The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - The Doctor That Got Banned For Speaking Out: “We've Been Lied To About Medication & COVID!”, “After 2021 Heart Attacks Increased 25%!” Dr Aseem Malhotra

Starting point is 00:00:00 Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

Starting point is 00:00:37 thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. From everything I know now, I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that the COVID vaccine introduction has had a catastrophic net negative effect on society. And this is really most disturbing. And I've not been public about this before, so I'm going to tell you this for the first time. Dr. Asim Al-Hattari is one of the UK's leading celebrity heart doctors. Whose influential research has sparked important conversations about nutrition and exercise and the healthcare system. The Times journalist called me and said, we've got reports now of a 25% increase in heart attacks in hospitals in Scotland,

Starting point is 00:01:11 which are unexplained. What do you think about the vaccine? I was a bit surprised, said, what do you mean? He said, and to have that deep knowledge and understanding gives me very deep pain. And medical knowledge is under commercial control. This is the root of the problem. The system is psychopathic when it comes to making money. And there is so much harm that comes from drug prescriptions.

Starting point is 00:01:29 One credible estimate suggests the third most common cause of death globally after heart disease and cancer is prescribed medications. This is a dirty secret within medicine. We should shift our approach to health from a predominantly drug-based model within healthcare to one which is more based upon lifestyle. So what is that? The first thing that needs to be done is by 2030, it's estimated

Starting point is 00:01:51 that about 23.3 million people will die yearly because of heart disease globally. And there are 200 million people taking statins around the world. But the increase in life expectancy with statins over a five-year period, 4.2 days. How do I prevent myself ending up on either statins or having a heart attack? This is really important information. So... Dr. Asim, you're working on a documentary called First Do No Farm, which will be out shortly. Why did you choose the name for your documentary, First Do No Farm? Well, first and foremost, the credit to that name actually goes to my co-producer, Donald O'Neill, who's made a number of health documentaries. And he's a former international athlete, you know, and he used to work in marketing and PR. So he's very good with

Starting point is 00:02:42 slogans and soundbites. But it totally resonated with my work and what I've been doing probably for well over a decade, which is to try and shift our approach to health from a predominantly pharmacological-based, drug-based model within healthcare to one which is more based upon lifestyle. And that's because that's where the best evidence is in terms of improving our health, but also in terms of managing the healthcare system where there is so much waste, where drugs are over-prescribed. And obviously, First Do No Farm means

Starting point is 00:03:19 in the consultation room, the ideal scenario should be with every patient that if there is a non-drug based way non-pharmacological way of managing their illness chronic disease which is the big problem in society right now on healthcare systems that should be the primary primary approach as well as highlighting through the title that there is so much harm that comes from drug prescriptions just i mean this is something that even brings gasps from audiences when i give talks and lectures all around the world and whenever even i say i even think bloody hell how have we

Starting point is 00:03:56 got to this situation that you know one credible estimate suggests the third most common cause of death globally after heart disease and cancer is prescribed medications what your doctor prescribes for you so-called appropriately mainly because the information which doctors use to make decisions for patients when it's prescribing drugs invariably is based upon a gross exaggeration on the safety and the benefits of those drugs. And the phrase, first do no harm, which is the original phrase that you spanned for the title, where does that phrase originate from? Well, actually, it's one of the basic principles of medical ethics.

Starting point is 00:04:36 You know, as doctors, that's something that's almost we're indoctrinated or ingrained with whenever we, you know, practice medicine, treat patients. That should be, that's at the forefront of our minds it should be at the forefront of our minds what what professionally what is your professional title um i'm a consultant cardiologist what does that mean if i so i uh i special so i qualified as a doctor um medical doctor in 2001. And then after becoming a, I decided after two or three years of doing my sort of initial postgraduate basic training in medicine to subspecialize in cardiology, which is basically everything to do with the heart. And then within that subspecialization of cardiology or specialization of cardiology, I trained in interventional cardiology.

Starting point is 00:05:26 In layman's terms, Steve, that means keel heart surgery. So that's what I trained to do. And I did that up until probably 2014, 2015. And then I shifted more towards a more holistic approach to managing heart disease, especially looking at the science and practicing the evidence

Starting point is 00:05:46 base behind how lifestyle changes can manage heart disease and even potentially reverse it. You must have seen a lot of hearts in your time. Yes. I think in terms of, I was thinking about this because, you know, up until 2019, I was, you know, an NHS doctor. We'll come back to later what happened in 2019. But, and that's my passion. But within the NHS, which I think trains doctors brilliantly, it's a very high intense workload.

Starting point is 00:06:18 And just to give you perspective on that, you know, we have the highest capita population per doctors in Europe. So least number of doctors per population in the country and the most number of doctors on night shifts. So it's quite intense. And because of that, I was thinking back in terms of the patients I would see on the wards and the throughput and the people that I would see, you know, in what we call cardiac catheter lab, where we did the diagnostic angiograms to visualize the heart arteries and we put stents in etc over my career i've probably managed tens of thousands of patients why did you choose to specialize in the heart versus other parts of the sort of medical um ecosystem that you could have pursued what was was there something? Yeah. I don't know if there's one answer to that. I think one

Starting point is 00:07:05 trigger very early on in my life is, um, you know, I grew up in a medical family, both my parents are GPs and I had an older brother who had down syndrome and, uh, which also meant he had a small hole in his heart as well. And when I was 11 and he was 13, shortly after his birthday, he got a tummy bug, a standard tummy bug. We didn't think anything of it. Within six days, Steve, he became breathless and rapidly deteriorated, got admitted to hospital and had a cardiac arrest and died. And later on it emerged, the post-mortem showed his heart was massively enlarged and essentially had something called viral myocarditis. It can happen actually to anybody. You get a cold and in one in 10,000 people up to one in 100,000 people, the body then has what we call an autoimmune reaction. Instead

Starting point is 00:07:57 of dealing with a cold on its own, it then attacks the heart. And in a third of those patients, you can basically, who get get that they will deteriorate and they will die and so i think for me that had such a profound impact on my life and with both parents being doctors of course there was a bit of there was no pressure for my parents they wanted me to you know my dad wanted to be a cricketer but um i think that was implanted in my mind that if i was to go into medicine, I wanted to get involved in managing and helping people, you know, prevent heart disease. So I think that's where it started from. It's interesting because when we think about our health,

Starting point is 00:08:33 a lot of people think about the amount of weight they have on them. They think, you know, abdominal fat, they think about how strong they are, their muscles and things like that. Then a lot of the other things are very superficial, Those sort of measures of our health, because we've never really seen our heart, and it's similar to our brain, because we've never seen our heart or our brain, I think we typically devalue the role that they play in our overall health. But when I was reading some stats around heart disease and how many people die from heart disease, I was shocked. So if we start there then, can you give me a sort of macro picture on why it's important to keep our hearts healthy and how many people are dying because of unhealthy hearts? Yeah, so globally it's estimated, and it's on the increase,

Starting point is 00:09:21 certainly by 2030 it's estimated that about 23.3 million people will die yearly, because of heart disease, globally, right. And that's a huge number. And just to put it in perspective, it's the one of the leading causes of premature death. In European men, it is the leading cause of premature death. And, and that's why I think it's so important, not just about people's lives being cut short early, but also there is an associated morbidity, which means the quality of life deterioration that happens with people who are diagnosed with heart disease that may not be able to exercise very much because they get pain in their chest because of a blockage,

Starting point is 00:09:59 or they may develop what we call heart failure, where the pump function of the heart is affected because of blockages or because of a previous heart attack where they survived, and therefore they can't actually do the activities they want to enjoy. And that's, you know, way bigger. In fact, that's, well, sorry, just as important as, of course, the premature death rate. So, no, it's a massive issue. And it's interesting, Steve, that you mentioned the image side where people think about excess body fat and big muscles and that kind of thing and that also plays into a certain culture and mindset that i think detracts from us actually addressing the root cause of many problems with society today in our health um which is not related to image actually it's about the the basics of of uh reducing stress about our social interactions

Starting point is 00:10:39 etc um to some degree obviously what we eat is linked to how we look but um yeah i mean absolutely i think it's not something people really think about enough um often until it's too late how does it impact women because we mentioned it being the single biggest killer of men i think in europe you said what about women it's um not as bad for women and part of the reason for that steve is and traditionally women on average will live live up to 10 years longer than men right and the reason for that is that women don't tend to develop heart disease um at the same age as men but after the menopause the rates of heart disease actually start to catch up so even though women will live longer it's still a big issue with women as well um absolutely your mother passed in november 2018 after a bout of sepsis the i was interesting i

Starting point is 00:11:34 read this quote you'd said i think it was on um on i news you said you're a gp that had dedicated 25 years of your life to the nhs and ultimately were failed by it. How were you failed by it? In my mum's circumstance, what happened was, you know, the system was under some strain. I mean, she had suffered with a debilitating rheumatoid and osteoarthritis for many years. Initially, I think a lot of her health issues were rooted in her weight. I mean, she was addicted to all processed food. She consumed a lot of sugar. I grew up in a household where there were just cakes and biscuits everywhere. And, you know, she was a very loving mom. But I was addicted to sugar

Starting point is 00:12:18 probably because of that as well for some time. But it affected her health. And I love my mom very, very dearly. And it was heartbreaking to watch her suffer slowly over a number of years. But the way she was failed by the NHS specifically is that I had already been campaigning for many, many years in terms of seeing how the system of the NHS was being put under more pressure, a lot of it by diet-related disease. And there were so many opportunities for us that were being missed to actually improve the system so that doctors could provide quality care to every patient to a good degree when my mom was admitted to hospital and she was sick with infection in her spine she'd become so frail

Starting point is 00:12:55 from her arthritis that her immune system probably wasn't functioning properly as well because the hospital was under so much strain because we had not sorted out the root causes of the pressure on the system they missed a heart attack for nine days and it's extraordinary steve i remember i was a they knew i was a cardiologist and it was our local hospital my dad was a local gp and he was uh considered a medical leader i mean he was loved and liked and respected massively so even with all of that um they did everything they could to help her. But she went, she became breathless one day. They treated her for, you know, for infection with lots of fluid, et cetera. And they carried out a heart scan. It was decided, let's do a heart scan on her. But nobody actually looked at the result of the heart scan and shared it with the team because they were so busy. They just missed it. And I get sent the results nine days later being asked, what do you think? And I

Starting point is 00:13:51 immediately noticed that it was an echo. It was a heart scan looking at the pump muscle of the heart that part of the heart muscle wasn't working well. I said, she's had it. You've missed it. It was a relatively minor heart attack, but enough to cause it to go into what we call heart failure. Within 24 hours, fluid in the lung, intensive care, went into a coma, and that was it. So that was a failing of the NHS, but not because of the principles of the NHS, but because the NHS over the years, Steve, has lost its basic ability to care for patients because the principles of the NHS have not been upheld. For anyone that isn't aware,

Starting point is 00:14:31 the NHS means National Health Service, which is the health service and system within the UK. Just a few years later, your father passes in July 21 from a sudden unexplained heart attack at 73 years old. I mean, so there's three members of your family that have ultimately died as a result of or closely linked to heart attacks. Your immediate family. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:07 Yeah, to some degree, yes. All related to some degree yes all related to the heart all related to the heart was your father's heart attack avoidable in your view if you think about the lifestyle choices and things like that you just you talked about your mother there was that avoidable any in any sense of the word, interesting. So there are two components to my dad's death. Strictly, the post-mortem findings didn't reveal a heart attack per se, but for all intents and purposes, it can be seen that way. So the first thing that happened was,

Starting point is 00:15:37 my dad, by the way, was a very fit man for his age, 73 years old, played badminton every week, had a bit of high blood pressure, but had got that better controlled after quitting sugar, partly because of all my campaigning. And he listened to me and he was very into eating healthy food. In fact, you know, I consider myself to be extremely fit. I'm obsessed with exercise. You know, I played a lot of competitive sport when I was younger, partly because of him. And it was very unexpected when he called me up.

Starting point is 00:16:08 It's coming up to his anniversary, July 26, 2021. And he said, Asim, I've got some chest discomfort. And I asked him, you know, to describe it. In medicine, 80% of your diagnosis, if you're a good doctor, comes from the conversation. So the way he described his chest discomfort was a central heaviness going to his shoulders. So immediately you think, this is heart. And I said, you need to call an ambulance. He was a bit reluctant to call an ambulance for

Starting point is 00:16:31 whatever reason. And then I said, okay, I was in London. He was in Manchester. That's where I grew up. And I decided to go and have a shower, get ready and get on the train. And he was ringing up his neighbors who were both doctors. And by the time I came out of the shower, I called him back and there was no answer. And I remember my heart just thinking, I really hope he's not had a cardiac arrest. I thought, no, this can't be what's going on. Kept ringing, ringing. And eventually the neighbor who was a doctor who knew me, she answered the phone and she said, Asim, your dad's had a cardiac arrest. We're doing CPR on him. I know from national data, and I've even written about this in the BMJ, the average response time, Steve, for many, many years, one of the things that we do have done very well in the NHS,

Starting point is 00:17:15 it's one of the best in the world, is our treatment of heart attacks and the speed of treatment and even cardiac arrests. I knew the average response time with eight minutes. I said the ambulance will be here in eight minutes. Because of the timing, almost certainly he will have what we call a shockable rhythm, as in the heart is probably having an electrical disturbance and we will be able to shock him out of it. More than 50% chance he will survive. I'm thinking already like this. Ten minutes pass by. Ambulance hasn't shown.

