that the increase in life expectancy over a five-year period was an additional 4.2 days.

Speaker 2 I heard that. Wow.
Right? And now 4.2 days.

Speaker 1 Now, how do we explain no reduction in cardiovascular mortality, even in high-risk people in these population studies from taking statins, increasing statins, is actually, Gary, when you look at the data, real-world data, 20 to 50%.

Speaker 1 of patients prescribed statins, even people at high risk, will stop taking them within two to three years. And when you ask them why, it's because they felt worse.

Speaker 1 They think they had side effects, particularly brain fog, fatigue, muscle aches. You mentioned this link.
It's very interesting with Alzheimer's and dementia. I haven't seen that data.

Speaker 1 However, there is a plausible reason for that. Statins also increase insulin resistance.
One in a hundred people taking statins will get type 2 diabetes. Wow.
For years, people have been saying that

Speaker 2 almost the same numbers will benefit from statins.

Speaker 1 Well, exactly. So for years, people have been saying that Alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes, right?

Speaker 1 So the underlying root cause that is definitely plays a role in the development of dementia and Alzheimer's, cancer, and of course, is the main pathophysiological process, if you like, behind heart disease is insulin resistance.

Speaker 2 Yes,

Speaker 1 and there's no pill that is effectively targeting insulin resistance. It all comes down to simple lifestyle changes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I love where you're going with this.

Speaker 2 Before we move on to the lifestyle changes, because I do want to give people tips and tricks for, you know, lifestyle changes, I want to go back to the data because when when you talked about published

Speaker 2 trials from pharmaceutical industries and actually going into those trials and using their own data to say this is what the data says,

Speaker 2 that's the data that's known, that's seen.

Speaker 2 Talk a little bit about what happens when a pharmaceutical company actually goes to have their research published or submits it to the Food and Drug Administration

Speaker 2 for a drug trial approval.

Speaker 2 There's an assumption that the data that they're giving is truthful and accurate.

Speaker 2 And I know from statistics, I'm not a mathematician, but I spend plenty of time building probabilistic models.

Speaker 2 We almost had a saying that you tell me what you want the data to say, and I'll have the data say that. And you could take the same data set.

Speaker 2 And I think that

Speaker 2 causal and efficacy and there's all of these terms in the literature that even some physicians and certainly the general public don't understand.

Speaker 2 And, you know, relative risk,

Speaker 2 you know, what is the relative risk ratio? I mean, unless you've specifically been trained to read medical literature, it's hard to actually understand what they mean.

Speaker 2 We think of it in simple terms that if something increases or decreases my relative risk, it's increasing or decreasing the direct risk of that event, which is actually not true.

Speaker 2 So without, again, getting too complicated, what I was fascinated by was what you uncovered very often in some of these published, peer-reviewed, randomized clinical trials that are now making it into major medical journals and that the information

Speaker 2 has never actually been independently reviewed.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So I think the top line to put that all together, Gary, and I'll elaborate on it is that medical knowledge is under commercial control, but most doctors don't know that.

Speaker 1 So the drug companies, that's just their primary motive and their legal obligation is to make profit for their shareholders, not to give you the best treatment.

Speaker 1 When they design their trials, their clinical trials, often they design the trial to try and give them the best results, even before the trial started, right? Of course.

Speaker 1 They're already thinking about that they've got their new product. They think it's going to do, you know,

Speaker 1 be a great seller. How can we design the trial to get the right people in the trial who are less likely to get side effects and more like to benefit? Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 How do we so they're not a true hypothesis?

Speaker 1 No, not a scientific. Oh, it's oh, it's bad science.
It's really bad science. Yeah.
You know, and so that's how the trials are done.

Speaker 1 Often these trials, these randomized trials involving thousands of patients, right?

Speaker 1 They the data that's collected is often tens of thousands of patients of pages long.

Speaker 1 So over a five-year trial, for example, on statins,

Speaker 1 they will collect lots of data. And then that raw data is then curated.
into a summary reports, which goes to the regulator. So in this country, it's the FDA.
In the the UK, we have the MHRA.

Speaker 1 And they then approve the drug. But there are problems because often they don't look at it, they just accept what they're told by the drug industry, the summary reports, right?

Speaker 1 Which means that they can hide data on harms. And we have lots of examples of that.

Speaker 1 And the other conflict, the other problem, Gary, we've got is that these regulators now take most of their money from industry.

Speaker 1 So the FDA gets 65% of its funding from industry. This is from a BMJ investigation in 2022.
Or FDA.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Gets 65% of its funding.
From big pharma. From big pharma, not from the federal government.

Speaker 1 No. 65% from.

Speaker 1 Our regulator in the UK gets 86% of his funding from pharma. You're kidding me.
And there's a massive conflict of interest because what happens, a lot of these people within these regulatory bodies,

Speaker 1 they want to please the drug industry because more often than not, when they leave their roles as regulators, they get offered very lucrative jobs in the pharmaceutical industry.

