173. Dr. Aseem Malhotra: What 1,000s Of Doctors Are Saying About The COVID Vaccine Safety Data

Summary

Podcast Summary: Episode 173 - Dr. Aseem Malhotra on COVID Vaccine Safety and Healthcare Corruption

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
• Host: Gary Brecka
• Guest: Dr. Aseem Malhotra
• Release Date: June 10, 2025
• Episode Title: Dr. Aseem Malhotra: What 1,000s Of Doctors Are Saying About The COVID Vaccine Safety Data

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Introduction

In Episode 173 of "The Ultimate Human," host Gary Brecka engages in a profound discussion with Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a renowned cardiologist and anti-aging expert. The conversation delves deep into the safety concerns surrounding COVID-19 vaccines, the influence of big corporations in healthcare, and the broader implications for public trust in medical institutions.

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COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Concerns

Reanalysis of Vaccine Data: Dr. Malhotra emphasizes the need to reassess the safety data of COVID-19 vaccines. He references a reanalysis of Pfizer and Moderna's randomized control trials (RCTs), which suggested that the vaccines might cause serious adverse events at a rate of 1 in 800, potentially outweighing their benefits.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [04:40]: "What it suggests from the beginning, Gary, is it was more harmful than beneficial."

Hope Accord Petition: Dr. Malhotra co-founded the Hope Accord, a petition garnering tens of thousands of signatures from healthcare practitioners worldwide, calling for a moratorium on mRNA COVID-19 vaccines due to emerging safety concerns.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [03:32]: "I can assure you... calling for a suspension... because the data on which they're making that assumption is from a modeling study. It's not even really... top of the evidence hierarchy."

Lack of Publicity: He laments the minimal mainstream media coverage of these safety concerns, noting that significant findings were overshadowed until he took matters into his own hands by publishing papers and appearing on various media platforms.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [08:43]: "This should have been world news. It should have been the biggest story of the decade."

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Corporate Influence and Healthcare Corruption

Corporate Tyranny: The discussion highlights how big corporations have amassed excessive power in the healthcare sector, leading to situations where medical professionals fear speaking out against questionable practices.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [01:00]: "This is a symptom of a corporate tyranny."

Funding and Bias: Dr. Malhotra reveals that a significant portion of regulatory bodies' funding comes from big pharma, potentially leading to biased decision-making processes.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [27:20]: "65% of the FDA's funding comes from Big Pharma."

Impact on Public Trust: The mishandling of the pandemic and vaccine rollout has severely damaged public trust in medical institutions, with trust in doctors plummeting from 74% in April 2020 to around 40%.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [21:03]: "There was a paper published last year in the US that showed that trust in doctors had gone from an all-time high... to now less than 40%."

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Statins, Cholesterol, and Heart Disease

Challenging the Cholesterol Hypothesis: Dr. Malhotra critiques the long-standing belief that LDL cholesterol is a primary predictor of heart disease. He cites studies indicating that in older populations, high LDL is not associated with increased heart disease and may even be inversely related to mortality.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [47:18]: "LDL was not a predictor in people with FH. Their LDL levels were the same."

Statins' Limited Benefits: He argues that the benefits of statins may be due to their anti-inflammatory properties rather than their cholesterol-lowering effects, and emphasizes that lowering LDL alone does not significantly reduce heart disease risk.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [53:16]: "I think they need to hang their heads in shame."

Impact of Overprescription: Dr. Malhotra expresses concern over the overprescription of statins, highlighting the downstream consequences such as joint pain, brain fog, and cognitive decline, which are often overlooked in clinical studies.

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Metabolic Health and Inflammation

Central Role of Metabolic Health: The conversation shifts to the importance of managing metabolic syndrome as a priority for public health. Dr. Malhotra emphasizes that improving metabolic health can significantly reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, and mental health issues.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [65:03]: "Improving metabolic health has to be a priority for all Americans."