Starting point is 00:17:43 20 minutes, nothing. 30 minutes, they get there. And I FaceTime them, they attach the cardiac monitor, it's a flat line, he's gone, nothing to be done. And of course, that was, you know, at that stage, I was obviously devastated. And I wrote in the iNewspaper about how I screamed louder than I've ever screamed in my life. But to come back to that situation, first and foremost. So the first thing is, if the ambulance had turned up on time, almost certainly it's likely he would have survived. That's the first thing. But the

Starting point is 00:18:12 second thing in my mind is why is he had a cardiac arrest in the first place? He was a really healthy guy. And in my family, as in on his side, there was no family history of heart disease. He had high blood pressure. Okay. But that was about it, right? And he was otherwise pretty good. And when the post-mortem came back, there were three major arteries of the heart. Two of them had severe blockages. And I thought, this is odd, because I knew his lifestyle.

Starting point is 00:18:39 This is my area of interest and expertise, heart disease specifically, how it progresses, how you can reverse it, all that stuff, what medications can do, what they can't do as well and i thought to myself hold on i knew his scan from a few years earlier something has happened in the last two or three years that has caused a rapid acceleration in the disease of the heart right in terms of the blockages getting very rapidly you know um, progressing. I thought, this doesn't make sense. And I thought to myself, was he just severely stressed? Like stress can do it. Very severe stress can do it. He'd lost, obviously, my mum a couple of years earlier, but he was a very resilient guy. He was

Starting point is 00:19:21 a vice president of the British Medical Association who was still involved in medical politics. During COVID, he was one of the faces on the BBC during the COVID pandemic, talking about how we should manage this, et cetera. So he was still very mentally active. He wasn't a recluse sitting in a corner. He was still social. So it doesn't really fit.

Starting point is 00:19:38 And then a publication appeared in the journal Circulation, which is considered the premier cardiology journal. And a cardiologist called Stephen Gundry, who you may have heard of, he's done a lot of work in lifestyle and lectins and stuff. And he actually had a very senior role in the American Heart Association, very eminent published cardiologist. He published an abstract where he'd looked at several hundred of his patients who had taken the COVID vaccines, specifically mRNA vaccines, so either Pfizer or Moderna, two doses. And what had happened was within eight weeks of taking those jabs, their baseline risk went from 11% chance of a heart

Starting point is 00:20:21 attack in five years to 25% chance just within eight weeks. That is a huge jump. Like, just to give you perspective, Steve, if I today decided that I was going to just consume junk food, all my meals, right? I was going to smoke 20 cigarettes a day. I was going to stop exercising. I wouldn't get anywhere close to increasing my risk within eight weeks. And the mechanism was through inflammation. And I thought, ah, I know heart disease is a chronic inflammatory condition. I think it's a lifestyle. So if this is even partially true, it means that the COVID vaccines may be causing inflammation around the heart. And that means that many people are going to have an acceleration in heart disease.

Starting point is 00:21:03 And that may explain what happened to my dad, but that was only one bit of data. Of course, a good scientist knows, okay, it gets you thinking. It's a hypothesis potentially, obviously some data, but it's not enough to make it more than likely at this stage. And within two weeks, call it providence or whatever else, I got a phone call from somebody who I know. I consider him one of the smartest cardiologists, very high integrity, from a very prestigious institution. And he called me up and he said,

Starting point is 00:21:35 Asim, I've got something to tell you. I'm very upset. He said, a group of researchers that I'm linked to in this institution had accidentally found, and this has nothing to do with blood tests or cardiac risk, through a very high-tech imaging of the heart modality they were using, that there was inflammation of the arteries, which would cause obviously potentially heart attacks, that was there in the vaccinated, but not there in the unvaccinated. The lead researcher sat the team down and he said, guys, I just want to make this clear. We are not going to explore these findings any further

Starting point is 00:22:11 because it may affect our funding from the drug industry. Now, obviously people hearing this are going to think, wow, that is, sounds corrupt. This is something that has been a big problem within medicine for a very, very long time, which isn't getting an airing, but it didn't surprise me of that, but it was still quite shocking. But for me at that stage, Steve, it was okay. At the very least, I should ask the question. And I was nervous about it. I had been someone, took the jab myself. I went to Good Morning Britain and very early on when they were just offering it to high-risk people to say that, I think that this is probably safe and people shouldn't be worried. And this was, again, specifically to address people from Black and ethnic minority communities, because there was a lower uptake amongst those communities, partly also because

Starting point is 00:22:58 they are often amongst some of the most marginalized members of society, and they have less trust in authority and government. So you can see how the psychology plays in there. And I convinced a friend of mine who's a film director, Gurinder Chadha, who directed Bend It Like Beckham. You might know some of her movies. And we went on together in Good Morning Britain to say, listen, I think this is fine.

Starting point is 00:23:18 So I had all of that. And so I was, in many ways, I was indoctrinated. And there is, you know, and people don't like to admit they're wrong or think they've got it wrong. So for me to start turning or changing my mind or asking the question is not necessarily an easy thing to do,

Starting point is 00:23:32 but I've done that throughout my career. So if anyone has the character, I know myself to be able to say, listen, okay, there's new evidence here or whatever else, I felt I could do that, but I was still nervous. And I thought, this is not something that I think the BBC are going to pick up on. I had a good rapport with GB News at that point. And I still do. And one of the presenters, Alexandra Phillips, was a friend of mine. And I called her up and said, listen,

Starting point is 00:23:59 you know, we were doing, she wanted me on anyway. I was doing regular health slots every few weeks. I said, what, I've seen do you want to talk about next week? And I said, I think let's talk about this. She said, okay, go on GB News. I say, you know, the vaccine committee of the country should look into this. This is what I know. This is what I found. Whistleblower, all this stuff.

Starting point is 00:24:18 I said, my dad died as well. And this may be the reason for his death. And I just asked that question. Of course, I didn't expect it to go viral. You know, it got millions of views and it was getting reach all over America and that kind of thing. Strangely, by this point, Steve, I don't know if you remember, but Omicron wave had started and we were getting reports from South Africa, which was really reassuring that from the doctor that discovered it, that this doesn't seem to be more harmful than the flu now. Great. Okay. It's mutated as a different strain. This is really great news. And then Sajid Javid around the same time, the secretary for

Starting point is 00:24:54 health had come out in parliament and said, we are now going to pass through legislation that the COVID vaccine needs to be mandated for healthcare workers. Despite the fact that the British Medical Association, medical colleges, we've never, in our country, one thing that's really good, especially within the medical establishment, we don't believe in mandating any drug. They do this in America. They've never done this here.

Starting point is 00:25:16 And although they weren't very vocal about it, they kind of were a bit relatively quiet, they weren't supporting it openly, saying that we should mandate. This was coming from this political decision. I said, this is very odd. At a stage now where we're thinking there's serious harm, know it's not and by that stage 2021 november most people were understanding now it wasn't stopping infection right for most people right so i said this doesn't make any sense so i then

Starting point is 00:25:37 started campaigning on this issue and i started campaigning on this issue was able to get into the mainstream news on this particular issue because around that time, the Eye newspaper had published an investigation into the delay that led to my dad's death of the ambulance service, right? And I had also got privy to knowledge in that story that the deputy chief nurse of NHS England had called me up and said there'd been basically a cover-up by the government and the Department of Health to stop people knowing for months there were ambulance delays. Doctors and members of public, I thought this is unacceptable. So I exposed this, it became a massive story, BBC News. And when the BBC presenter was saying, Dr. Mahotra, what's going on wrong with the NHS? Why is it failing? Why is this happening?

Starting point is 00:26:21 I said, it's multifactorial, but I said, one of the most important reasons is you failed. We failed for years to address the root cause of what's driving stress on the system, taking on the excesses of big food and big pharma. But I said, right now, we've got 80 to 100,000 NHS staff who are refusing to have the COVID vaccine. This would be a crisis. They're going to lose their jobs. This is, this bandaid needs to be overturned. It's not scientific. It's not ethical. So I got, I got that into the mainstream and ultimately we ended up overturning, right? The, the, um, the mandate. Um, but there was a backlash, Steve, behind the scenes, and I've not been public about this before. So I'm going to tell you this for the first time, because I think it's time I tell this story. Shortly after me going on GB News,

Starting point is 00:27:06 as a doctor who'd had the vaccine, had been on Good Morning Britain to say it was likely safe and effective, to then talking about we should maybe look into this and maybe pause the situation because of these heart issues that need to be investigated. I received an email from the Royal College of Physicians. This is the oldest medical

Starting point is 00:27:26 institution in the world saying, Dr. Malhotra, we have received a number of anonymous complaints from other fellows that you, in reference to my GB News interview, that you are spreading anti-vax misinformation and you've got four weeks to respond to this and they were saying all the different sanctions that could happen because of me doing this right steve at that point i thought if we are going to get a pause on this vaccine and really investigate it it's because of such an indoctrination because so many people billions of people around the world have taken this and therefore the the the battle to expose it is going to be harder than anything I've ever done. The only way in, my only chance is to get it published in a peer

Starting point is 00:28:11 reviewed journal and then to get it into the news. I spent nine months at that stage, literally eating, breathing, sleeping, speaking to two Pfizer whistleblowers, speaking to eminent scientists in expertise I didn't have around immunology and vaccine development. Of course, I had the understanding of cardiology, you know, better than anybody in this particular field, this particular area. And when I did that research and looked at it, I first of all concluded that there absolutely needs to be a suspension of the vaccine because what happened by the summer of 2022, and this is actually the most crucial and important piece of data on its own, which should

Starting point is 00:28:51 have been enough to suspend it and actually suggest that it probably shouldn't have been rolled out in the first place, is that those trials that were done by Pfizer and Moderna, which led to all the media reports, 9,500% effective, the approval by the regulator, the rollout, the coercion, the mandates. They were reanalyzed by some very eminent scientists, including the associate of the BMJ, one of the world's top epidemiologists. And they published in the journal Vaccine, which is the premier journal for vaccines. And they were able to get new data that was made available on Health Canada's website and the FDA in America's website.

Starting point is 00:29:30 And what they did in their reanalysis of the original high quality clinical trials is they found, Steve, you were more likely to suffer serious harm from taking the vaccine at a rate of one in 800. That meant hospitalization, disability, or a life-changing event, then you were to be hospitalized with COVID. And this is during the early phase, right? This is during the most lethal strain. For all age groups?

Starting point is 00:29:55 Yes. Well, absolutely. Well, they put all age groups together. So on average in all age groups, that's a very good question. But what's missing is that actually, okay, is there a benefit that's greater than harm in certain age groups? But we can indirectly answer that in a second. So that was the original trial. So on average, it was more harmful than beneficial. Okay. But even before talking about all age groups, Steve, a one in 800 harm rate for a vaccine is completely unacceptable in the sense that we have pulled other vaccines in the past for much less harm. The swine flu vaccine was suspended globally

Starting point is 00:30:31 because it was found to cause Guillain-Barre syndrome, a debilitating neurological condition in one in 100,000 people. Rotavirus vaccine was pulled in 1999 because it was found to cause a form of bowel obstruction in children at one in 10,000. So you've already got a harm rate of 1 in 800, irrespective of, right? So that first and foremost should be a red flag to say, hold on, this is too much. When they say harm rate, how do they, what's the range of definitions of harm? Well, in this one, they categorize

Starting point is 00:31:00 serious harm as it caused you to be hospitalized yeah it caused a disability okay or something that was life-changing now of course that can incorporate lots of different things but of those and i spoke to the lead researcher i know work with him on other things um 40 percent of those serious harms were actually related to clotting disorders like lung clots heart attacks etc and make sure i'm super clear here because because I don't understand the data you're citing. So you're saying that they found one in 800 people would have serious harm or harm? Serious harm.

Starting point is 00:31:32 Serious harm. One in 800 people had... In the trials. One in 800, yeah, one in 800. Serious harm, right? Now, just to give you perspective, so you can balance it out, just because this is important,

Starting point is 00:31:42 it's a question you've asked, it's really important. We didn't have any good real world data at that point on can we separate vaccinated from unvaccinated to look at what the hospitalization rate would be for COVID, for example, in people who took the vaccine versus the people that didn't, according to age group. That data in the whole world, the only country to make that data available was the UK.