Speaker 1 They don't want to bite the hand that feeds them. Then what happens is the articles get published in medical journals,

Speaker 1 and the medical journals themselves, and this is pointed out in the documentary by probably one of the giants of medical journal editorship, is Dr. Fiona Goddy, former editor of the BMJ.

Speaker 1 Is that medical journals are businesses and often take millions from big pharma, either in advertising, but more commonly

Speaker 3 for

Speaker 1 selling reprints

Speaker 1 to the drug industry, right, that can be used as marketing material. And a really good example of just how bad this can be, and this is one example that we know of, Gary, is the Viox scandal.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that was terrible.

Speaker 1 So this was a drug that was marketed in the late 90s as a blockbuster drug, better than ibuprofen, as an anti-inflammatory. Drug company was Merck.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it was published in the New Journal of Medicine, number one impact medical journal in the world.

Speaker 1 And what happened later on is that

Speaker 1 it became clear that merck had hidden data showing that it was going to double at least double your risk of a heart attack or stroke or death

Speaker 1 and ultimately likely killed 60 000 americans right it was pulled from the market i think 2004 2011 merck were fined almost one billion dollars for this But what was most extraordinary is in the litigation process, which we explained in the documentary involving Dr.

Speaker 1 John Abramson, a lecturer at Harvard,

Speaker 1 it it revealed that the chief scientist of Merck,

Speaker 1 when the drug was being rolled out in internal emails, said, it's a shame about the cardiovascular risk of this drug, but the drug will do well and we will do well. Right?

Speaker 1 In other words, I know it's probably going to kill people, but we're going to make a lot of money out of this. Now, this comes from the chief scientist of Merck at the time.
Wow. Right.

Speaker 1 And this was just,

Speaker 1 we as human beings,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 we become acceptable collateral damage. You know, this is not, not, and nothing has changed in the system, Gary, to stop these sorts of events happening again.

Speaker 1 And just to get to the diagnosis as well of

Speaker 1 just how these big corporations operate as entities is that when the FDA became aware that there was a cardiovascular risk, they wrote to Merck and said, you need to put a black box warning on your packaging.

Speaker 1 Not only did Merck ignore that, they doubled down on their marketing. They purchased more reprints from the Journal of Medicine, right?

Speaker 1 And their aim was to make sure that every doctor in the United States had a copy of the original fraudulent paper in the New Jersey of Medicine to say that this drug was the best drug for, you know, best painkiller, better than ibuprofen.

Speaker 1 And that's what they did.

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Speaker 2 Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast.

Speaker 1 Right. So what do you call that behavior? When I ask audiences, people say evil, crazy.

Speaker 1 There's actually a very precise diagnosis, which isn't my diagnosis, but I agree with it.

Speaker 1 Robert Hare is a forensic psychologist who was behind the original definition of psychopathy in the international DSM criteria.

Speaker 1 In the book and the documentary, The Corporation, which was written by Joel Burkhan, law professor, in 2000, he actually says, as entities,

Speaker 1 Big corporations, especially big pharma, actually fulfill the diagnosis for psychopath. Wow.
So what does that mean?

Speaker 1 Callous unconcerned for the safety of others, incapacity to experience guilt, repeated lying, conning others for profit.

Speaker 1 So what we are dealing with, Gary, really at the root of the problem in my view, and I don't want to make this over-inflammatory, but I just wanted people to understand what we're dealing with, is at the root, we have this machine that is pathologically self-interested when it comes to making money.

Speaker 1 And we are now suffering the consequences of that in healthcare.

Speaker 2 And, you know, as a consequence of Viox, nobody was held responsible. There were some big fines paid, multi-billion dollar fines.

Speaker 2 I think there was a billion dollar fine initially, and then several months or years later, after a class accident litigation that had more than 20,000 patients, they paid another $4, $5 billion fine.

Speaker 2 But, you know, if you have a drug that makes $25, $30 billion and you pay a $5 billion fine, I mean, that's cost.

Speaker 1 That's a cost of business.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a cost of business. You know, I've talked about this before, too.
Again, I hate to get on here and sound like the conspiracy theorists. They're all out to get us.

Speaker 2 I don't think that there's one person at the top who's myopically sinister and goes, okay, here's a plan to kill a bunch of people.

Speaker 2 I think that the way that the system has developed, right? We've taken these baby steps. You know, my father used to talk about this.

Speaker 2 He was a disciplinary and a Navy captain, and like he was very, very, very regimented. And, you know,

Speaker 5 and he

Speaker 2 was very scheduled and very regimented.

Speaker 2 And one of the things he used to tell me about, you know, being a captain in the Navy was you have to have these rigid parameters because little tiny mistakes made over and over time cost lives out at sea.

Speaker 2 And I think that what's happened is the industry has slowly crept into this position.

Speaker 2 We have

Speaker 2 a legal system that has pharmaceutical companies responsible to shareholders to make a profit.

Speaker 2 So they actually have a legal and criminal liability for not doing so, responsibility to turn a profit for their shareholder, to do what's in the best interest of the shareholder.