Inflammatory Cascade: He explains how chronic inflammation, driven by factors like insulin resistance and high triglycerides, damages the endothelium of arteries, leading to heart disease.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [61:50]: "Chronically raised insulin itself is directly toxic to the inner lining of the heart arteries."

Dietary Interventions: Dr. Malhotra advocates for low-carb diets as an effective method to reduce insulin spikes and improve metabolic health.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [63:48]: "The quickest and the low hanging fruit for us to do that is really to go low carb."

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Policy Recommendations and Public Health Reforms

Regulating Ultra-Processed Foods: Drawing parallels to tobacco control, Dr. Malhotra suggests stringent regulations on ultra-processed foods, including banning their sale in hospitals and schools, and implementing advertising restrictions.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [69:38]: "It's the new tobacco."

Economic Reforms: He calls for taxing corporate fraudsters and redirecting funds from large corporations to support public health initiatives, emphasizing that the necessary resources are already available but misallocated.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [68:50]: "Let’s tax the fraudsters, which happen to be some of the richest people in America."

Empowering Healthcare Workers: Dr. Malhotra highlights the paradox of healthcare workers facing poverty despite being part of the largest employment sector in the U.S., advocating for fair wages to reduce poverty levels significantly.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [73:55]: "One shocking statistic... 24% of healthcare workers are earning less than $15 per hour."

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Restoring Public Trust and Moving Forward

Acknowledging Mistakes: He underscores the necessity for apologies from medical leaders like Dr. Fauci and a transparent acknowledgment of the errors made during the pandemic to rebuild trust.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [20:24]: "They need to apologize... because there was a paper published last year... trust in doctors had gone from an all-time high to now less than 40%."

Holistic Health Approaches: Dr. Malhotra advocates for a multifaceted approach to health that includes nutritional education for doctors, public health campaigns, and policy changes to promote metabolic health and reduce reliance on pharmaceuticals.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [77:56]: "Mental health problems... have a huge component linked to diet."

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Concluding Thoughts

In wrapping up the episode, Dr. Malhotra and Gary Brecka stress the urgent need for systemic reforms in healthcare and public health policies to prioritize metabolic health, reduce corporate influence, and restore faith in medical institutions. They advocate for courageous compassion as the cornerstone of becoming an "ultimate human"—a state characterized by both personal health optimization and societal well-being.

• Notable Quote:
  Dr. Aseem Malhotra [77:50]: "I think to act with courageous compassion."

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Key Takeaways

1. Reevaluation of COVID-19 Vaccine Safety: Emerging data suggests potential risks may outweigh benefits for certain populations.
2. Corporate Influence in Healthcare: Big pharma's substantial funding of regulatory bodies compromises transparency and public trust.
3. Challenging Established Medical Hypotheses: Traditional views on cholesterol and statins may need significant revision based on recent studies.
4. Importance of Metabolic Health: Managing metabolic syndrome is crucial for preventing a range of chronic diseases.
5. Policy Reforms Needed: Implementing stricter regulations on ultra-processed foods and reallocating corporate funds can enhance public health.
6. Restoring Trust: Transparent acknowledgment of past mistakes and systemic reforms are essential for rebuilding public confidence in healthcare.

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Final Remarks

This episode serves as a critical examination of current healthcare practices and policies, urging listeners to advocate for evidence-based reforms and prioritize holistic health approaches. Dr. Aseem Malhotra's insights offer a compelling call to action for both medical professionals and the public to address the underlying issues affecting health outcomes.

Transcript

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

The COVID vaccine and the handling of it really, I think has become the end result of decades of unchecked visible and power of big corporations. And that needs to be changed and overturned.

[Gary Breca]

In my opinion, that's why the vaccine gets away with having caused so many conditions, but is not being blamed for so many conditions.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

57% of Americans felt that the excess deaths in the US were linked to the COVID vaccine. And the main reason in my view, is the handling of the pandemic specifically with the COVID vaccine.