Starting point is 00:32:07 And they did that in the beginning of 2023, so January last year. And what did that show? After two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, Steve, if you were over 70, so this is the highest risk group, you had to vaccinate 2 500 people to prevent one person being hospitalized with covid this was with the different strain the omnicom strain because the original strain was yeah it was they didn't yeah it was you're right it was with the omicron strain

Starting point is 00:32:38 so that was still but it gave us a ballpark figure that even that so it's like so say a patient comes to me and says doc what are the benefits of this drug as a prevention whatever else and i say to them well if you take this there's a one in two thousand five hundred chance it will help you prevent you being hospitalized i'll be honest with you steve i mean in medicine in all the drugs i've used and all the data i know about different medications and heart disease etc that figure i mean it's a very serious issue but that figure is a joke i mean there's a very serious issue but that figure is a joke i mean there's nothing of that of such poor and then when you get under the eight when you get to people under the age of say uh 50 you're talking about having to vaccinate maybe

Starting point is 00:33:14 several hundred thousand to prevent one is that relevant for that the first strain of covid as well because or do we not have the data on that because we don't have that data on that we do in my paper which i published actually we did have some data on that? We don't have that data on that. We do, in my paper, which I published, actually, we did have some data on Delta. And if I remember correctly, the data on the over 70s, there's also problems with this a little bit because it's not corrected for other factors, such as socioeconomics, et cetera,

Starting point is 00:33:37 risk factors that might make people more vulnerable. So if I remember correctly from that paper, if you're over 70, that was about one in two fifths. Delta was the worst strain, actually. So about one in two fifths. Delta was the worst strain actually. So about one in two 50. Okay. On the British Heart Foundation website, I'm sure you've read this. Just to read out what they say on there.

Starting point is 00:33:54 It says that up to one in 10,000 people with the Pfizer vaccine might experience, are at risk of myocarditis or pericarditis. Have I pronounced that correctly? Up to one in 10 000 people for the moderna vaccine and it's not possible to submit other vaccines because they're not frequently used in the uk all three of these covid 19 vaccines are mrna vaccines designed to target the omniconstraint and at the top of this it says the risk of myocarditis or pericarditis after covid 19 vaccine is very low low. How do you respond to that? Do you think you agree with that? No, I don't agree with it at all. I think there are a number of layers to respond to this. I think the first thing to say, Steve, is the British Heart Foundation with a great respect to them,

Starting point is 00:34:38 and they do a lot of good work, overall is still part of the so-called establishment, which has been blinded for years to actually even address so many issues on health when it doesn't suit the interests of big pharma. And I can say that categorically because I know one of the chief advisor to heart disease for the British Heart Foundation, with the greatest respect to him him is a guy called Professor Rory Collins at the University of Oxford. And they have said similar things when it comes to statin drugs, which we'll talk about later.

Starting point is 00:35:13 But that person, the people who advise them are people who are heavily funded and linked to pharma, taking their institution, taking hundreds of millions, for example. So there's a huge bias there to start with. That's the first thing. But for me, what the British Heart Foundation are not doing

Starting point is 00:35:29 is actually countering, and I'd love them to counter that because I'm very open for the debate here, is that you've got a reanalysis of, and they know this, the best way of determining serious harm from any drug is actually looking, one of the best ways, is the highest quality level of evidence, which is the randomized control trials, which is where led to the approval. When you've got an

Starting point is 00:35:49 independent reanalysis in the peer-reviewed journal saying more harm than good from the beginning, that in itself, and then we look at real world data, Steve, there's so many other bits of data that they're ignoring. Basically, to answer your question, they're ignoring lots of other data, which is very clear, whether it's autopsy data, whether it's other studies that came out of Israel that showed, for example, this was published in a journal called Nature Scientific Reports. And again, they ignore this. They don't talk about it. So it's like, hold on, guys. You're not even mentioning this data.

Starting point is 00:36:18 They showed. And this is really most disturbing. In 2021, there was a 25% increase in heart attacks and or cardiac arrests in people aged between 16 and 39, which was associated with the COVID vaccine, but not associated with COVID. How do they tease out? I was thinking about the increase in heart- related conditions around the pandemic and following the pandemic and in much of your work and i think in this book i can't actually pronounce the word pop diet the pop diet you talk about how these other sort of lifestyle factors like community friendships relationships stress mental health being sedentary sedentary all these things can contribute to heart problems so when i think about the

Starting point is 00:37:04 pandemic i go people weren't seeing their friends we were stressed more than ever people were losing their jobs they were furloughed yeah they had mental health you know we saw the mental health uh stats explode yeah um all the factors there that are linked to heart disease so how do we know that it it wasn't those factors of the pandemic that caused an increase in heart-related issues? And how can we tease that out from the vaccine? Really good question. Because remember, I also said that early on before I realized the vaccine might be playing a role.

Starting point is 00:37:35 I actually thought that was the most likely explanation of the increased heart attacks, lockdown stress, poor diet, etc. You'd expect to see an increase. You would. And I think it has played a role, Steve, for sure. It has played a role steve for sure it has played a role but then when you look at the quality of data to say how much of a role that's played that it's on a different level when you look at the vaccine when you look at the plausible mechanism you look at the types of people that are dying young people and stuff like that it doesn't fit um i'll be honest, my personal view, it is a primary driver without any shadow of a doubt in my mind and a personal view of the excess deaths. As a

Starting point is 00:38:10 scientist, I'll say it's a likely significant contribution factor, but probably the most likely because another aspect to all of this is what we call pharmacovigilance reports. So these are reports that are done by members of the public when they they have an adverse reaction to any drug and it's not easy to fill in you fill in these what we call yellow card scheme you can get it online and you send it off to your doctor or to you know the regulator those reports and i've throughout my career i've never seen the extent like for example i'll give you an example um after 9.7 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was ultimately pulled, right?

Starting point is 00:38:47 AstraZeneca, of course, was also one of the COVID vaccines. There were 800,000, in this country, 800,000 yellow card reports. Now, some of them are not going to be serious, serious, but people don't fill in a yellow card report if you've had a bit of a fever after having a vaccine. They felt quite ill, ill enough to that's already. And then

Starting point is 00:39:05 within that, it's estimated maybe one in five of those from other data would suggest serious harm. So other data from reporting and with the, so with about, I think 30 million doses, if it was probably about 30 million doses of Pfizer, we had about 500,000 yellow card reports in this country, right? Which is still a lot, you know, it's one in 60 yellow card reports. Now, they're all not going to be super serious, hospitalization, death, whatever else. But when you put all of the data together, Steve, that it paints a picture that makes it look as clear as day. That anybody doubting, you know, it should be, the evidence should be, this is the primary cause of the excess deaths until proven otherwise. That's the level of evidence, Steve.

Starting point is 00:39:46 But it's just being ignored. It's being ignored. And I can talk about why it's being ignored. One of the things that have been sort of gaps in my head that I've been keen to fill is, do you believe that if we hadn't have introduced the vaccine, more or less people would have survived COVID? Because I've got close friends of mine that got COVID, and I watched them go from very healthy looking people to basically skeletons. Actually, a good friend, one of the CEOs of my company, his dad went from being a very healthy man to being basically looking like a skeleton and almost died. And then I've got,

Starting point is 00:40:18 I know of other people that did die. So I think in the grand scheme of things when we think about um vaccines was it a net positive that we had a vaccine there is from everything i know now i have slowly and reluctantly come to the conclusion that the covid vaccine introduction has had a catastrophic overall net negative effect on the population and society. And let me just caveat this because you've mentioned the fact that people suffered from COVID and I'm not denying that. I've got patients, Steve, that I see that have had long COVID, that weren't vaccinated, okay, and have suffered quite badly. Most of the most serious aspects of COVID happened early on in 2020 and predominantly affected the elderly. We've got all of that data now that's been reanalyzed by one of the world's top scientists. And even looking back now, essentially, if you were under 70, even from

Starting point is 00:41:19 the beginning, your risk of serious harm from COVID is in the ballpark figure of the flu, right? And even I actually was wrong. I wrote an article in European Scientist in April 2020, because I actually initially started making a lot of noise about why we're not talking about lifestyle with COVID to help people mitigate, you know, improve their immune system. And I said, you know, talking to a friend of mine who works in the busiest ER in America, in New York, who I've done work with, and he said, I've never seen anything like this. This is devastating. Some of my colleagues are dying.

Starting point is 00:41:54 So I have no doubt that at the very beginning, in the early strain of the virus, it was really bad, especially for vulnerable people, people with obesity, etc. Because I remember getting covid i was actually used to live on the top floor of this building and i remember i've never experienced anything quite as bizarre as the symptom set that i had when i got covid the fact that at 3am in the morning i don't take medicine so in fact at 3am in the morning i'm lying flat on my floor ordering ibuprofen on uber eats because my back i just had the most bizarre like

Starting point is 00:42:24 back pain and so i was having to like lie flat on the floor because i couldn't even lie in bed it was so bad just this weird set of symptoms that i'd never had before my partner she lost her smell and taste and it was so unusual it was so unusual um there's not been a time in my lifetime that people have lost their smell and taste en masse so when i when when you hear it compared to the flu you go this was not the flu this is something different yes no the symptoms are very different and i think now it's accepted um that um we won't go into a lot of detail but i think one of the reasons as well it was human engineered you know it almost certainly the evidence points it being a lab

Starting point is 00:42:58 leak right so it had a very you're right it was very different to any other virus that used to be a conspiracy theory i know right now it's not a conspiracy i know it's funny yeah when you hear about that lab in wuhan that were messing around with viruses and then we we decided to put the blame on like a market store but i think now the general consensus is that it probably came from that lab in wuhan yeah absolutely yeah absolutely and i've spoken to in fact, I spent time with actually the scientists that first went public with it, who identified it, um, guy in America, uh, sorry, in Australia. Um, so yeah, that came from lab, but so I think it had these different strange things, loss of smell, et cetera, but in terms of serious illness, um, it was there at the beginning. Now, when you, when you look

Starting point is 00:43:38 back, I think essentially there were vulnerable elderly, but, uh, you know, who, who suffered, um, especially people in nursing homes have a lot of deaths there but there's so many other components to this so one is did we institute the correct treatments a lot of people were killed because they weren't managed properly in itu you know in terms of putting people intubating them putting on respirators when they didn't need it and that in itself has a risk um some of the wrong treatments were given there were other treatments now that we look back that probably would have been helpful, things like ivermectin, which I know has been a bit controversial, but it's very safer than

Starting point is 00:44:13 paracetamol, right? So first do no harm, okay? But it may have done some good in a lot of people and doctors around the world that used it in several thousand. There's a doctor in South Africa that used it in 14,000 patients, including many elderly, not a single one died from COVID. And this is early on. So all these things that we missed, we missed the lifestyle intervention. So all those things are there. But by the time you get to the end of 2020, the beginning of 2021, there are so many things that happen, Steve, that you have to think about before you introduce a vaccine. One is what is the state of the virus right now? And it already mutated to some degree and become less lethal. There is natural immunity, which we know is very powerful, right? But the issue with the vaccine is, and certainly it was

Starting point is 00:44:53 probably there from the beginning, we know that when one looks at the original trials, there was a, and this is what the drug companies have done for a long period of time, they will mislead people using statistics about the benefits. So you use something called relative risk reduction. Let me just explain this because you can apply this to statins as well. They presented the benefit as a 95% protection against infection. Remember that figure, 95%, right? And it was what we call relative risk reduction. So if you've got, for example, two groups in a trial, say 101 trial in one group and 100 in another, and let's just say, let's give you an

Starting point is 00:45:34 example of statins, and you're following them up over five years to look at a drug to see if it benefits them in preventing having a heart attack. In one group, they get the dummy pill, and you follow them up for five years. And in the people that got the dummy pill, in fact, you didn't do anything different. Two of them suffered a heart attack. In the other group, the other hundred people that were followed up for five years who got the pill, the drug, right? Only one suffered a heart attack. So you've reduced the heart attack risk by 50%, right? Two to one, right? 50%. But you've only prevented one heart attack. You've treated a hundred people, but you've prevented one

Starting point is 00:46:11 heart attack out of treating a hundred. Yeah. Does that make sense? So that's a 1% absolute benefit. In other words, when you explain that to a patient, when I ask, when I have engaged in sort of what we call informed consent, shared decision-making, when they ask me about drug, I'll say, this gives you a 1% chance if you take this drug religiously of preventing a heart attack. Now you apply that to the original COVID vaccine trials, which by the way, have so many other problems with them because even those trials were conducted and analyzed and designed by the drug industry. I mean, this is one of the biggest myths that needs to be busted, Steve, out there for most doctors, as well as members of the public. Medical knowledge is under commercial

Starting point is 00:46:48 control, but most people don't know that. So what happens is they did the trial, but let's just talk about what their results showed us. A 95% relative risk reduction against infection. They didn't show any reduction in COVID death, by the way in that trial right they just said prevent from infection but we then presume it may then prevent right uh reduced death rates the absolute risk reduction from infection at the beginning was one was 0.84 percent one in 119 so that's how many people you need to vaccinate prevent one infection which actually people were not told that so imagine you're thinking should take this vaccine say well steve there's a one less than one percent chance that it's going to prevent you getting infected people