Speaker 2 It just so happens that they're also in the business of making the chemicals and the synthetics and the pharmaceuticals that are going into human beings, but they have no obligation to that human being.

Speaker 2 They don't have the best outcome of that patient.

Speaker 1 And this has been an increase. You're absolutely right, Gary.
This has been an incremental problem that's developed over years, even centuries.

Speaker 1 When you look at the founding of America, it's very interesting. You could only form a business.
Governments only allowed businesses to form if you produced a product that was beneficial for society.

Speaker 1 That was the primary motive.

Speaker 1 We've gone from that to profit-making at any cost.

Speaker 2 You know, and

Speaker 2 very often, guys like yourself, myself, we get accused of fear-mongering. And I actually don't think it's fear-mongering.
I think it's hope-monitoring mongering because

Speaker 2 the fear should be that I need to rely on a chemical or a synthetic or a pharmaceutical so that I don't die.

Speaker 2 But the truth is, you can rely on lifestyle modifications and there is hope for putting nutrients, vitamins, minerals, amino acids back into your body, living a healthy lifestyle, exercise.

Speaker 2 I mean, exercise across nearly every spectrum outperforms pharmaceutical intervention.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. SSRIs, which, by the way, was talked about in your documentary.
I mean, I forget the woman's name who

Speaker 2 lost her husband to suicide. And he was a young entrepreneur, happy, healthy, wasn't even taking any depressants for depression.
He was taking them for to help him sleep. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And prescribed off-label. And again, it was Pfizer who had hidden data that one of the side effects could be increasing the risk of suicide from

Speaker 2 ideation. I mean, we just have, we've had horrible strings of

Speaker 2 school shootings here in the United States. And very often you find that those

Speaker 2 perpetrators were on high doses of SSRIs, right? Because it removed their ability to feel empathy.

Speaker 2 And for a young entrepreneur that's just having sleep trouble to suddenly, you know, take his own life by hanging himself,

Speaker 2 to me, is a real travesty. And, you know, she talked about that's what turned her into a medical advocate.
But in any case, getting back to the point, I think that what's happened is, you know,

Speaker 2 we have an industry built on disease.

Speaker 2 We have an industry built on managing disease um we've done nothing to change the toxic soup um as casey means calls it that we're bathing our cellular biology in we've and

Speaker 2 there's there's no way to slow this system down right uh other than to provide an alternative and that's one of the things i want to talk to you about is you know as a cardiologist and someone who's probably operated on hundreds if not thousands of hearts seen hundreds if not thousands of patients what are the lifestyle modifications what are some of the big myths out there?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I think when I started looking into this and tried to understand what is the best evidence on lifestyle, looking at the different components that play into that, I think the low-hanging fruit and one of the biggest ones, of course, is diet, right?

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 you know, according to the Lancet Global Burden of Disease Reports, poor diets is responsible for more disease and death. globally now than physical inactivity, smoking and alcohol combined.
Really?

Speaker 1 So, yeah, it's a huge one.

Speaker 1 It's also, interestingly, Gary, the only intervention that on its own can actually send type 2 diabetes into remission, get people off their blood pressure pills, et cetera.

Speaker 1 So if we come back to the root cause of the issue is abnormal metabolic health rooted in insulin resistance. And for the lay person,

Speaker 1 only 12% of adult Americans now have optimal metabolic health. So what does that mean?

Speaker 1 It means your triglycerides and your HDL, part of your cholesterol profile, are in the normal range. Okay.
Nothing to do with LDL, cholesterol, right?

Speaker 1 It means that you have a normal waist circumference. It means that you do not have pre-hypertension or high blood pressure, and you're not pre-diabetic or you don't have type 2 diabetes.

Speaker 1 Only one in eight Americans, adult, and only one in four aged between 20 and 40 are in that situation. That's how bad, right? So the root of that is insulin resistance.

Speaker 1 How does one combat insulin resistance when it comes to diet?

Speaker 1 And the most obvious way, the clear way, is to reduce the foods in your diet that are going to have the biggest impact on raising glucose and therefore insulin.

Speaker 1 So that means ultimately minimizing starch and sugar.

Speaker 1 And then I looked at the other, the twin of heart disease and this paper I published was you've got insulin resistance, but heart disease is a chronic inflammatory process.

Speaker 1 So what is the best data that we have on anti-inflammatory foods with some outcomes? There's only a couple of randomized trials.

Speaker 1 One was the PrediMed study in Spain that followed up people at high risk with olive oil,

Speaker 1 extraversion olive oil, nuts and seeds, and a Mediterranean style diet.

Speaker 1 And another one was a Mediterranean diet with people with heart disease.

Speaker 1 But ready to answer that is from a diet perspective, I tend to tell my patients good quality extraversion, olive oil, nuts and seeds daily, oily fish at least twice a week, and a mixture of whole fruit and vegetables.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 2 That's just how we ate out there before the movie.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, it was amazing.