[Gary Breca]

If you were actually preserving so many lives, then a lot these numbers wouldn't have changed.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

We should utilize this as an opportunity to expose the whole system and society that functions well throughout history is also to stop any single entity getting so much power that it can then be abused. Even for example, with the COVID vaccine. I have many doctors who talk to me and say, I see my completely with you. Thank you. They get emotional, but I'm afraid to speak out. This is a symptom of a corporate tyranny. People say tax are rich. I don't think that sounds right. Let's tax the fraudsters, which happen to be some of the richest people in America.

[Gary Breca]

Everyone purports to want to protect and serve the least fortunate. And yet these are the ones that are continually preyed upon by a lot of these corrupt practices. In fact, if you could rewrite something in the public health policy, where would you start?

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

I think one of the challenges we still have, Gary, and we should just talk about it, is.

[Gary Breca]

Ultimate Human. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human podcast. I'm your host, Gary Breca where we go down the road of everything anti aging, longevity, biohacking and everything in between. This is a three time return guest now and one of my very close friends and a man I am so incredibly fond of. He's well spoken, he's well published, he's well revered the British medical journals and also here in the United States is a renowned cardiologist. And his refreshing view on everything ketogenic, low carb, LDL cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome is just so in line with the data, the big data, and so in line with my philosophy. I can't wait to chop it up with him again. Welcome back to the podcast.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Thanks for having me.

[Gary Breca]

Dr. Aseem Malhotra. So yeah, we've had, we've had a really kind of a fun journey, you and I. You know, we've developed a friendship over the last year. It's been amazing getting to know you and last time we we chopped it up about the, the whole narrative surrounding statins and cholesterol. But before we actually get into that today, in fact, right before this podcast, I mentioned you because we were, we were talking about cholesterol and cardiovascular disease on a previous podcast and I actually told them to go look up the podcast that I did with you because you're so articulate with the way that you explain things. But early this year you actually called for and publicly demanded a moratorium on the mRNA COVID 19 vaccines. And I don't know if you began the petition or if you were just a part of the petition that was going around, but then a number of physicians had signed and it was citing some of the newest clinical data on cardiac risks and even newest data on autoimmune disorders. And I wonder if you might just expand upon that, you know, what was, what was the rationale, the impetus behind actually calling for a moratorium on these.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah, really good question, Gary. So I think it's a culmination of what's been happening over the last several years. I was a co founder of the petition. And the petition calling for this moratorium, you know, has got tens of thousands of signatures around the world from healthcare practitioners and specific tens of thousands, tens of thousands, and specifically thousands of, of actual medical practicing doctors right around the world. So that's a lot of doctors who are saying, agreeing with what we wrote. And people can look it up online. It's called the Hope Accord. So look to go to hopeacord.com and you can, you can have a read of it. But essentially one of the, for me, I always go back to square one, which is what did the original randomized control trial data tell us when it was independently verified and analyzed? And that analysis was done by one of the co founders of the petition, a guy called Joseph Freeman, who is an ER doctor in Louisiana and a data scientist and himself a number of very eminent doctors. They reanalyzed Pfizer and Moderna's original RCT, the one that the world was told was 95% effective.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah, 95% efficacy, I remember, no side.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Effects, et cetera, et cetera. So when they were able to reanalyze that data with new information that became available on the FDA's website and health Canada's website, what they found is that you were more likely to suffer serious harm from taking the vaccine that was described as life changing event, disability or hospitalization at a rate of 1 in 800 than you were to be hospitalized with COVID In other words, wow.

[Gary Breca]

So the rate was less than 1 in 800 with COVID Absolutely, yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

You know, in a relatively healthy population. But they looked at, you know, age groups, you know, from young to old, and there was over more than, I think 40,000 participants in that, in that, in that trial. In those trials. So what it suggests from the beginning, Gary, is it was more harmful than beneficial. They were able to match the serious adverse event rates with a list that was put up by an organization called the Brighton Collaboration in the uk and they already had a list that was endorsed by the World Health Organization. I mean, this is pretty shocking stuff because why was this not well publicized? The who, when the vaccine, even just before it was even being rolled out, or when it was being rolled out, suggested these are the potential serious harms that could happen. Right. From different bits of data that we put together, you know, the platform that was being used, previous harms from other vaccines, animal studies, what Covid, severe Covid did itself. So they said these are the potential serious adverse effects that could happen. Anything and everything and every organ system is in that list of harm, really. The heart, cardiac arrest, heart failure, myocarditis, pericarditis, heart attack.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Arrhythmias. It's all there, Gary. So imagine you start from that position, that place of, okay, at least 1 in 800 short term, there's just short.