Starting point is 00:47:31 weren't told that but that it then reduced my chance of getting seriously ill right no but we've then talked about that haven't we like as in when you look at the data certainly beginning of 2023 that was looking over the previous year, 2022, you have to vaccinate 2,500 people to prevent one person getting serious ill with COVID, right? If you're over 70. With the second, with the other strain. With the other strain. And it may have been better, Steve, you're right. It may, it probably was better, but it's still, numbers are still much smaller than what people were led to believe. And, and by the way, Steve, the narrative at the beginning, they kept changing

Starting point is 00:48:02 the goalposts. Remember, it wasn't about preventing serious illness and death it was all about preventing infection you are not in america you've seen it all over cnn rachel maddow and she's saying it so passionately if you take this vaccine you are not gonna get covid and calling anyone who questions it being a science denier i mean jesus christ so my last question on that before i i said i was going to say is um do you think there would have been less deaths overall if we hadn't have had a vaccine yes you think there would have been less deaths by now when you look at it so i think over time so so where we are now um so if we hadn't have introduced the vaccine for that first strain of covid you think there'd be less deaths okay if i was to i still think that if okay this is very nuanced but important

Starting point is 00:48:56 if the vaccine had only been offered to the high-risk people at the beginning, say the over 70s or people with multiple risk factors, I think there is a case to be made, right? I'm going to counter that in a minute though, but there is a case to be made that there was overall benefit versus harm. But there's a problem. One, there wasn't true informed consent, right? Because those figures, those numbers weren't given to people about the prevention of infection, et cetera, right? And two, if you have an average serious harm rate of 1 in 800, any scientist, even regulators would have said,

Starting point is 00:49:36 hold on a minute, this is way too high. This is too risky. And this is, by the way, Steve, only the short term. Because remember, this vaccine didn't go through what other vaccines have gone through, which is five to 10 years of safety testing. So if you throw all those caveats in and use informed consent, I can guarantee you with all of my knowledge, expertise, experience with patients, when you engage in these conversations, most of those elderly people will probably have still refused it. But yes, I think there is a

Starting point is 00:50:06 case to be made that the benefits may have outweighed the harms in those high-risk people at the very beginning in the short term. Absolutely. You know, when I think about Rachel Maddow and what she said on TV about, you know, it's going to stop the spread of infection, etc. I can have a degree of empathy because if that's the information you're being fed and you are a public facing broadcaster and it's being fed to you by scientists and it's been fed to you by the nhs and whoever else and you know very credible people that you've been raised to believe and to trust if you're a public facing broadcaster what else are you going to say you're not going to say the opposite you're not that you can't sit on the fence your job is to broadcast it's the news

Starting point is 00:50:48 right so i have and i think you did the same you said earlier you went on good morning britain or something and i'm not blaming rachel madder here i'm just saying that the indoctrination that came through the mainstream media was so strong through people like rachel madder and why is that important steve i had a conversation with the chairman of the British Medical Association in December, 2021, when I was campaigning to overturn vaccine mandates for healthcare workers. He had access to Sajid Javid. I had a previous rapport with Matt Hancock,

Starting point is 00:51:15 but he had obviously left by then. And I spoke to, his name's Shah Nagpal, and I explained to him everything I knew about the vaccine after looking at data at that point. I hadn't published at this point, but I went through it in a logical way. Chairman of the BMA, by the way, not just some random person. And he said, Asim, no one appears to have critically appraised the evidence on the vaccine as well as you have from our two-hour chat. Most of my colleagues who are in senior policy, you know, medical positions, establishment positions,

Starting point is 00:51:44 are getting their information on the benefits and harms of the vaccine from the BBC. It's super difficult. Isn't that extraordinary though? I think it's really difficult because if I, if you're dealing with lots of people dying en masse and it's happened very, very quickly and people are just dropping dead

Starting point is 00:52:01 and you're seeing, you you know hospitals being overrun you've got to you've got to tread carefully with the information you're putting out there so if the scientific information comes in early and maybe a little bit too too soon before it's really been vetted and triple checked saying one thing and you're desperate for answers i can i can see why a group of people would say okay okay, this is the best information. And then to go against that information could potentially cause tons of harm. So I can also imagine why a group of people would be really slow to then change their mind away from it.

Starting point is 00:52:34 Because you're dealing with lots of people. And Steve, I was that person too. So I'm with you on that, 100%. I think where I'm taking this is, the system, if it had been more transparent early on, and this is where I've been banging my head against a brick wall to some degree for about a decade, if there was more transparency in the system, we would have had better information even from the beginning.

Starting point is 00:52:55 But that information was kept commercially confidential because of the system that really is geared towards supporting the interests of big pharma, not in the interest of people's health. And that's the key point here, right? We're looking back over time thinking, how did this happen? How do we allow this to happen? We need to go deeper. Say, how do we stop this happening again in the future so we have better information? That's all I'm saying. Do you think it is malicious at like a government level? Do you think? No. You don't think it is? Not at all. I know many politicians,

Starting point is 00:53:26 very senior people, cross party. Some of them I call my friends. Many of them come to me for medical advice, right? In fact, one of them, you know, he lost a hundred pounds on my pioppy diet with Tom Watson, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, right?

Starting point is 00:53:41 So, and these genuinely by and large are decent people that want to do the right thing. But they are also fed misinformation by lobbyists. They take as expert opinion or information stuff that has been curated for the purposes of the interests of big food or big pharma. When I campaigned on getting the sugar tax introduced, I wrote articles in the BMJ and I started writing every newspaper. And I remember I thought we're going to win this because the front page of the Daily Mail was sugar is a new tobacco. And that put pressure on the then Secretary of State Jeremy Hunt because the Mail then decided they were going to go, right? And of course, you know,

Starting point is 00:54:17 that government, conservative government are particularly, you know, influenced by what the Daily Mail writes because they are traditionally one of their supporters. But there was a story around that time where they exposed, and it was on the front page, that government ministers in terms of obesity strategy, how do we solve the obesity epidemic, had had 99 meetings with representatives of the food industry and not a single meeting with a public health doctor, example so i know how that happened that obviously that the system should be more transparent to make sure that they understand that those those politicians but many of them um were shocked you know when i when i told them this information they trust me um one of them you know was a very a former government

Starting point is 00:54:59 minister who who said a scene you know this is she's shocked by it but like now understands it that they were captured as well but we were all we were in a state of fear steve as well we let's not underestimate that the very beginning we were all scared we didn't know what we were dealing with and of course we have to have empathy for ourselves when you're in a state of fear right for albeit you know i think it was a big error to some degree and everybody was scared and i don't think it was malicious to create that fear initially um it stops us you know being into being able psychologically it inhibits your ability to engage in critical thinking and all of us were in that position is there a risk now that if there was a deadly vaccine deadly virus that broke out across the world people are so

Starting point is 00:55:41 scared of vaccines now that they would not go and get it. Because there's something I was saying to my friend the other day, I was like, we've gotten to a point now where I think so many people are sceptical about vaccines, that if something does come from another lab somewhere, and it is really fatal, and the government stand on that podium again and say, hands, face, space, whatever it was, that slogan, and they say, we need you to all go get this vaccine who's gonna go get it yeah no i i agree i don't like that situation i don't

Starting point is 00:56:12 want us to be in this situation but you're right there will be another pandemic there is a big risk and um the way around that is and this is what we're taught as doctors, right? It's one of the things that is ingrained into us as a medical school, is that when you make a mistake, you tell the patient. Patients are very forgiving if they think and know that you acted from a place of good intent, because mistakes happen, things go wrong. This is what we need as a mea culpa, right? I was willing to do that. I mean, in some way, I was partly responsible, certainly at the very early stage, to support a vaccine rollout.

Starting point is 00:56:57 But I know that the most important thing for me to do when new information comes available, and medicine, again, is not an exact science, it evolves. But let's play that out. Let's play that out. So if we had a situation where the, I don't know, the scientist that said really positive things about the vaccine, that it was side effect free or whatever, they come out now and they say, we were totally wrong. And they say, we got it. So let's play out that scenario. What would happen the next day on social media is everybody who was criticized or critiqued or lost their job or was i don't know

Starting point is 00:57:26 in some way penalized for their views that there might be side effects that we're not talking about would immediately go to their their base of their audience and say i told you so the conspiracy theorists on the internet who are really extreme that believe that there's a group of people wearing like tin hats that have come up with this idea they would be empowered and what you then have is a situation where another fact another pandemic rolls in from a far away land those people said listen you know those people that so you're so trying to say it it would in my mind it would fuel the um the narrative that vaccines are bad and less like people would be less likely to take them because we're not driven by facts stats graphs and figures we're driven by emotion

Starting point is 00:58:12 yeah it's much more powerful yeah than just if a scientist standing there and showing me a graph it's how i feel which matters the most and if i felt like i was betrayed and lied to there's no chance that i'd run down and get another jab or something in my arm. It's an uncomfortable truth that needs facing though, Steve, because if we don't face it, these problems are going to carry on. We're not going to improve the situation by ignoring it and sweeping under the carpet. So there will be that, you're right, there will be that backlash. I myself have had that, right? I've had people, you know, I got heckled, you know, a talk I gave on this for the first time when I spoke at it in London, saying I was part of it all. You're a liar, all this stuff.

Starting point is 00:58:51 Yeah, absolutely. I got, you know, expletives were thrown at me. And I understand where that emotion comes from. But at the end of the day, the only way we can progress and evolve is just accepting. But that, you know, because we want to then, it's not just about saying we got this wrong. It's actually explaining to people and saying, okay, we thought we were doing the right thing. These are problems in the system we weren't aware of. Most people are not aware of this. We need to resolve this and move forward with greater transparency. And over time now, okay, within the immediate aftermath, of course, there's going to be that emotional reaction. There's going to be a backlash. If there happened to be a pandemic within a short space of time after that admission,

Starting point is 00:59:27 yes, it may well be that people aren't going to go and take vaccines. But why should they, Steve? Vaccines can save your life. No, no, no. I'm talking about anything new. I'm not talking about... So yes, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:59:37 Traditional vaccines. I mean, I'm still a big subscriber and supporter. Let me just make this clear. Traditional vaccines. In my paper that I wrote, I said, you know, estimates suggest vaccines have saved four to five million lives a year and the serious harm rate of vaccines i think there's of course there's going to be nothing's completely safe no drug is pharmacology is completely safe but just in terms of published data right probably still an

Starting point is 00:59:58 exaggeration but still it gives you it gives you a comparison serious harm rate for traditional vaccines one to two per million. All right? People aren't very smart though, including me, when it comes to, when I hear the word vaccine, I think all vaccines. You think,

Starting point is 01:00:12 we don't know what a vaccine is. No, I know. So it's just a word. It's like, if you said to me, dogs are savaging one in 800 people, you know, the average person might not,

Starting point is 01:00:22 the average person might not think if that's a chihuahua or like a German shepherd, we just heard dogs. And then there's going to be a fear of dogs. And I think of the same with the vaccines. you know the average person might not the average person might not think if that's a chihuahua or like a german shepherd we just heard dogs and then there's going to be a fear of dogs and i think the same with the vaccines we don't know the difference between different vaccines we just think they're all the same so if you tell me that vaccines are causing x y and z i'm gonna go i don't care if someone offers me a flu shot or whatever thing or whatever it's the trust that's been eroded in the system and it's my trust in the word vaccine that's been eroded yeah no and it's the trust that's been eroded in the system and it's my trust in the word vaccine that's been eroded yeah no and it's unfortunate it's unfortunate that that has definitely showed

Starting point is 01:00:48 there has been a dent and a change i think an uptake of things like mmr malaria vaccine because of this it saved my life when i was a kid i got my all my family got malaria we're in africa so they all got pretty bad malaria and uh so we yeah my pretty pretty serious as well i think i almost died of uh malaria i hear from my mother steve the thing is with those for vaccines they went through many many years of safety checks right and this is an important thing is that people i think we shouldn't underestimate people's intelligence and their ability to understand and forgive as long as we communicate it in the right way i have these conversations all the time with my patients. I give them numbers. I talk through it. When I talk about

Starting point is 01:01:28 statin drugs, for example, I say, I'm going to give you these numbers, but there are lots of caveats here. One, the data has never been independently verified, right? And I give them all this and I give them alternatives, et cetera. I do this all the time. And patients want that. They want more information in a way that they can understand. And of course, yes, they want more information in a way that they can understand and of course yes they want to trust their doctor but again it's all it comes down to ethics values intent and doctors not admitting their mistakes is a very very bad place to be the chair of the clinical cardiology at the university of edinburgh professor mark dweck commented that um on your opinion saying the covid vaccines the covid vaccine opinions you have are misguided and in fact dangerous. The vast majority of cardiologists do not agree with your views and they are not based on robust science. Now, if you're someone listening to this now, I've got your opinion and I've got this guy's opinion,

Starting point is 01:02:15 the chair of the clinical cardiology at the University of Edinburgh. I've got the NHS saying that vaccines are safe and extensively reviewed in both adults and children and that the independent medicines and healthcare products regulatory agency is continually monitoring the safety of covid vaccines and reports of side effects are very rare and then i've got your view how do i as someone that's hearing this in this year and this in this year figure out what to believe because everyone's so compelling everyone's got data well you just ultimately you've got to go with your own intuition steve my intuition's always going to side with fear yeah because i'm a human being maybe and this stuff works um i'll come on to this and this was a bit of a hatchet job by the guardian interestingly i've written 19 op-eds for the guardian observer newspaper

Starting point is 01:03:00 over the years but you know how these how this works. They'll move on. A couple of things, just a couple of facts to throw back at you first. And then what you've raised is really interesting historically and something that I've learned from this sort of backlash. Mark Dweck, with the greatest respect to him, what wasn't disclosed in the article is that he has taken money from Pfizer. He's, you know, been funded by Pfizer. And that's factual. You can look that up, right? That's one thing. So that's a bias. More important than that, the MHRA, which is described as independent, right?