Speaker 1 Healthiest meal I've had in the United States and I've been here two weeks. There you go.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And sadly, it has to come from an Amish farm, you know, again,

Speaker 2 or from my Parker Pastures, you know, folks out in Colorado. You know, I often say that it's not really the food.

Speaker 2 Sometimes it's the distance from the food to the table. Yeah.
There was a really interesting discussion. I'm giving your documentary a lot of love because you guys got to watch the documentary.

Speaker 2 But, you know, they talk about. putting together a

Speaker 2 processed food system, like a ranking system, one, two, three, four. Yes.
Which

Speaker 2 I consider myself pretty in the know, and I was even unaware of that. And, you know, they talked about, you know, what is a whole food? What is a processed food? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because I think when we say, um, stop eating highly processed foods, people are like, well, what is a highly processed food?

Speaker 2 Or what is a minimally processed food? What is a whole food? And he used the example of an apple. Yeah.
And he said, you know, that's a whole food.

Speaker 2 I mean, you pick an apple off the tree and you eat it, you're eating a whole food.

Speaker 2 But then if you take an apple and you treat treat it, you put a preservative on it or something, now you're in a like a class two. And then if you put a,

Speaker 2 now if you have insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, preservatives,

Speaker 2 you package it, you slice it,

Speaker 2 you've altered it and, you know, and you put it in a, uh, on the shelf and now you're at a stage three. It's it's minimally processed.

Speaker 2 And then you get to the highly processed and use the use the example of a McDonald's apple pie where you can't find the apple

Speaker 2 because then you take the apple and you add sugar and high fructose corn syrup and you know preservatives to keep it from looking brown

Speaker 2 and you and you add flour and all of these ingredients to it

Speaker 1 but there's still a

Speaker 2 hint of an apple in there yeah um now you have a highly processed food absolutely and and i think sadly

Speaker 2 We have been so inundated with highly processed foods. I mean, 65, 60, 7% roughly of our diet is highly processed.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. So the term that's used from this NOVA classification is they call it ultra-processed, which is the most processed.
Ultra-processed, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And a very simple way, which I explain to patients, is, which is from that classification, if it has five or more ingredients on the packaging, if you can count five or more ingredients, usually with additives and preservatives, it's ultra-processed and best avoided.

Speaker 1 And all of the data and the studies are pointing in one direction when you look at observational studies or population studies of the higher the consumption of this food, every single disease pretty much from heart disease, all causal mortality, depression, you know, cancer, all of it goes in one direction correlated with the consumption of these foods.

Speaker 2 What's interesting is there's also some data refuting that,

Speaker 2 but it's coming from big food. Yeah, big food

Speaker 2 in the industry. And

Speaker 2 they show, because I have peers, folks that I, you know, have some respect for in this industry that will, you know, that will say, well, there was a study published in XYZ that says that, you know, artificial,

Speaker 2 you know, sweeteners are not bad for you. They don't destroy your gut microbiome.
The seed oils are non-inflammatory.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 2 this harkens back to the same issues that we have in pharmaceutical research, where you have to ask the question, are we seeing all the data? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And you have to look at the whole scope of the trial. I mean, you could get a PhD in analyzing these trials.

Speaker 2 And then you take one little sliver of data and you end up with a food pyramid that says the lucky charms are more nutritious than grass-food steak,

Speaker 2 sponsored by, you know, Nabisco or Kraft or Nestle.

Speaker 2 And, you know, and then you even take a further step back and you look at the consolidation of tobacco companies into food companies and the

Speaker 2 relatively few number of food companies that own nearly all of of the processed food industry.

Speaker 2 And you see this concentration of power, trillions of dollars concentrated in a war chest that has the ability to affect scientific research, that has the ability to impact public policy, that has the capacity to affect the nutritional narrative and even publish nutritional research that is widely in their favor.

Speaker 2 to go against it like yourself it's it's fear-mongering rather than hope-mongering because we're we're teaching people to get back to the basics so if somebody's listening to this and they've recently had you know blood work done and their ldl cholesterol is is elevated um their insulin is elevated they are um pre-diabetic which is more than 50 percent of americans right now

Speaker 1 what would you should say are this the suggestion steps that they that they follow to get out of it yeah i mean what i do actually because i think patients they like to look at to see that what they're doing is having an impact and you know one of the things I discovered early on is that the data suggested that dietary changes rapidly can improve cardiovascular risk factors even within 21 days I've seen it Gary you know you know yeah we've seen it on thousands and thousands of patients yeah so so I usually go with um with these particular patients who have these metabolic abnormalities I go with a you know primarily a low carb Mediterranean style diet so I say go cold turkey not forever but go completely cold turkey on the starch and the sugar for the next six weeks right and usually they come back.

Speaker 2 White flour, white bread, pops up.

Speaker 1 Popsy bread, pasta, rice, potatoes,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 too much fruit juice, for example, all these sorts of things. And then,

Speaker 1 and that's really all they need to do. But of course, I do give other advice as well around, you know, the exercise.
I say, keep it simple.