[Gary Breca]

Term harm in 1 in 800 in just an average population. So this is like a 24 year old healthy athlete, 44 year old soccer mom and a 65 year old.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

It was across the board. So they weren't able to find out was it more prevalent in any particular age group. So it was an average, but in a general healthy population. And that too short term. So yesterday, that's incredible with what we know about COVID and it will fit with the vaccine, what we've seen, if you've got comorbidities, if you're already metabolically unhealthy, those people were more likely to get serious adverse events from the vaccine as well. Because what it does is it accelerates underlying conditions already. So this 1,800figure is probably a gross underestimate. And then just to give a perspective in terms of what's happened historically with other vaccines that have been pulled, again, not well publicized now, but that was available. People can look this up. In 1976, the swine flu vaccine was pulled from the market. I think it was President Ford, was it? That was the 1976. He pulled it, right? He pulled it from the market because they found a signal that it was causing Guillain Barry Syndrome, a neurological condition that's very disabling. Right.

[Gary Breca]

Strange one. Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

At a rate of 1 in 100,000, that was enough to pull it.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Right. And then you've got the rotavirus vaccine, which was in 1999, that was suspended because it was found to cause a form of bowel obstruction in kids. At a rate of 1 in 10,000, we're saying 1, 800. And this is not some kind of 1 in 800. It's not a blog. This is, you know, where they publish this. They published it in the highest impact journal for vaccines. It's called Vaccine. And I'll tell you what you know, and that was in the summer of 22, and I met Richard Horton, who I know personally, the editor in chief of the Lancet, in the street just before I gave a talk in London after I'd published a paper summarizing my findings, including this paper, at the end of 2022. And I met him in the street where we live in this village called Hampstead, and had. He's very pleasant, you know, I had a conversation with him and I said, you know, I'm giving this talk and he didn't know about this publication in Vaccine. And his eyebrows raised when I told him, he said, oh, he goes, that's a pretty credible journal. He didn't say anything else after that.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

So, yeah. And this should have been world news. It should have been the biggest story of the decade. There was no publicity in any mainstream press.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

All of the publicity came from me, ultimately, when I published my paper several months later, basically, and then kept highlighting this in all the news I was in, the conversation I was having with Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson or Megyn Kelly or, you know, even hijacking the BBC, people that would listen. Yeah. You know, which I did in the beginning of 2023. And that on X got 25 million views because people were so interested in that story. We were talking about statins, but I said, the reason we're talking about statins is because we've got this excess death rate going on in the UK that people are trying to understand. And almost certainly the COVID vaccine is playing a role. How big a role? We don't know. I think probably the biggest role. And then, you know, all hell broke loose.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah. For you?

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Well, yeah, yeah.

[Gary Breca]

Because you said the access test could be related to the vaccine. So you called for this moratorium and you said almost 10,000 physicians have signed the.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

To at least 2,000 physicians, but thousands More healthcare practitioners, which include nurses and other health, you know, healthcare workers.