Starting point is 01:03:31 Yes, it's not. The British Medical Journal, BMJ, did an investigation published in the summer of 2022. And I presented this data on the MHRA at the British Medical Association annual conference where the president of the BMA was there, the chair of the BMA was there, right? And they were gobsmacked and they couldn't believe.

Starting point is 01:03:53 And this is why this information is so important, these facts are so important. Even I was shocked when I read this. Our medical regulator in this country, MHRA, gets 86% of its funding from Big Pharma, which is a huge bias. So they're not independent. So those are the two facts that should at least, if I threw that back, you'd say, well, hold on a minute, then should I believe all this? Now, what was the purpose of that article? Of course, it was to undermine my credibility. I'm exposing

Starting point is 01:04:17 essentially something, you know, for all intents and purposes, pretty horrific, you know, reluctantly on the BBC with 25 million views or whatever else, right? But people that inspire me have been through far worse, right? And I'm an activist that want to expose injustices, right? The likes of Mandela, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. One of the lessons from them and even in public health advocacy, as soon as your work threatens an industry or an ideological cabal, you will be attacked sometimes unrelentingly and viciously and that was really a hatchet job what about the second part of the quote that he says that the vast majority of cardiologists do not agree with your views um is that true well he's giving his opinion but actually um from every okay every cardiologist i spoke to has basically said seem you're going to do doing great work

Starting point is 01:05:06 but they won't speak out and this is part of the problem right is that people are turning a blind eye i had uh one cardiologist um who met me in the street right these are i have this happens all the time and he said i read your paper he said i can tell you now although they won't admit it publicly all the cardiologists in our department, and they know you and they trust where you come from and your integrity, none of them are having any more COVID vaccines because of you. They're onto it. But Steve, this is a problem. Only a small minority of people are willing to speak out. I have a platform where I'm able to articulate it and do so, but that is my duty and responsibility. This is just a reflection of what is ultimately a

Starting point is 01:05:47 big pharma tyranny. You know, I know you've interviewed Jordan Peterson, who I admire greatly. And Jordan Peterson says, when you have something to say, silence is a lie. And, you know, tyranny emerges when people are afraid to say what they think. And when everybody essentially lies all the time by being silent, that's when the tyranny is complete. This is exactly where we are. But I do want to mention something, if you don't mind. Like, I have to go through this, right, myself. And it's not easy, right?

Starting point is 01:06:18 You get all this stuff and people are tracking your credibility. And I remember when that Guardian hit piece, which was like the top story that day, I actually felt in many ways I had mixed feelings, but I felt over the target here, right? Because Gandhi said, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. So the point is these things work, Steve, but you know, the truth is the truth. So what is the reality then of your life going through that? Because, you know, if you get attacked from all angles, you've not got immediate family there.

Starting point is 01:06:52 You're reading stuff about yourself online all the time. Your colleagues, et cetera, are turning on you. What's life like if I'm a flower on the wall in those hard moments? Um, very deep pain on to, to, to have the knowledge and deep and understanding that in my view, we are dealing with one of the greatest likely corporate crimes, medical mistakes, damage to people's health. People are suffering. People are dying. People have got all sorts of problems because of this vaccine. To have that deep knowledge and understanding

Starting point is 01:07:28 and to not be able to see any great progress or enough progress for this to be resolved or to be improved, that suffering around me gives me very deep pain, more than anything else. Why? I think inherently I'm just very sensitive to that around me. That's just the way I am.

Starting point is 01:07:52 I think it's part of my innate nature. I've always been like that. You know, I had a, I went for, you know, on the positive side, there are a lot of good friends around. You know, I haven't got immediate emotional support, if that makes sense, right where I am. But there are hundreds of thousands of people that support me. Certainly, you follow me on Twitter and people come and meet me in the street. I randomly bumped into this doctor in the street who I didn't know, an older doctor, quite well known.

Starting point is 01:08:17 I won't name him. And he said he got really emotional in the street. And he met me and he said, Dr. Malhotra, thank you for everything you are doing with all of this. And I said, well, you know, I tried to be as humble with that. I'm just a medium for a message. I'm doing the right thing. He said, no, what you're doing is extremely brave. And I'm with you a hundred percent. And I know the vaccine killed one of my colleagues, et cetera, et cetera. And he was very honest. He said, I'm just too frightened to speak up, but that gives me fuel. Right. And this, this happens constantly. So I think there is definitely something that I get from that. So let me summarize your position then because i want to move on to i

Starting point is 01:08:48 want to talk about statins and heart disease particularly high cholesterol because i got told by my doctor i have high cholesterol to summarize your position is you believe that vaccines themselves are not good for the world some of the greatest achievements in medicine are traditional vaccines no doubt you believe that the covid vaccine at the start when administered to certain age groups that were most vulnerable there's an argument to say that it was it was a net positive yeah i think there's an argument and that you believe after sort of 2022 or 2021 when the variant changed to another i think it was called Omicron, wasn't it? That at that point, it certainly became a net negative. Is that your view?

Starting point is 01:09:32 I would think probably earlier, Stephen. The only reason I say, and this is anecdotal evidence, of course, is my dad had a cardiac arrest in the summer of 2021. He was 73, right? And he could be considered in a high-risk group. So i think that if one was to make that case i would say well well it depends what we're talking about as well in terms of covid yes right the net benefit in terms of covid and covid deaths but the problem is what's the point in preventing someone getting covid if six months later they're going to die of a cardiac arrest you see what i mean so we've got to look at it in that nuanced way but yeah i think there is a case to be made that if it was just given to certain high risk groups, overall, there may have

Starting point is 01:10:09 been a net benefit at the beginning. But where we are now and where it's continued and the mandates and all the stuff that extended it to many more people taking it, and that almost certainly was being fueled by Pfizer. And that's been shown that they were you know giving money to grass credible grassroots organizations in the u.s to promote the mandates right this is after the data they received showing that it wasn't preventing infection and causing serious harm right so this is this is a problem with the system i'm not blaming individuals here this is something we'll talk about with statins as well is that um the uh the system the corporate capitalist system or the way capitalism is is actually being implemented is in its in many ways and this has been diagnosed by forensic psychologists

Starting point is 01:10:54 uh the the corporation as an institution is psychopathic when it comes to making money that means they have callous unconcern for the safety of others, repeated lying, conning others for profit. And this is, unfortunately, this is the root of the problem. And you also believe that there is a chance as well, and it's likely, that the impacts of the lifestyle changes, the lockdowns, etc., the stress, the mental health issues, the removing people from being able to see their loved ones, the sedentary lifestyles, also contributed to the rise in heart related conditions and heart disease 100 it's played a

Starting point is 01:11:29 role a smaller role but it's played a role 100 so i want to talk about heart disease because i don't even know what heart disease is and also i don't know what a heart attack is i think we kind of all just assume we know but what what is a what is a heart what's heart disease and what's heart attack? So heart disease, the conventional description or explanation of heart disease is disease that affects the blood vessels of the heart, essentially. That's coronary artery disease, we call it. That's what most people, when they talk about heart disease, that's what they mean. So that disease that affects the blood vessels leads to build up of something called plaque uh which is furring if you like okay like a plaque yeah so plaque is furring of the arteries like a blockage okay right a blockage

Starting point is 01:12:18 that blockage is made up of uh cells of the system. It's made up of cholesterol, right? And over time, those blockages can either suddenly, like a pimple building up and the pimple getting bigger and bigger and bigger, or even a small pimple suddenly bursting. And the contents of that plaque, right? The response to the blood having contact with the contents of that plaque that has built up over time suddenly causes the clot to form. And if the clot blocks the whole artery,

Starting point is 01:12:55 then the blood supply is completely cut off to the heart muscle. So the purpose of those blood vessels is to supply the heart muscle with blood so it can contract. So if you have a blockage that is there for several minutes, completely cutting off the blood supply, depending on where it is, it will cause that area of the heart muscle to lose its oxygen supply and nutrients and die and scar. And that leads to cell death. But of course, the heart muscle is quite big so it could be a very small heart attack could be a big heart attack and then so so heart attack specifically is death of any region of the heart muscle because of a blockage okay i'm gonna try the death of the

Starting point is 01:13:37 cells i'm gonna try and play this back to you yeah correct me where i'm wrong so you get this buildup in your artery yeah but due to a bunch of factors which we're going around yeah this buildup in your artery. Yeah. Due to a bunch of factors. Which we'll go into. Yeah. The buildup explodes. Yes. Flows through the blood, blocking the artery at some point. Yes. And then that blockage in the artery causes a cell in the heart,

Starting point is 01:13:57 some areas in the heart to die because they're not getting oxygen. Exactly. So you've basically cut off the blood supply. So it's cutting off the blood supply to whatever area, because there are many branches. It depends where the blockage is. Yeah've basically cut off the blood supply so it's cutting off the blood supply to whatever area because there are many branches it depends where the blockage is yeah you cut off the blood supply if it's cut off for long enough those cells every cell in our body needs oxygen to survive right then that those that part of the heart muscle will die and become scarred so it dies and becomes scarred in about seven eight seven eight minutes you said it can well it can take you know 15 to 20 minutes it depends on different factors

Starting point is 01:14:25 but within minutes yes and how does that feel from minute one till minute 20 10 so the classic symptoms of a heart attack right that is a central what we call crushing heaviness or pain that can travel radiate we say in medical terms to the the jaw, it can go into the shoulders, it can go into the back. That's the classic symptoms, or down the left arm. And you're conscious at this point? Yes, you're conscious. So a cardiac arrest just means the heart stopping. Ultimately, actually, we all have a cardiac arrest when we die. The last thing to go is our heart, right? But one of the most common causes of a cardiac arrest, certainly prematurely, not because of old age, for example, is, and this is random. So you can have a heart attack and you can be conscious and

Starting point is 01:15:10 have pain and you get to hospital and you get diagnosed and you might have a stent put in, or you might be put on blood thinners or whatever in a certain proportion of people. And it doesn't depend on the size of the heart attack. So you can have a big area of the heart muscle that's damaged or a small area of the heart muscle of damage. And it's random that it can cause an interruption in the normal electrical activity of the heart. The heart has an electrical circuit that allows it to pump, right? The electrical circuit that allows it to pump in a certain, you know, in a regular rhythm. That circuit can get interrupted. And then the heart muscle that's pumping like this, right? Because it's pumping all the blood around your body

Starting point is 01:15:49 to your brain and everything else, suddenly starts quivering, right? And that's known as ventricular fibrillation. That's when you see on all the, you know, on movies or on TV shows and stuff like that when they start shocking people. And that shows on the heart tracing as a kind of squiggle like this.