Speaker 1 You know, a lot of people who are very overweight and starting from a very sort of, it's not necessarily good for them to go really hard in the gym at that stage, right?

Speaker 1 They want to just get into a better position, but keep it simple. Can you do a 30-minute brisk walk every day, for example?

Speaker 1 Just, you know, get a little bit out of breath 30 minutes a day you know doesn't cost anything

Speaker 1 uh and then the one of the i think one of the missing parts of this discussion which again you know

Speaker 1 as i think had a profound impact on my thinking in the last few years is the uh the impact of stress and the impact of stress reduction and what that can do for you yeah this was fascinating even for me we had this conversation i'm glad you brought this up because that was one of the things i want to talk about um you know we talked about about this

Speaker 2 at the table.

Speaker 2 You said something and I was flabbergasted by it that

Speaker 2 just the impact of stress, mental stress, emotional stress

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Speaker 2 You know, they smoke a pipe or smoke a cigarette. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 And they're 96 years old and they're walking up a 37-degree incline to go to, I don't suggest you start an exercise program and start talking to Packer Marlboro Lights.

Speaker 2 But I think that we are,

Speaker 2 because exercise is so readily available,

Speaker 2 it's a choice. It's a lifestyle choice.
It's a modifiable risk factor. We simply don't give it the value in our life that it deserves.
Sure.

Speaker 2 And I argue that it should be a non-negotiable meetings and travel should be scheduled around sleep and exercise, not sleep and exercise scheduled around meetings and travel. Yes.

Speaker 2 But I want you to expand upon what you were going to say because I was even fascinated by that.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So chronic stress, you know, again, when it comes to heart disease, you're absolutely right.
It's a similar risk to being a smoker, having type 2 diabetes, or having high blood pressure.

Speaker 1 But most of us are not dealing with it or not. We don't know how to deal with it.

Speaker 1 And the mechanism behind it, there's a really interesting paper published in The Lancet, I think it was 2020, where they took took hundreds of people in middle age and they used a

Speaker 1 high-tech MRI of the brain called fMRI to look at the amygdala in the brain, which is the emotional center.

Speaker 1 And what they correlated was the subjective levels of stress. There was more activity in the amygdala with people who were higher stressed.

Speaker 2 So they reported, I am stressed out. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 And that also correlated perfectly with inflammatory markers in the blood and clotting factors. And we know heart disease.
Inflammatory and clothing.

Speaker 1 So the evolution of the understanding of heart disease is, we know, has got very little to do with LDL cholesterol. I mean, this is, we should need to keep calling this out.
It's nonsense. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a chronic inflammatory process,

Speaker 1 which is related to clotting and insulin resistance. So that's probably the likely mechanism of how chronic stress causes heart disease.
Why would that be?

Speaker 1 What's interesting from an evolutionary perspective, the explanation for this is that

Speaker 1 acute stress is not necessarily a bad thing and can be life-saving.

Speaker 1 So if you think back to whatever, thousands of years ago, we might be in the jungle, you know, running away from a tiger in that situation, it is beneficial for our body to produce inflammatory markers and

Speaker 1 clotting factors to reduce our risk for bleeding to death and healing more quickly.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 But if this is constantly turned on at a low grade level, you can see how that can cause a damage to the body and especially to the heart.

Speaker 1 The good news is we do have some data and it makes sense that if you engage in activities to reduce your stress, and that's what I always tell my patients to do.

Speaker 1 And actually, you know, I send them to a, there's a brilliant nurse I work with who is a stress reduction expert, but an expert particularly in breath work,

Speaker 1 that that is likely going to have an effect on the heart, but also. improve quality of life, mental health.

Speaker 1 And when they are going through dietary changes, you know as well as I do, Gary, that that often people stress eat. Right.
No question.

Speaker 1 So actually, if they get on top of their mind as well simultaneously, it's going to be easier for them to adopt healthy lifestyle changes, which then become a habit and their quality of life improves and they don't look back.

Speaker 1 Of course, the challenge we have, and I think it's really important we mention this, we're not going to sort out the chronic disease pandemic because of individual responsibility.

Speaker 1 We all have a role to play. Most of what drives people's eating habits is rooted in the food environment, an oversupply of ultra-processed foods.
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 So we need to make healthy food more affordable. Some people don't even have the agency to be able to even buy, to eat the kind of foods that we have the luxury of eating.

Speaker 1 So that's where you need a third-party, ideally,

Speaker 1 an effective, honest government that actually puts the interests of the people first, not big corporations,

Speaker 1 to come in and say, listen, we are going to help improve the food environment. We're not saying ban junk foods completely.