[Gary Breca]

Right. And now what's the status of that? They collect all these signatures. I don't even know what the procedure is. You turn it into who, Health and Human Services.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

I mean, well, we publicized it, number one, certainly through social media. Interestingly, Gary, I also have been involved with lots of different. Backlash goes on when you speak truth to power and you get stuff out there. Right. And I've been involved in this for many, many years in different ways, especially on statins, which we'll come on to later. But one of the things that was interesting when this Hope Accord was signed, I, in fact it was when I was in the States last time when I was here, I think it was after we met. I was in a situation where the General Medical Council, which are the body that control your license to practice in the uk, they had been put under pressure to investigate my license to practice and they'd been holding on to making a decision whether or not to do this for since the beginning of last year. Okay, so it's quite a while at the end of the year last year, even though the evidence that I put forward was in my case was I think overwhelming that the advocacy I've done has been evidence based. I've not said anything thing that is, you know, so far fetched that it's going to cause patient harm or whatever else. In fact the opposite. They asked me to respond to further allegations that I was spreading misinformation, that I was abusing my position. And I looked at some of these allegations from anonymous doctors and they were absolutely just crazy. Including, they're saying that Aseem Malhotra is spreading misinformation on the COVID vaccine and exploiting vulnerable communities in India and South Africa.

[Gary Breca]

Oh my God.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Right. Because I'd been so get this story right. So when I came out speaking about the vaccine, I got one of the most sort of, I don't know, two big moments for me on a personal level really made me, you know, gave me strength and hope that what I was doing was right. The first one, just after I published my paper at the end of 2022, I went on GB News in the UK and to say that we should suspend the vaccine. This was September 2022 and as I come out of the studio, I get a missed call from a U.S. number, right? I was like, oh, that's interesting. Who's that? So I called it back. It was Robert Kennedy Jr. First conversation I'd had with him.

[Gary Breca]

So he had seen Your.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

He was aware of it. And he'd got my number from Robert Malone. Okay. And he basically said to me, Dr. Malhotra, it's Robert Kennedy Jr. Here. I want to thank you for your courage. And I was like, wow. You know, I said, it's an honor to speak to you. And then. And that's how we initially connected. So there was that.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Obviously another story ongoing with Bobby after that.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And then what happened was again, around the same time I got a DM on X. It was then Twitter from. The man is called Jay Naidu. He's one of the most powerful voices in Africa. He is credited as being the person that almost single handedly organized the release of Nelson Mandela from prison by organizing. He was a trade union leader. He organized a strike of a million workers in South Africa and it pushed essentially the South African government to release Nelson Mandela from prison. He was Nelson Mandela's best friend. He was in his first cabinet. And he was writing to me saying, asim, what you're doing is so wonderful and amazing. Mandela would say this. And I was like, is this for real? That's super cool. So that was kind of like, you know, for me, that was. These are sort of moments that made me, kind of gave me strength to carry on in this battle. And so anyway, all of this was put forward to the General Medical Council. They then asked me, sorry. So Jay Nido asked me to come speak in South Africa. I went to South Africa, spoke in one of their parliaments, got stuff in the mainstream news which no one had been able to do, of course, with backlash. And I went to India when one of the most powerful families in India and one of the richest families in the world, called the Ambanis there, one of the brothers, his name Anil Ambani, who owns, you know, they basically run the. The film industry of Bondi. Right, right. Their son and daughter in law contacted me as well and asked me to come and speak in India because we've got problems with the COVID vaccine.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

So I went to speak, you know, in very credible places, including one of India's most prestigious hospitals. In my talk, Gary, because I believe in the evidence, speaks for itself. If people will listen. Doctors who were there were gobsmacked and were turned in one hour. Doctors who had been responsible for rolling out the vaccine in India by the end of my talk basically thought, you know, metaphorically, holy shit, wow, what have we done? Like, it was that kind of response, okay, wow. I then spoke in another institute in India, one of the Most prestigious institutes in India called aims. It's the number one medical institution of the whole of India and even Asia, probably.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

But so, and I had feedback, right? I had feedback from these places, from these doctors saying aseem came to speak here. He was very evidence based, very eloquent, you know, etc. Etc. So imagine I'm not having to respond to the General Medical Council from these anonymous complaints of complete bullshit, basically saying I'm exploiting vulnerable communities. Right. This kind of stuff. So in that I wrote, I added in of course, the Hope Accord situation, interestingly also wrote in my letter to the General Medical Council, which people can read it's open access on my website and I mentioned that Jay Bhattacharya, who at that stage wasn't the director of nih, it was before his director of NIH had also signed it.

