Joe Rogan Experience #1979 - Dr. Aseem Malhotra

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The Joe Rogan Experience.

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How you doing? I'm good.

All right, we're rolling.

Awesome.

How are you?

I'm good, man.

Welcome to America. (laughs)

It's- it's great to be here, like, my 25th time. (laughs)

Yeah. 25th time recently?

Um, no. I mean, I was last here in, uh, November actually. Yeah. I was here in November and, um, but I have, you know, my closest family outside my immediate family, um, unfortunately have all passed away now, uh, are in California. So, you know, since I was a kid, I'd probably come over and meet them and, you know, come over to San Jose and, like, every other year.

Hmm. (smacks lips) So for people who don't know what- who you are and what you do, w- could you please just tell us your credentials and w- what your occupation is?

Yeah. So I'm a consultant cardiologist. Um, I qualified from Edinburgh Medical School in Scotland 2001, so I've been a practicing physician now for well over 20 years. My initial early career, Joe, is I specialized in interventional cardiology. So in layman's terms, that's keyhole heart surgery. Stents, if you like. Um, and then over the past few years, for different reasons, which we'll probably get into, um, I focused more of my, uh, work on prevention.

And how did you become this, uh, controversial COVID character?

Well, it's interesting. My- I think controversy with me probably started a- a much, uh, many years ago. Um, probably I became sort of- I- I broke into the mainstream, uh, around sort of 2011 initially, because I wrote a article which was a front page commentary in The Observer Newspaper, which is part of the Guardian Group in the UK, basically as the cardiologist who's saying, you know, "Why are we serving junk food to my patients in hospitals?" Uh, and that was after I'd met with Jamie Oliver, who I'd written to. So that's how I kind of started campaigning on the issues around obesity at that point. Um, and not shortly, uh, aft- not long after that, Joe, I then, um, had a sort of- went into a deep dive to try and understand why we had an obesity epidemic, so what was driving that, uh, what was the role of cholesterol and heart disease, uh, overprescription of statins, saturated fat, and- and essentially, that culminated in me publishing a piece in the British Medical Journal in 2013, October, basically which was titled Saturated Fat is Not the Major Issue, and suggesting we should be focusing on sugar. We got it wrong on saturated fat. We're overmedicating million people- millions of people on statins. Cholesterol is not that bad as a risk factor for heart disease. Um, and that's really where I sort of broke into the mainstream. That was, you know, it w- the BMJ press released it. It was front page of three British newspapers. It was- I was on Fox News Chicago, CNN International, and that's really when I- I started my kind of activism and, um, to try and fight back against medical misinformation and- and a kind of deep understanding that what was driving poor health for many, many people was biased and corrupted information that was coming from two big industries, um, big food and big pharma.