Speaker 1 People are always going to enjoy the occasional That's fine, but we should make the healthy choice the easy choice at the moment the unhealthy choice has become the easy choice And that's where we are where we are interestingly we sit here today as you and I are actually supposed to be at a meeting and uh for the

Speaker 2 um for make America healthy again, which is not a political

Speaker 2 agenda, it's a humanitarian agenda to get the corruption out of our food supply and to really target the pandemic of chronic disease in young children, the highest rates of adolescent cancer that we've had in recorded history, life expectancy beginning to go backwards, the highest rates of chronic disease, multiple chronic diseases in a single biome, type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, and

Speaker 2 morbid obesity, and also just pre-diabetes. And yourself and myself, and several

Speaker 2 prominent thought leaders in the longevity and biohacking space.

Speaker 2 We're in Miami right now and we're supposed to get hit by a hurricane in 24 hours.

Speaker 1 So, Dr.

Speaker 2 Zen was kind enough to actually not cancel his flight and come in and

Speaker 2 to deliver his podcast to you guys. But

Speaker 2 I think there's so much that we can do as a society, as an industry, to put pressure on

Speaker 2 our politicians and our public policy advocates to create public policy that really serves the best interests of the people because we are clearly going the wrong direction in the United States.

Speaker 2 And people that are against the grain, you know, as I've spoken out, again, I am not a physician.

Speaker 2 And so I never tell people, get off your medications, you know, stop taking blood pressure medications, stop taking cholesterol medication.

Speaker 2 But what I do say is there are alternative lifestyle changes that could put you in a position where your physician will take you off of those.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 2 I think there's a real opportunity. We've gotten to such a place now where we're almost at a tipping point.
You know, we spent $4.5 trillion a year on healthcare.

Speaker 2 And at some point, it's going to become too expensive to maintain the status quo. We either go blindly bankrupt or we have to take a clear-eyed look at causality.

Speaker 2 And a very sensitive subject, which you and I spoke a little bit about

Speaker 2 before

Speaker 2 coming on the podcast, was

Speaker 2 the vaccinations

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 2 isolating some of these vaccines, especially the new evolution of mRNA, messenger RNA vaccines. And for

Speaker 2 the layperson,

Speaker 2 mRNA is a, you know, the DNA inside the nucleus of the cell is

Speaker 2 running the show. DNA is the CEO, right? He's giving commands to the cell.
He's replicating himself, making an exact copy of himself or herself.

Speaker 2 But these messages called messenger RNA, messenger ribonucleic acid, this transcription process of sending a message from the DNA in the nucleus of the cell into the cell is a very new way.

Speaker 2 Mimicking that message is a very new way of creating vaccines. You know, when I was growing up, most vaccines were attenuated viruses.
Yeah. Right.
We would, we would take the

Speaker 2 nucleic acid protein of the virus or the, you know, the envelope of the virus, pluck the DNA out, and then you would put put that viral envelope into the body, and the immune system sees it, manufactures an antibody to it, but it has no capacity to infect you, right?

Speaker 2 Because it doesn't have the DNA to inject.

Speaker 1 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 That to me seems like a safer way of creating an immune response.

Speaker 2 I think what happened in the last pandemic, I don't know if it was for scale or volume or for expense.

Speaker 2 But we decided to do what I believe to be a gene experiment and take a synthetic copy of a messenger RNA and use that as a way to solicit an immune response.

Speaker 2 And what have you found to be some of the errors in that as a cardiologist?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so, you know, first of all, Gary,

Speaker 1 I think it's important, as you've said already, this, you're right. It's, let's start from square one.
This isn't a vaccine. This COVID, it was not nothing like traditional vaccines.

Speaker 1 It's a gene therapy, right?

Speaker 1 But because people associate the word vaccine with safe and effective, and there's good reason for that, I mean, if you look at all of the interventions we do in medicine with all the side effects of drugs, et cetera, and I'm not saying no drug or no vaccine is completely safe, right?

Speaker 1 But when you look at and compare them to traditional vaccines that have gone through five to 10 years of testing, they are definitely one of the safest things we do.

Speaker 1 And just to give some perspective here, and again, I know we're talking about published research findings being false, et cetera, but you can still make a comparison.

Speaker 1 According to published data, the serious adverse event rates from traditional vaccines are about one in a million.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 1 With this product, these mRNA products, from all of the data that we know now,

Speaker 1 it's probably one of the biggest medical mistakes,

Speaker 1 potential frauds, and horrific,

Speaker 1 fair to say, experiments that have been,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 impacted upon the world population that I think we will see in our lifetime.

Speaker 1 And in very simple terms, the best quality level of evidence, of course, is a randomized controlled trial.

Speaker 1 But there was a reanalysis done of those original trials done by Pfizer and Moderna, by very eminent scientists, and published in the journal vaccine. People can look this up, still

Speaker 1 stands up to scrutiny. Maybe I'll dig it up and I'll put it in the show notes.

Speaker 1 And they found in the reanalysis of the data that led to the approval, by the way, so this is the source data that led to approval of the vaccines genetic therapies um coercion and mandates

Speaker 1 you were more likely to suffer a serious harm from these vaccines covered vaccines than you were to be hospitalized with covid and that serious harm rate was about one in 800 at two months in the short term and remember this is a population people that was designed who were put into the trials that are less like to get side effects.