[Gary Breca]

Right, yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Okay. So he was also part of this for me. One of the lessons in public health advocacy, Gary, is if you get an issue, media attention, you're more likely to influence policy than just private advocacy, essentially.

[Gary Breca]

Right, right.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Sunlight is a very potent disinfectant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is.

[Gary Breca]

Bright light.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

So with all of this going on in the last few months, what suddenly happened is very interesting is the Daily Mail USA and their science editor, who used to work in the UK and we've done stories with before, has suddenly become very interested and we've had conversations and convinced him at least that there's a case to be made here, that this needs more attention.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

So that's why we've been getting, if you've seen and the Hope Accord has been mentioned and members of, you know, linked to the administration from Jay Bhattacharya to Bobby Kennedy, even Kash Patel, I didn't know had actually called. You know, he basically has skepticism about COVID vaccine as well. All of these players were then mentioned, you know, that saying that, you know, the potential U turn by Trump team on COVID vaccine. Because I think one of the challenges we still have, Gary, and we should just talk about it, is I think President Trump, I think he was misled and I think he's, you know, there is this narrative that's out there which suggests, I'm not saying from him, you know, he may have mentioned it, but it didn't come from him saying that millions of lives or maybe tens of millions of lives have been saved from the COVID vaccine. And the data on which they're making that assumption is from a modeling study. It's not even really. It's not Even in the hierarchy of evidence based medicine. Carl Hennigan, who is the director of the center of Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University, he's one of the most eminent evidence based medicine doctors in the world. And I've had close conversations with Carl, right. He supported my paper when I called for a suspension. Behind the scenes, he wrote in an article saying, this suggestion that it saved millions of lives is implausible. Really completely implausible.

[Gary Breca]

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[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Well, all of that. But also the data they're using to make that assumption is very poor quality. It's not even considered in the hierarchy of evidence based medicine. We've got the RCT from reanalysis right at the top. We've got all the observational data.

[Gary Breca]

We've got observational, observational data. You got excess deaths. And you say, well, if you were actually preserving, preserving so many lives, not, not, not even extended, just preserving so many lives, then, then a lot of these numbers wouldn't have changed. But once you start removing people from the pool, ostensibly because of death, everything changes so completely. Yeah, I mean, I was in probability and statistics and I, and I know that you can take two completely identical sets of data and have them say completely different things depending on, on what you're after. I mean, an improvement of 1 in 100,000 is a 100 improvement over 1, you know, so, and a lot of people don't understand efficacy, you know, effective, you know, these minimum effective doses, how, how effective a, a compound or a vaccine or a drug is. And when you start peeling back the layers of the onion and you say, well, you know, there were 10,000 people in this study. One person had positive outcome and in the, you know, in the placebo group, two people had a positive outcome in the non placebo group. So that's 100% more effective. And then all the consumer hears is it's 100% effective. Yeah, I, you know, I still remember turning on the TV and everything else during COVID I would almost second guess myself because it would be like it's 97.6% effective, it's 99.2% effective, which makes you think that you have a 0.4 or 0.6% chance of, of catching the virus and having any kind of severe complication. In fact, I think it does more harm because you give people false sense that they're protected.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Completely. Right, Completely. You know, the evidence is overwhelming, but the evidence is overwhelming now. Right. So, you know, there needs to be moratorium. There needs to be an apology from the medical establishment. Yeah, for sure.

[Gary Breca]

From people like Fauci or from.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah, absolutely, from Fauci, from, from the medical bodies that pushed it, that supported mandates, for example. They need to apologize. They need to. Well, you know, when you make an error in medicine, you're taught that first of all, you acknowledge there's a problem. Right. Acknowledge there's a problem, then you apologize. Then you say, this is what we're going to do to make it better, to make sure it doesn't happen again. That's what needs to happen. Until that happens, you know, the trust in. There was a paper published last year in the US that showed that trust in doctors had gone from an all time high, about 74% in April 2020. Right. The height of the pandemic to now less than 40 or about 40%.