Starting point is 01:16:05 Right? And that is what we call a shock a kind of squiggle like this. Okay. Right? And that is what we call a shockable rhythm. If you deliver a shock, you know, often 200 joules, right, is delivered with a defibrillator, that will often restart the heart into a normal rhythm. And then the patient can be managed and treated, for example. But that quivering of the heart

Starting point is 01:16:21 causes basically the heart to stop pumping blood around the body. The heart's still moving, but it's not enough to pump blood around the body. And if that's going for a very long time, Steve, not long, you know, for example, my dad's case, it may have been similar, 20 or 30 minutes, then eventually then, you know, that will even stop and patient dies. So I've read some stats from a different source that said in the UK, one in eight men and one in 14 women die from connery heart disease over the course of their lifetime and that nearly 50 of all u.s adults

Starting point is 01:16:50 have some type of heart disease um and before the pandemic hit in 2019 12 children died every single week in the uk from cardiac arrest so i mean this is if anything's going to kill me it's probably this yes most likely so how do i stop it right um how do you stop it how do you even reverse it how about some statins yeah so okay let me just say this my doctor i got my lab results back at like three days ago and he told me a couple of things one thing he told me is you got low vitamin d i said fine yeah i get it i'm in a room all day uh the second thing he said is your cholesterol is high. He said your bad cholesterol is high. And I don't really know what to make of that, but he said your bad cholesterol is high and I need to get that down. My father takes statins, which I know a lot of people take statins. I think

Starting point is 01:17:40 it's like 200 million people are taking statins globally um so because i have you here what do you think of of what the advice i was given which is just to get my bad cholesterol down and how do i prevent myself ending up on either statins or having a heart attack okay so on the statins issue and the cholesterol issue traditionally steve for uh decades and even now the one of the the primary focus within medicine within cardiology to combat heart disease was to get your so-called bad cholesterol ldl as low as possible so ldl means bad cholesterol it's called low density lipoprotein right so which is is the bad stuff. Well, it's thought of conventionally as a bad cholesterol, right? And the reason for that is the earliest studies that were done on the correlation that was found between high cholesterol and heart disease

Starting point is 01:18:38 revealed at very high levels of total cholesterol, there was a very high prevalence of heart disease. But those levels of cholesterol, and we're talking about going back from, you know, studies that started in 1948 that went over three decades, where they found cholesterol being associated with heart disease, was only really there at very, very high levels. That's the first thing. The second part of it and why they thought that getting it as low as possible was the solution is that people who had very low levels of cholesterol tended not to get heart disease, right? Total cholesterol less than four, LDL less than two millimoles. Let's just say that for

Starting point is 01:19:21 argument's sake, less than two millimoles per liter. And by the way, just so people understand this, you would have got a red mark probably saying that your LDL cholesterol is high. Now the guidelines suggest if it's more than three millimoles per liter in your blood, the measurement, that is considered high. But we'll tease that apart in a second. Now, the thinking was that,

Starting point is 01:19:42 okay, if people with low cholesterol are not getting heart disease and people with very with low cholesterol are not getting heart disease, and people with very high levels of cholesterol are getting heart disease, and that was total cholesterol above 10, for example, right? And LDLs above seven or eight, massively high, right? Then, or more likely to get heart disease at significant numbers. The thinking was that the lower the better. So all these drug trials started. But there's one thing missing, first and foremost, is that most people's cholesterol, Steve, LDL, is genetic. 80% of your cholesterol, because cholesterol is a very, so why have we got it?

Starting point is 01:20:17 It's a very vital molecule in the body. Without cholesterol, we would die. It's required for maintaining the integrity of cells and cell membranes it's required for hormone production right it has a role in the immune system so it's really important vital molecule in the body you can change the profile of the cholesterol there are different components there's something called triglycerides which is a blood fat and hdl so called good cholesterol and ldl through dietary changes but predominantly it's genetic initially, right? So this is a thing. So one could then question, maybe those people in those original studies had genetically high cholesterol, but that doesn't mean the cholesterol was the problem. There may have been something else that hadn't been measured, that we hadn't discovered yet. That was genetic. That was

Starting point is 01:21:02 causing the heart disease, but it happened to also be causing a raised LDL. And the same time people with low cholesterol, they may have had something else, right? They may have had other factors that we now know actually are linked to heart disease and it's something to do with the cholesterol. So that's the first thing. The next question is, does lowering cholesterol, so the question to you is, does lowering your LDL make any difference? And for many, many years, there was a mantra that was pushed by the medical establishment that there was a linear relationship. The lower your LDL, the less likely you are to get heart disease. In fact, there was a commentary written by one of America's most well-known eminent cardiologists. He was the editor of the American Journal of Cardiology. His name was William Roberts. And he wrote an article in 2011 to try and push the cholesterol message further. So more people take

Starting point is 01:21:50 cholesterol lowering drug statins. And it was called, It's a Cholesterol Stupid. And there's a line in that, which I mentioned in my book, where he said, you can be an obese, diabetic, sedentary smoker. But as long as your cholesterol is low enough, in other words, to LDL cholesterol, you will not develop heart disease. Think about that for a second. Now, I'm just putting that to you, Steve. Now, you hearing that, does that sound plausible to you? No. Right. It doesn't, does it? It sounds a bit strange, doesn't it? Right. And I thought, this is odd. I started looking into this in a lot of detail, probably 2010, partly because by the end of the, by the late nineties, the people who had discovered the relationship with

Starting point is 01:22:34 very high LDL cholesterol, which is actually, by the way, genetically linked to a condition called familial hyperlipidemia, affects one in 250 people, right? His people's cholesterol is sky high. Those people who got the Nobel Prize for this discovery said they predicted almost the eradication of heart disease in the world by the early 2000s because we had discovered these drugs called statin drugs that lower cholesterol and are shown through clinical trials to prevent heart attacks and strokes and death, which we'll come on to, right? So you've got the combination of that. But before statins came on to the market and have been prescribed now to 200 million people, one of the things that isn't talked about enough is that there

Starting point is 01:23:16 were lots of trials done. So you've got this hypothesis now, we think we're right here. We've discovered that very high cholesterol in the population has got a strong link to heart disease, and we've discovered that very low cholesterol doesn't give heart disease. But by the way, what's interesting is for 95% of the population in the middle, there was no relationship with who was going to develop heart disease and who wasn't depending on, based upon their cholesterol. Okay. But they thought, let's develop these drugs to lower cholesterol and we'll prevent heart attacks. So all the drug trials, Steve, before statins came on the market, did not show any benefit. So you've got the trial where you've got someone with high cholesterol and another person with high cholesterol. One person

Starting point is 01:23:51 gets a drug and the other person doesn't. You follow them up. The person on the drug massively lowers the cholesterol, no prevention of heart attacks over several years. It's like, hold on, what's going on here? Maybe we did the trial wrong. Let's try again. Let's try again. Let's try again. Statins are produced, okay, a different type of cholesterol-lowering drug, and suddenly you start seeing benefits. Oh great, we've solved it. Then we can make this case that the lower cholesterol, the better. Two problems with that. The first one is that statins actually have other properties other than lowering LDL cholesterol. They are also anti-inflammatory and they have anti-clotting properties. What's accepted now is we know heart disease is a

Starting point is 01:24:31 clotting problem linked to chronic inflammation. So it means the benefit of statins, which I will give you in a second, right, is probably more likely because of those properties because other studies, when we did other drugs on cholesterol, there was no benefit. Does that make sense? Am I making sense now? Yeah, so it's targeting the inflammation and the clotting. Exactly. So the question then is, what are the benefit of statins?

Starting point is 01:24:53 So the first thing to say, and this is where the controversy has happened, is that what I'm about to tell you is, again, based upon drug industry-sponsored trials, where the raw data on those trials with the benefits I'm going to tell you has never been independently verified. So what I say to patients, and I'll say this to you, is what I'm about to tell you is likely, in my opinion, an exaggerated benefit, but it's still a benefit, I'm going to tell you. If we trust the drug companies completely, this is a benefit you're going to get, Steve. If you've not had a heart attack, forget about high cholesterol for a second, right?

Starting point is 01:25:27 This applies to everybody. If you've not had a heart attack or you have not been diagnosed with severe blockages, right? You've not got that, right? And you would know if you did because you'd get symptoms of chest pain doing exercise. Then the benefit of a statin for you over a five-year period at best is one in a hundred in preventing you having a non-fatal heart attack, a non-disabling stroke, but will not prolong your life by one day. So that's the first thing. Now, when you do studies where you give patient that information in that transparent way, more than two-thirds of them, most of them will, and my experience as well say doc those odds don't sound great i want to prevent heart disease but i don't fancy taking this

Starting point is 01:26:09 before by the way we've talked about side effects where the controversy has happened which i've been heavily involved in is in my experience with with patients and also other data that's out there a large proportion of patients will suffer quality. Let me be clear here. It's not about serious, right? Quality of life limiting side effects, right? That means most commonly fatigue, muscle pain, can be erectile dysfunction, sleep disturbance, but stuff that makes you not feel, you don't feel good. Like this is not a good way to live. The good news is it's reversible usually within a couple of weeks of stopping the statin or reducing the dose. Okay. So that controversy led to me publishing an article in the British Medical Journal in 2013, where me and another, and a Harvard doctor in a separate article said, we believe that the side

Starting point is 01:26:54 effect rate is probably in the order of one in five people, 20%, which is quite high of those sorts of side effects. Right. And that caused a bit of backlash because the group of researchers in Oxford who take money from Big Pharma, who write the guidelines around the world, said this is going to scare people, stop them taking statins and people will die. But for the low-risk people, no one's going to die because there's no benefit in mortality. Now for high-risk people, those are people who've had a heart attack, the benefit of a statin is better, Steve. Okay. So let's say, for example, some patient comes in, they've had a heart attack and I'm telling them the benefit of the statin. If they take it religiously every day for five years,

Starting point is 01:27:35 because that's how long the trials last, where you can give them that information. The benefit of preventing a further heart attack is one in 39, about 2.5%, one in 39. And the benefit in prolonging their life is one in 83, right? There's another way of looking at the stats though, based upon again, industry sponsored trials, all of the trials that have been done on statins. And people might ask a question. They don't often ask this, but they may ask the question, how much longer am I going to live? Right? Like, okay, let's just throw this question to you say you've had a heart attack you survived a heart attack doctor says take this drug and and over a five-year period how much extra life life extension would you hope or hope it would add over that five years you can you know you can

Starting point is 01:28:22 do it over whatever 20 years but just say five years to start with how much longer would you hope to live from taking that stat in okay so over five years then i'd say um maybe a year okay 25 percent more okay fine that sounds that sounds pretty good yeah okay um the actual figure not disputed from industry sponsored trials right 4.2 days just over four days is that because they haven't been over a long enough period of time no i mean i don't know if you then extrapolate it out if you presume the benefits are going to keep going on you could then argue well over 10 years it'll be eight days and over 20 years it'll be 16 days or whatever right so so that's the information so this the reason i'm i'm telling you, Steve, is that this information is important.

Starting point is 01:29:07 I'm not just a doctor. I'm a potential patient. I ask myself, what would I want to know? I'm here to try and improve my quality of life and my health. What is important to me? What is important to patients? This information is important, especially, Steve, because it's not that I'm saying don't take statins,

Starting point is 01:29:22 but a lot of people would say, okay, I'll take the drug, right? And if they don't get side effects, why not? You know, it might be a bit of a lottery, but why not take the drug? And the people say that to me, and that's fine. And if they get side effects, but the thing that's missing, Steve, is, and this is where we come on to the question you asked me about how to prevent heart disease. Is there an alternative that doesn't give me side effects, improves my quality of life, and likely is going to help prevent, stop me getting heart disease so what is that lifestyle changes absolutely so 80 of heart disease is linked to

Starting point is 01:29:53 environment and lifestyle okay so what is the the core most important biological phenomenon in the body that leads to heart disease, which is not disputed, but it doesn't get much of a... There's no market for the message because you can't commodify this. This is an interesting thing, right? But it's really important information. It's called insulin resistance. Insulin is a very important hormone in the body, released by the pancreas, helps maintain blood glucose within certain ranges so our cells can function optimally. All right. Over time, if your insulin is chronically raised too high, or if your cells become resistant to them for whatever reason, that is the most important driver of the development of these so-called plaques, these furrowing, these blockages in the arteries. So what causes

Starting point is 01:30:43 insulin resistance and how can you combat it? Or how can you prevent and potentially stabilize and even reverse? We'll get into reversal as well, because that's a fascinating area. Most important components, diet. I would say in big figure terms, now, probably 50% of heart disease around the world can be linked to poor diet okay so let's start with diet then i've actually got a bag of sugar that i've brought with me because um when i think about insulin glucose bad diet the first thing my brain thinks about is sugar so i've got this bag of sugar here that i brought with me um and i've got two look at us we've we've written sugar on it and covered up the brand because they didn't pay us but if there is a sugar brand that would like to do a brand deal please get in touch we're big fans if we

Starting point is 01:31:34 need to be um what i actually would like you to to show me is how much sugar do i need to function and to be healthy okay the amount of sugar that you need to function and to be healthy? Okay. The amount of sugar that you need to function and be healthy is zero. There is no nutritional requirement whatsoever of this, what we call added sugar or table sugar, none at all. So I don't need any? You don't need any. And the reason for that is, very briefly, our bodies need glucose to survive, but you don't need any dietary source of glucose to survive, right? Because people go on what we call ketogenic diets and they literally eliminate all starch as well, which also contains glucose from their diet. Your body will make it itself from fat and protein. So in terms of diets, there is no value from sugar whatsoever. It can give you

Starting point is 01:32:24 energy, of course, yes, but you can get energy from other things, but there is no value from sugar whatsoever it can give you energy of course yes but you can get energy from other things but there's no nutritional value whatsoever zero so from a from a health perspective there is zero requirement for dietary sugar so when we say that americans are consuming a lot of sugar every day are we talking about added sugar yeah we're talking about so the way that so the world health organization now um after i was involved in this campaign you know and there was a lot of attention on it they revised their guidelines so they recommend a maximum limit for the average adult of actually six teaspoons of either um so maximum limit okay which you don't need it but maximum limit because after that that's when the health consequences start to accumulate one two three four five six okay so that's the maximum daily limit maximum daily limit

Starting point is 01:33:21 okay but just to give you an example, so one sugary drink, we don't name any brands, right? You wouldn't have to... Would often a 330ml, let's say the most famous sugary drink in the world... I have no idea who you're talking about. Would have nine teaspoons on its own. Nine teaspoons? Nine spoons in one of those, right? And that's just in the 330ml. Imagine going to the cinema and having half a litre or whatever else, right? Jesus. So one can of... Beep! Has nine teaspoons of sugar in it.