Speaker 1 So we're talking about in the short term of a serious adverse event rate at least one in 800. And what does that mean? It means life-changing event, it means hospitalization or disability.

Speaker 1 And, of course, the most common of those serious adverse events were issues related to clotting, pulmonary MBLI heart attacks, for example.

Speaker 3 Now,

Speaker 1 that is unprecedented.

Speaker 1 If we knew that from the beginning, they never would have been approved for use in a single human being. And I genuinely believe what we're seeing now.

Speaker 1 We're seeing obviously excess death rates in highly vaccinated countries. We have plausible mechanisms.

Speaker 1 We have seen mortality statistics yeah we have all the different levels of uh different types of data and different levels of data all pointing in the same direction that this was a very very very bad idea

Speaker 2 so now that we're there um

Speaker 1 what do we do to get rid of it i mean because how does somebody guard against the thrombolytic thrombocytopenias and that the yeah i mean it's going to vary from person to person gary i think i think in general though my overall antidote if you like is again this is our opportunity to maximize our lifestyle changes that we can to reduce any inflammatory process in the body.

Speaker 1 But the truth is, this, until it's fully accepted and acknowledged by the medical establishment and the mainstream politicians, we're not going to get all of the best minds within medical science looking at who is really at risk of long-term problems and what can we do about it.

Speaker 1 And that's obviously my greatest concern. You know, I think one of the things that, you know, my expertise is cardiology.
I'm not a vaccine expert.

Speaker 1 But what I can tell you, one of the things I discovered for the record.

Speaker 1 And discovered, and I published on this, and I think I do have expertise in this particular area, is that the COVID mRNA vaccine seemed to accelerate heart disease.

Speaker 1 So when my dad had his sudden, unexpected cardiac arrest in the summer of 2021, being a very fit guy, someone who didn't have any age, any, no family history of heart disease, you know, had some heart scans done a few years earlier.

Speaker 1 Everything was pretty okay, mild, if you like,

Speaker 1 very active person. I was pretty shocked, you know, to understand why this happened.
And when the post-mortem findings came back, it didn't make sense to me.

Speaker 1 He had two of his three arteries had severe blockages. So in my head, I'm like, something has happened in the last few years in a short space of time that has suddenly accelerated

Speaker 1 his coronary artery disease. And Stephen Gundry, a cardiologist here in the US, published this.

Speaker 2 I just did a podcast with him. Yeah, Stephen's great.

Speaker 1 I met him recently. And what he told me was quite interesting because I haven't published.

Speaker 2 I did a podcast with you in the US and I did a podcast with him in London.

Speaker 3 Oh, right. I just thought that was kind of funny.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should have swapped.

Speaker 1 But what he told me was very interesting. So, you know, he published this paper, this abstract in circulation, and he basically found that in his patients,

Speaker 1 who are middle-aged, the baseline risk of a heart attack went from 11% risk in five years to 25% within eight weeks of having two doses of the mRNA vaccines, which is huge, right?

Speaker 1 When I saw that paper and it was linked to inflammation, I was like, the penny dropped for me. I was like, okay, this is likely what happened to my dad.
even six months after having the vaccine.

Speaker 1 But I immediately thought, if this is real or even partially true, we're going to basically increase everybody's risk of heart disease in the population that's had the vaccine

Speaker 1 and accelerate it. And I was then seeing patients with those problems who had angiograms, pre-vaccine, and suddenly developing 90% blockages within a few months of having two doses.

Speaker 2 A few months. Yes.

Speaker 1 So it's causing rapid acceleration in many people.

Speaker 1 And that's probably one of the main drivers behind the excess death rates is the cardiovascular mortality and heart attacks happening because of these vaccines that should again never have been.

Speaker 1 and be very clear Gary I'm happy to stand in it you know I've given witness statements in in courts uh in Finland and I can back this up I've got a period paper on this honestly speaking this should never have been given in retrospect to any single human being and if we had had system changes in place which is what the movie tries to highlight where actual data that drug industry produces is independently verified from its source, we would never be in the situation to begin with.

Speaker 2 Meaning Meaning, the actual source data, not the consolidated reports that are then

Speaker 2 fed. It's astounding to me that public policymakers approve,

Speaker 2 you know, life-altering medications, drugs, and synthetics, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, based on somebody else's promise that this data is valid or the consolidation of this data has been properly

Speaker 2 put together.

Speaker 2 I just feel like we should be able to see the blueprint, not just the final construction.

Speaker 1 I think there's a huge blind spot. So people say, well, why would people deliberately do this? And I don't think it's that simple.

Speaker 2 I don't think it's that simple either. Like, again,

Speaker 2 I want to say that I don't think a pharmaceutical CEO or the boardroom is like, how do we kill more people? Or let's figure out a way to hide this data.

Speaker 2 I just think the design of the system is such that the visibility

Speaker 2 is not there.