[Gary Breca]

That's like where Washington politicians are.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Exactly. And the main reason, in my view, one of the main reasons, not the main reason, is the handling of the whole, the pandemic, specifically with the COVID vaccine. I agree. I mean, a separate study showed 57% of Americans f felt that the excess deaths in the US were linked to the COVID vaccine. There's such a disconnect there. Right. And you look at, of course, we're really happy that we've got the likes of Bobby Kennedy Jr. And Tulsi Gabbard and Jay now and Mani Bakari in really Prominent positions to influence policy and health. But I can assure you, Gary, and please correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think anybody on this particular, during this election voted for Donald Trump because of Operation Warp Speed.

[Gary Breca]

No, nobody voted for him because of Operation Warp Speed.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And he needs to know that he doesn't need to hold onto it like he was misled. I agree that there may have been a slightly greater benefit than harm potentially for very high risk people at earlier stages. But as we said already, if everybody knew at the beginning the rate of serious harm was going to be at least 1, 800, it would never have been approved. It would have passed authorization.

[Gary Breca]

Right, right. You know, I, I, I was actually down the rabbit hole really, looking at some of the papers on gain of function research and some of the papers.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

On.

[Gary Breca]

The COVID vaccine. I don't know if you subscribe to the fact that it was a lab leak theory.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Oh, completely.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

It seems most likely I do too.

[Gary Breca]

And, and I think, I think most people do by now. What was really interesting is when you look at gain of function, how you take the most viral or virile outcome or impact of one virus and you stitch it together with a different virus. So let's say you have a respiratory virus and a virus that causes neural inflammation, and now you have a neuroinflammatory respiratory virus because you somehow stitch these viruses together. This paper went on to say how in the human body there's no mechanism for two independent viruses, like, say you have Epstein Barr and you have chickenpox. There's no way for these two viruses to get together and form their own supervisors. Right. They don't lock arms and form their own virus. It's possible to have different viral attacks in the same body. You could theoretically have influenza, you know, the common cold, and the next day get Covid.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah.

[Gary Breca]

And have both of them. Or you could have an Epstein Barr virus and, and also have shingles. Right. I mean, it's possible that you could have these multiple viruses. But one of the interesting things that it went into, and I don't know if this is, love your opinion on it, was that the nucleocapsid protein on this virus was stitched together with something called a CGG sequence, cytosine glycine, glycine sequence, which they said does not occur anywhere naturally in nature.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Right.

[Gary Breca]

So the best way I could describe it is that you have had an influenza virus. You had a SARS CoV2 virus, you had a Middle Eastern respiratory viru. And basically, because These things can't spontaneously combine. They were synthetically stitched together to form this. Let's call it a super virus, SARS CoV2, what we call SARS19 and that that's what leaked. And when that leaked, we didn't have the antidote to slow it down. And it's a really, really interesting paper. I'm going to, I'm going to make sense, I'm going to link it and. Yeah, very interesting in the notes below, but it does make sense. And this cytosine, glycine. Glycine, the CG cgg sequence of, of actually causing these independent viruses to connect and sort of become one, did not exist anywhere else naturally in nature or anywhere else in the world. And they found it highly focused in that, you know, in that.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Wow.

[Gary Breca]

In that one lab, you know, some of the things that you've, you've claimed is that the pharma companies manipulated the data and, and that that politicians were actually misled. I think very often we think that our politicians are just on board with the whole game, right? They're. And maybe, you know, they're getting paid or they're part of the problem or eventually they're going to get paid when they go to work for Big Pharma or Big Food. But, but in this, you didn't really say that. You said that the pharma companies manipulated the data and the politicians were misled.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah, absolutely, Gary. That's also my experience speaking to politicians. I have, I know many politicians, very senior members across all parties in the uk and some of them even come to me for medical advice. Some of them are my patients.