Starting point is 01:33:49 Yes. Which is... Yeah. So four... Yeah, absolutely. So four grams is one teaspoon. Okay. Which is well above the daily recommendable...

Starting point is 01:33:56 It is now. Daily maximum. One chocolate bar. Yeah. Like a standard size chocolate bar, what we grew up with. About the same. Leave chocolate out of it. Right? Well, listen, you can have dark chocolate. I love chocolate, right about the same leave chocolate out of it right well listen you have dark chocolate i love chocolate right yeah um for children the u.s department of agriculture for the average four to eight year old child think about kids as well

Starting point is 01:34:15 they're the most vulnerable to a lot of this probably these problems of sugar they recommend a maximum limit of three teaspoons yeah now the average person in this country in america is consuming at least 20 teaspoons now when we talk about sugar we're talking about what the word they use is free sugar so that means this sort of sugar added right to foods but it also includes fruit juice honey and syrups same Same effect on your body. Whole fruit is fine, but if you think about it, a glass of orange juice, for example, would usually have the juice of six oranges. You couldn't eat six oranges that easily. You'd have one orange, for example. And there's fiber, and the fiber has a counteracting

Starting point is 01:35:05 effect on terms of the way that the glucose and fructose is affected, absorbed in your body. A lot of it's to do with the rapid increase in the bloodstream of blood glucose. And that causes huge spikes in insulin. And the problem with that over time, of course, is you get chronically raised insulin and heart disease. But also, also interesting the more rapidly you have a food that causes a glucose spike the more quickly you're going to get a crash because insulin goes up quite quickly and it causes it to come down and it drives hunger yeah so that's another problem so the food industry i think knew for a long time that's why you know in america and it may be similar here 70 of foods purchased in supermarket in america will have added sugar because they knew that it increases the palatability and the consumption. Of course,

Starting point is 01:35:49 they're there to sell food, not look after your health. So you said 20 teaspoons is the average for an American? At least 20 is probably much higher. I'm going to have to ask you to show us that. Yeah. So I can see what that looks like in a glass. It's disgusting. That's disgusting. When you see it like that and you don't you don't realize that you're having that much sugar in a day but i mean technically that's what two cans of fizzy drink yeah yeah but the thing is a lot of the sugar that's being consumed are in foods that people wouldn't think have sugar in them they're not the usual junk food your cakes and biscuits and whatever else you know um they're

Starting point is 01:36:25 in things even marketed as being healthy low-fat foods etc low-fat yogurts so could you just summarize what we have here then these two glasses yeah so this is the maximum daily recommended limit by the world health organization of sugar consumption after which you then start doing you see increases risks of disease um and this is what at least i think what most people are consuming at the moment are you hopeful that there's something we can do about this at a society level well i think one important step was the fact that we you know this levy on sugary drinks definitely would have some um impact partly based upon what we learned from big tobacco you know steve you know 50 of it's interesting we crazy we think

Starting point is 01:37:13 about it now in 1970 50 of adults in the uk were smokers right we've got that down to about 17 now but massive reduction right and it happened education was important but the real the real intervention that had more um impact than anything else was actually taxation of cigarettes and it had twofold effect of course you make it a little bit more expensive you know you know this with your business background right it's going to reduce the the consumption but it was a way of also increasing awareness that this is harmful so i I think that the sugar stuff is ongoing. I think a lot of people have awareness on it. I think now, which is linked to sugar, and I've written about this, we need to treat ultra processed food, which a lot of the ultra

Starting point is 01:37:59 processed food has added sugar as the new tobacco, right? more than 50 of the calories in the uk and more than 60 of the calories in the us is of people's daily consumption is coming from ultra processed foods essentially described as if it comes out of a packet industrially produced and you can read more than five ingredients usually with additives and preservatives it's ultra processed and best avoided and all of the research that's been done only points in one direction. And I think there are at least 32 different conditions or diseases now that are associated with the consumption of ultra-processed food. That is the major issue. So because this is a predominantly an environmental problem, right? Our food environment is saturated with this stuff. Even hospitals, Steve. I mean,

Starting point is 01:38:43 the first campaign I got involved with was trying to get this stuff. Even hospitals, Steve. I mean, the first campaign I got involved with was trying to get this stuff out of hospitals. I was like, hold on. We're treating patients with obesity-related conditions, yet we're serving them junk food in hospitals. The staff, 50% of NHS staff are overweight or obese. What's the probability that if I'm... Because I want to talk about ultra-processed foods

Starting point is 01:38:57 as well as the shoes. What's the probability that if I'm having that much sugar a day, the big glass, that I'm going to end up in your practice with some kind of heart disease. I wouldn't be able to give you a figure, but you're definitely significantly increasing your risk. Well, if that's the average American, then what's the average American's chance of ending up in...

Starting point is 01:39:16 I guess causation needs to be established. Yeah, of course. And it depends what else they're having as well. But it's definitely putting them at significant increased risk of type 2 diabetes. I think the figure now in Americaica if i'm not wrong is that a third to a half of adult americans now are pre-diabetic um the the broad so to answer your question in a better way because we're already there unfortunately. The way to understand insulin resistance on a personal level in terms of measurements, body measurements, is something called metabolic health.

Starting point is 01:39:52 And there are five components which are very easy to measure of metabolic health, okay? It's your waist circumference, right? It's your blood triglycerides, which is a form of the cholesterol being above 1.7 millimoles. Okay. It's your HDL cholesterol, the good cholesterol being less than one millimole. It's being pre-diabetic, okay, having a HbA1c of more than 5.7%, or being pre-hypertensive. So your blood pressure is above 120 over 80 average. If you have three of those that are abnormal, you have something

Starting point is 01:40:27 called metabolic syndrome, which is the highest risk of heart disease. And at least 50%, if not more patients admitted with heart attacks will have metabolic syndrome. But all those five parameters being in the normal range, in America, only one in eight adults have all of those in the normal range and only one in four people age between 20 and 40. Think about that for a second. So seven out of eight. Yes. Adults will have abnormal metabolic health. If we, within a year, if we just shifted a little bit people's eating habits and let's say we eliminated ultra processed food we got people to eat more nuts and seeds oily fish you know whole fruit and vegetables it's been estimated that you would half the death rates from heart disease within globally within one year from 20 million to 10 million you'd be out of business as a heart doctor um

Starting point is 01:41:23 no there's still a lot of people to treat though we've got to help the other 10 million as well right but but i think the other thing as well is um what it does steve though is it shifts the age so instead of someone having saying a dying prematurely and having a heart attack at the age of say 65 you know they'll live to 85 so all we'll be doing as doctors will be managing older people but that's fine you know we've improved longevity improved quality of life as well you refer to stress as a silent killer it's something we're not addressing i think as a society so to put it in perspective when you look at risk factor for heart disease risk factors for heart disease the major ones are smoking type 2 diabetes high pressure. The risk of heart disease linked to stress,

Starting point is 01:42:06 chronic stress of more than a moderate degree, is actually the same as being a smoker or having high blood pressure or having type 2 diabetes. And most people, I think, are not managing it. And certainly of all the patients I see, all the heart patients I see, invariably all of them have had over the preceding years before their heart attack, stress levels are quite high. What's the mechanism? So from an evolutionary perspective, if we were acute stress can be a lifesaver, right? If we were running away from a saber-toothed tiger, right? Then what happens is the body produces clotting factors and inflammatory markers uh factors in the blood that if we were attacked

Starting point is 01:42:53 they help reduce the risk of us bleeding to death so imagine now imagine that happening chronic stress you've got a low grade what we call chronic inflammation and clotting factors increase and that's been shown actually in proven in a study that was published in the Lancet a few years ago where they did an MRI of the brain of young healthy people adults and they followed them up but they looked at the their subjective stress scores they did like questionnaires to measure their stress levels subjectively they correlated that with looking at the amygdala in the brain, which is the emotional center. And then they looked at clotting factors

Starting point is 01:43:29 and they even looked at heart attacks further down the line. And there was a perfect correlation with the subjective stress score, the amygdala lighting up, the clotting factors in the blood, the inflammatory markers in the blood and heart attacks. So we've got the causal mechanism. So if that's the case, Steve,

Starting point is 01:43:43 there must be a way of curbing it. And well, how does one do that? Well, the two most important cause of stress in society are work and relationship stress. So those are things people can potentially work on, right? Potentially, but it's just be aware of it.

Starting point is 01:43:57 But one of the interventions that I use with my patients is actually breath work and meditation. And one of the most extraordinary bits of research i came across and it's in our documentary as well because we're going to a bit more detail on it i had to go and see it for myself to believe it actually properly believe it um a cardiologist in india for more than 20 years has been um through a lifestyle approach has been reversing heart disease so he did a study

Starting point is 01:44:25 called the Mount Abu. This is a place in Northern India where he's got a huge community and a hospital. People come to see him there. And he puts them through this lifestyle plan, which in this study was, you know, they're devout Hindus. So it was a high fiber vegetarian diet. It was two 30 minute brisk walks a day. Okay. And something called Raj Yoga meditation for 40 minutes, which is a form of breath work, but it's also a bit of a spiritual transformation as well. It's about understanding where your anger comes from and all that kind of stuff. So it goes quite deep. And anyway, he followed these people up who were diagnosed with at least 50 to 70% blockages in their arteries. They had heart disease. For some reason, they didn't want to have

Starting point is 01:45:05 a bypass operation or a stent, or they couldn't afford it. And they wanted this lifestyle plan. So he put them on a lifestyle plan. He repeated their angiograms after two years, right? He looked at the arteries again. And on the people that had adhered to the plan, there was an average reduction of the blockage of 20%.

Starting point is 01:45:22 70% became 50, 50 became 30. This is unheard of. If you ask any cardiologist, can heart disease be reversed? Saying no, I've never even seen it. It's not possible, right? But he showed this to be the case. He then looked at his data in a bit more detail and said, was it the diet? Was it the exercise? Or was it the stress reduction? The only, of course they're all important, but the only independent factor for the reversal of the blockages was 40 minutes of Raj Yoga meditation per day. Now I asked him, you know, he published this data in what we call an observational study. It wasn't what we call a randomized trial where it was just more rigorously done. And he said, why have you not done the randomized trial he said i have years ago and

Starting point is 01:46:05 he showed me the data and i was like wow why didn't you publish this anywhere couldn't get it published he invited and i i could be wrong about it was it was senior it was a senior cardiology society can't remember the american art association but it was a senior cardiology society in america to um he invited them to ind India so he could present his data he presented his data to them and they basically thought it was fascinating but in between the lines they said to him you know we can't publish this because it will affect our stent business and what's a stent business stent is basically the heart stents like as in it would you know I remember Steve when I first um wrote an article the first sort of mainstream media article i wrote in 2011

Starting point is 01:46:50 was me it was in the observer newspaper i'd met jamie oliver having written to him saying can you sort hospital food out and then i ended up writing an article called i mend hearts then i see our hospitalists serve junk food to my patients uh basically saying listen we're going to tackle this obesity epidemic tackle heart disease we need to sort the diet out and i remember one of the cardiologists um who i knew a senior cardiologist i was still a junior doctor at this point kind of tongue-in-cheek but many truths are spoken and just said a seam this is going to affect our our business our stent business as in operating on people as if it was a bad thing that i was saying that we should basically prevent heart disease, right? There's a cultural problem

Starting point is 01:47:28 here, Steve, honestly. This is a dirty secret, if you like, within medicine, unfortunately. Amongst establishment figures is that they have become so wedded and so close to these tyrannical corporations or their own self-interest that, you know, we're missing a big trick here in terms of what we can really do for patients. In part, your other book here that I have, I still can't pronounce this word, Piopi? Piopi Diet. Your Piopi Diet, I guess, serves to address many of these issues and to make sure that our hearts

Starting point is 01:48:01 stay healthy. What I wanted you to do for me is, if I'm endeavoring to have a good heart health until I die, which I guess is kind of impossible, but maybe I'll get hit by a truck or something. If I'm endeavoring to have good heart health, what should my daily, in an optimal situation, what should my daily routine look like? If I follow the diet that you came up with,

Starting point is 01:48:23 but also if I'm thinking through all of the potential things that can cause bad health sleep i wake up so i sleep for seven hours yeah so at least seven hours sleep great okay okay that's the tick yeah okay um eating real food okay so breakfast is how many how many meals a day should i have well two to three whatever suits you when you feel hungry eat till you're full not seven eight nine not no just you know and also i suppose if you're doing activity then you may but the most important thing is to avoid the ultra processed food and not to have too much starch what about fasting um controversial area mixed data um i think that in terms of you know i have patients who feel benefit from fasting and other people feel more stressed. It depends where you are in your life. If, for example,

Starting point is 01:49:09 you're very active and your sleep isn't good, actually fasting can make your stress levels worse, which is not good. It causes cortisol to increase. And there is some data showing that happens. So it depends where you are, but I'm not averse to fasting. It depends, you know, see how people feel. Okay. So I've woken up, I've had seven hours of sleep. I've eaten breakfast, which was whole foods. So yeah. Yeah. And okay, so I would say, you know,

Starting point is 01:49:30 whole fruit and vegetables, ideally. A mixture of low sugar fruits, if you can, ideally. You know, berries, mixed berries, for example. If you can get at least five to seven portions in, that's great. The foods that are thought, so the anti-inflammatory foods that have got a reasonable body of evidence behind them are things like extra virgin olive oil is

Starting point is 01:49:51 your base fat okay nuts and seeds tree nuts almonds walnuts um hazelnuts for example oily fish at least a couple of times a week right and then i would say minimizing you know the starch and the sugar okay and the rest of it doesn't matter you can have you know i have heart patients asking me where they can eat a steak i say absolutely it's not going to cause you know it's very nutritious if you want to have a steak two or three times a week no issue saturated fat in the diet isn't a problem i busted that myth so butter cheese for example red meat is not going to have any adverse effect on your heart. Okay. So I've eaten my breakfast.