Speaker 2 Certainly not the informed consent.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. And it's ultimately self-defeating as well, because it's a kind of false economy.
You know, one of the problems with the drug industry is, well, if you look at data

Speaker 1 where in the last 20 years, most new drugs are copies of old ones. They change a few molecules here and there

Speaker 1 and they take an old generic drug, they patent it, give it a new name. and make lots of money, then move on to the next one.

Speaker 1 And only about, you know, less than 10% of drugs, maybe less than that, are actually clinically meaningful, new drugs that come on the market of therapeutic value over other drugs. Right.

Speaker 1 And there was one. GOP ones.

Speaker 1 And one study, you know, that was done in,

Speaker 1 looked at data from Canada and France showed that double the amount of drugs that were beneficial, about 15% of them, were more harmful.

Speaker 1 So the overall net effect of, it's very clear, the overall net effect at the moment of the drug industry on society is a negative one.

Speaker 1 If we get better transparent evaluation of data, then it will, and it's a level playing field.

Speaker 1 It would actually encourage real innovation within the drug industry where we could produce actual drugs that are going to be beneficial for specific groups of society.

Speaker 2 Because there are some drugs that are beneficial. There are.

Speaker 1 There are. Absolutely.
But the system at the moment is not, it's not, it's a, it's, in my view, it's a, it's a very brittle, false economy, and it's causing huge damage to the population.

Speaker 1 And if we have the opportunity, Gary, which I'm sure hopefully we will, I know when you know, coming here, we were going to meet a very prominent politician.

Speaker 1 And again, as a doctor, for me, this is, I know that things are very polarized in this country.

Speaker 1 People ask me that, you know, why are you speaking to that guy who's a Republican senator or blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 I say, listen, you know, first of all, I quote Malcolm X, who said, I'm for the truth no matter who tells it.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 1 And I even got criticized from, you know, friends of mine saying that, why did you get interviewed by Tucker Carlson, for example? Right. And that's what I replied to them.

Speaker 1 But the other side of it is as doctors, our duty and responsibility is not to discriminate people according to their race, their political affiliation, their gender.

Speaker 2 If you needed to know a patient's political affiliation before you actually operated on that.

Speaker 1 So I'm very happy to speak to any politician that has the means ultimately to change the laws, Gary, that got us into this problem in the first place.

Speaker 1 These are unjust, unscientific, and unethical laws that allowed big pharma to have so much power. And we need to then change those laws back to something that's democratic and fair and just.

Speaker 2 Great. So what is the future for Dr.
Malhotra? I mean, where do you, where is your passion and your vision, you know, in a perfect world, what have you accomplished in the next five years?

Speaker 1 I mean, I,

Speaker 1 you know, my good friend Robert Kennedy Jr. says, when you speak the truth, you got to let go of the outcome.
So I don't think of five years.

Speaker 1 I think, I think day by day, doing your best, being the best version of yourself.

Speaker 1 My primary goal and my purpose as a doctor is to improve patient outcomes, you know, in very simple terms, manage risks, treat illness, and relieve suffering, and to have conversations and be involved in creating environments where everybody can be, everyone can flourish, everyone can be the best version of themselves through conversation, you know, through structural changes to address the biopsychosocial determinants of health, you know.

Speaker 1 So that's really where my focus is.

Speaker 2 You know, I'm,

Speaker 2 first of all, this has been an amazing podcast. I definitely want to have you back again.

Speaker 2 You know, I wind down every podcast by asking all my guests the same question. So if you see my podcast, you know this question's coming.

Speaker 2 And there's no right or wrong answer to this, but what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 first and foremost, in the last few years, Gary, I think I've become a much more spiritual

Speaker 1 partly, partly, you know, through our own challenges in life.

Speaker 1 Everyone has unique challenges and we all suffer. That's part of life in different ways.

Speaker 1 I've lost both my parents in a very short space of time.

Speaker 1 I've also had a lot of medical persecution. When you put your head above the parapet, you know, you're going to get attacked.

Speaker 1 And I found a lot of comfort in spirituality. And what I've learned from that is...

Speaker 1 The most important thing that going back to square one is that you can't be a healthy person and you can't have a healthy society unless you have healthy values.

Speaker 1 So how can I be the best possible human I can be? And what does that mean? It means

Speaker 1 personal growth. It means lifelong learning.
It means giving back to the community.

Speaker 1 And it means making sure I enhance the quality of my relationships with my friends, my family, my so-called partner, whenever that happens. So that for me is my main focus.

Speaker 1 And then to disseminate that to as many people as possible.

Speaker 2 That's a good one. That is a good one.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 Dr.

Speaker 2 Mahaltrai, I can't thank you enough for coming on the podcast. This has been amazing.

Speaker 2 Thank you, Gary. I actually enjoyed the pre-podcast in my kitchen as much as the podcast.

Speaker 2 So promise me that you'll come back again and you'll stay in the fight for our Make America a Healthy, Great Movement.

Speaker 1 I look forward to that.

Speaker 1 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 And as always, guys, that's just science.