Starting point is 01:50:27 You want to enjoy your food as well, right? Yeah. So that's my sleep, taking care of my meals that day, taking care of what else do I need to be thinking about to optimize heart health? Well, I suppose you've got to think about what, it's very subjective. You know, if you're stressed and if you're stressed, then you need to think about what can you do about it and there are different things some people find exercise um is good some people do yoga they do pilates some people do breath work so try and find i have an app called calm which i listen to i i do at least 20 to 30 sometimes 40 minutes of breath work every morning when i wake up it's the first first thing I do, actually. I'm going to do both. I'm going to do breath work and I'm going to go for a long workout.

Starting point is 01:51:08 Is there such a thing as too much exercise? Yeah, unfortunately, yes. About 11% of elite athletes, by the time they reach 50, will have scans that show very severe blockages or a heart disease, right? And I think, Steve, to to be honest it might be genetic predisposition but i think a lot of those people i have some of these people coming to me who don't

Starting point is 01:51:30 know why they've got diagnosed with heart disease and i remember one lady i saw a few months ago and she was running something like something crazy like five to ten miles a day but on only four hours sleep and she was young and otherwise didn't have a diabetes or anything else but had heart disease and developed heart disease and i said this is probably because of this so uh i think that when you look at heart disease and optimal levels of exercise it is actually the one thing i think the guidelines are right about is probably that 150 minutes of moderate activity a week so you know i again i i follow my own advice and i will um you know i i used to run but, but running can be quite damaging to the knees, especially as you get older. So I cycle and do exercise bike and whatever else,

Starting point is 01:52:11 and I will get my heart rate to about 115 beats a minute for 30 minutes, five times a week. One study found that marathon runners experience a frequency of heart attacks and strokes similar to people who already have heart disease suggesting too much exercise is harmful which is in your book statin free and um another stat here is athletes who do more than one hour of intense exercise per day four times and have four times the frequency of breathing infections per year compared to those who do moderate activity that's the other thing about over exercising well it depresses the immune system that's well known uh and in fact if you look, and a lot of people do it for different reasons, but if you look at the communities around the world

Starting point is 01:52:47 known as the blue zones, Steve, you know, where people have high longevity, these people weren't pounding it in the gym. They're just outside, you know, they were gardening, they were moving. You don't need to be doing all of that kind of stuff. People do it for different reasons. I mean, I do it sometimes.

Starting point is 01:52:59 Oh, also for mental health, it's good. You, didn't you publish an article, you co-authored an article for the british journal of sports and medicine called it's time to bust the myth of physical activity yeah physical inactivity and obesity you can't outrun a bad diet that was the title of the article and the point was and we make it very clear at the beginning that exercise has many benefits for health but weight loss is not one of them because most of what determines your weight gain almost all

Starting point is 01:53:25 of it is to do with with what you eat and that discussion of that thinking whether it was about burning calories actually came from the food industry they they they they manufactured that um coca-cola mcdonald's they would push this they even the olympic games 2012 they were the main sponsors right because for them they want to distract from their unhealthy products and say well the obesity epidemic has been driven by people not you know not exercising so on that day on this perfect day that i'm creating in my mind i'm eating well i've moved but not too much i'm doing breath work in the morning i've slept seven hours a day and the last thing that from looking at your 21 day immunity plan is socializing yeah Yeah. So, so important. I think one of the

Starting point is 01:54:06 most important aspects for mental health, physical health is the quality of our relationships, friends, family. Um, people may laugh at this, but I actually, I actually prescribe hugging to a lot of my patients, uh, especially couples, you know, um, there is definitely some benefits from that, you know, uh, know uh and uh in terms of reducing cortisol levels etc i think that's an issue in society in general you know we become we have been conditioned in a way to think that we can just be dependent on ourselves as individuals and we don't need other people but actually we do this is that's how we evolved partly because it helps us it helps us feel safe hugging i think it just it just yeah

Starting point is 01:54:46 there is a it activates parts of the brain the protections soothing mechanisms of the brain and i think that is just an extra element of it absolutely and it reduces cortisol and all those things so it's going to stave off heart attacks if we hug we have less chance of having a heart attack it's not just about that. I think it's also good for the immune system. So the people that did the original cold studies on cold viruses, this was done, I think, in early 2000s, fascinating study. They inoculated people with a cold virus. So they put the traditional cold virus, whatever, into people's nasal passages. And they looked at who developed symptoms of a cold and who didn't. And they looked, and before they did that, they did these questionnaires based upon several

Starting point is 01:55:29 different aspects of people's social life. Are they involved in community activities? How often do they meet their friends? What's it like with their partner, et cetera, et cetera. And the people who had the highest scores, only one in three of those people developed a cold. And the people on the other side that were maybe more lonely and weren't interacting with other people who didn't have good quality relationships, two out of three of those people developed colds. So it's not just about heart disease,

Starting point is 01:55:55 it's about the immune system as well, overall health. Makes you think, doesn't it? If loneliness really is killing us, we need to try and do more to end the epidemic that is loneliness, because the stats seem to suggest it's going one way and it's not a good way. And part of that issue as well, Steve, which is something we need to think about with what's going on in society, is we've got a worsening mental health crisis. We've got less trust in government. One of the ways societies progress

Starting point is 01:56:21 is people being able to trust each other by people not being afraid to speak the truth. And more than ever, and certainly I've seen it in medicine, we have got to a situation and the COVID vaccine is a microcosm of something much bigger where people are afraid to speak the truth. And that gives us an element of uncertainty, distrust, and it makes us more stressed. So what this means, what it comes back to is ultimately part of the solution to the mental physical social well-being crisis heart disease is thinking about acting from a place of virtue and ethics right thinking about you know your intentions being honest not manipulating other people for money this is unfortunately whether the the capitalist

Starting point is 01:57:04 system or the current economic system has taken us and the corporatization of human beings as a result and that is very detrimental to our physical mental health what was your father's name kelash kelash son never change your loyalties yeah loyalty was very important to him you know there's i was brought with those core values about um honesty integrity being loyal to people how to be a good human being how to be the best version of yourself steve um that's what it's about you know for your benefit and for the benefit of others he said that you and you were younger and you were considering switching football team. He told you to never change your loyalties. And I've got the eulogy you wrote for your father when he passed away here.

Starting point is 01:57:56 And it's interesting some of the words and phrases that you used in the eulogy to him because they seem to be quite pertinent to our conversation today. The ultimate purpose of knowledge is to reduce human suffering and that true wisdom to achieve that end only comes from dialogue. Yeah, that was a Socratic, Socrates quote, true wisdom comes only from dialogue. Understanding others starts from understanding oneself and to get to a greater truth one has to be able to question one's own beliefs and to get there to achieve that you have to engage with other people and have discussions but from a place of compassion where you are open to listening to other people because we can only get to a greater truth if you listen to all different sides on a particular

Starting point is 01:58:43 issue and that comes from having that conversation so i think that's a huge component of it all which i think we're losing steve in society there's so much polarization you know yeah and that's yeah i completely agree and you know it's difficult obviously because um conversation can be fatal it can be um especially medical conversation conversation about things like vaccines or health information. So it's very delicate information. But what can also be fatal is the lack of conversation, i.e. not seeing ideas collide. And it's interesting as someone who speaks to a lot of health professionals on this podcast, I'm not an expert in health and people

Starting point is 01:59:21 will often criticize me for that and say, you um this they said this thing wrong or this thing wrong but i think the place that i've got to now is to present every opinion that i can yeah and hopefully to will people to be able to make up their own minds and i hope i tried to uh present some of the other side of um at least the rebuttals so people can can be curious and they don't we're not pushing in any particular direction i have no bloody dog in the fight i don't know and i'm not i want to have that conversation steve i think part of the problem with all of this is that conversation isn't even happening we want to have that conversation we want rebuttals we want a counter view yeah but the ignoring of even the conversation that for me is is is unforgivable it's a shame i think podcasts are doing a good

Starting point is 02:00:02 job of kind of well i think a lot of them are doing a good job of just having that conversation yeah um because it's long form and there's i mean there's a there's a comment section so people are going to discuss below and there's you know there's lots of podcasts there's lots of information being thrown out into the world and um everything we've talked about today will be linked below as much of the the links as we can so if anybody is curious about anything we've discussed or any stats you'll send me your stuff absolutely and i'll link it below and i'll link the nhs and the british heart foundation and anyone else below so people can have a think about that but i am a big fan of conversation and i'm a big fan of having both

Starting point is 02:00:39 sides of an argument and trying to make my own mind up on things and find the nuance i find the truth is usually somewhere in the middle yeah so i think it's important because you know one of the things i think we have to we have to reflect on is some of those amazing people you talked about like martin luther king and i don't know whether it's the suffragettes or gandhi whoever it might be their ideas in their time were received equally horrifically and um now those are things that we all consider to be true and very important as it relates to maybe science or just social issues on equality. So with that in mind, we have to also be humble to the fact that an idea that might be important might at first

Starting point is 02:01:16 offend us, it might trigger us, it might be counter to the public narrative or to the current available science, but I don't think it should be censored no and i i would say that people listening to this just think about one thing one of the reasons that we seek the truth and greater truths is that a life lived in darkness has no meaning amen we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for and the question left for you is of all the most amazing superstar people you have met in your life what was the quality that made them superstars and can it be taught a love for humanity

Starting point is 02:02:06 that was a quality that made them superstars and whatever they were doing it was to give back to society in some way whether it was entertainment whether it was music whether it was sport but based upon a love for humanity. Stands up to be true. I just went through a list of superstars that I know of in my brain and I think that's certainly the case. And it's funny because the people that I think of as real superstars

Starting point is 02:02:34 aren't necessarily famous. They're not rich. They're not anything like that. They're just like the best people. The ones that I really aspire to be more like. But the one that made them stand out for me, the one quality that made them extra special in those particular people um was despite them being so excellent is they had a huge a wonderful humility about them

Starting point is 02:02:58 and they can find you everywhere especially on twitter good big twitter following um and your books as well i will link your books below in the description for anybody that wants to read them i've these two books in particular the one that i can't pronounce the peopie peopie diet a 21 day lifestyle plan lose weight feel great and drastically reduce your risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease and a statin free life a revolutionary life plan for tackling heart disease without the use of statins are two that i'd certainly really really recommend thank you dr azim thank you for the work you do the way that you do your work and thank you for having the courage to be a loud counteracting voice in society where we do need counteracting voices i don't think anybody can ever argue with that

Starting point is 02:03:44 and the way in which you do it and your intentions of doing it, I think are wonderful. And I think they're a real credit to the two wonderful people that raised you. So thank you for your time today. Thank you for doing the work that you do. I'm going to continue following it. I follow you on Twitter and I've been following you for many, many years, I think, I believe. And I very much enjoy consuming your information because I know that there's a certain fearlessness with you that is going to deliver what is true regardless of consequence. And that is a useful source of information to have in my world where I'm trying to advance my thinking and I care more about progress and truth than I do something feeling comfortable. So I highly recommend everyone go check you out on twitter as well

Starting point is 02:04:49 you

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