[Gary Breca]

Right.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

So I have honest conversation with them and they. A lot of them were very shocked. Even recently, I was returning from Washington D.C. having been invited for the inauguration and from the Wahaba where we last met. And I was on the plane and I met the former Attorney General and she was the Home Secretary at one stage named Suella Braverman. On the plane with her husband, I was introduced to her by a common friend and she seemed very pleasant. And, you know, I spent about half an hour speaking to both her and her husband. Right. About what happened with the COVID vaccine. Had no idea. And they literally. Her jaw dropped. I mean, she didn't know what to say.

[Gary Breca]

She. Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

She had no clue. No clue. These are people in the heart of government.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Right. So in the UK or here. This is in the UK.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah, yeah, in the UK. Yeah, yeah,.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

You know what's fascinating in all of this is a lot of members of the public. And even doctors get their information from mainstream media. I gave a talk in the British Medical association during the annual conference in the summer of 2022 before I published my paper. And it was on the corruption of Bigfoot. It was like essentially, I think my talk title was something the corporate capture of Medicine, Public health. And in that, by this stage, Joseph Freeman's paper, the vaccine paper, was in a preprint stage. It hadn't been finally published in vaccine, but it was in a preprint. And I just brought that in in the middle of the paper. And then at the end of the talk, there was a lot of interest in what I'd said, but a lot of shock. And, you know, the chairman of the British Medical association were there and one of the things that I mentioned to him is that, you know, 86% of the funding of our regulator in the UK, MHRA, like the FDA, comes from big pharma.

[Gary Breca]

86%, yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

65% of the FDA's funding comes from Big Pharma. Right. So you think about it, he didn't even know. He was shocked by that. But I go back to several months earlier. I was involved in a campaign to help overturn vaccine mandates for healthcare workers in the uk and the chair of the BMA at the time, Chan Nagpal, his name is. We've known each other for a long time. He was very close to my father, my late father. And I wanted to get access to the Secretary for Health at the time, his name, Sajid Javid, he'd come out calling for mandates, which was all very weird, by the way, Gary, because that happened sort of October, November 2021. The mandates were being pushed after real world data was showing serious harms, after we knew it was stopping transmission. So for me, at the time, I realized my intuition, my intuitive intelligence, said, this is coming from Pfizer. This is coming from the drug companies for sure. And then it was later prov. That Pfizer, I think Lee Fang is the name of the journalist. He found that Pfizer, in the summer of 2021 had lobbied respected grassroots organizations in the US by giving tens of thousands of dollars to push the vaccine mandate narrative. Wow, right. So they did that because they wanted to distract.

[Gary Breca]

Ultimately. Was that coming from like, Soros or was it coming from who?

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Well, it was coming from the company, I don't know, from Pfizer that way. They were saying that the company itself was paying money to these, these organizations because that's what they do deliberately to detract from the harms to make you think if it's being mandated, it's gotta be safe and effective. But anyway, during my conversation with Char Nagpur about the mandates, he said to me, and I spent about two hours on the phone with him going through all the information I knew. He said, aseem, most of my colleagues in medicine, senior National Health Service doctors, right, policymakers are getting there, have not critically appraised the evidence as well as you have. They're getting their information on the safety and benefits of the vaccine from the BBC.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Right. Rochelle Walensky said the same thing, that her optimism from the vaccine came from a CNN news report. So I'm saying that because if that's senior doctors who are being indoctrinated and taken in by a mainstream media narrative, we have the same thing, all the politicians, same thing. So that's why part of the. An important key way to overturn all of this thinking and expose the truth is use of alt media and mainstream media.

[Gary Breca]

Wow. And how do you think that we do that? What evidence do we need to be putting out there in the media platforms like myself to say, you know, objectively, not, not subjectively and certainly not in a way to take a political stance, just objectively to say here are the facts and here is the solution. And why. I think the solution is so much more. More superior to.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

I think we have to something first before that, Gary. Right. I've realized barriers to the truth are not often not intellectual, they are psychological. A lot of people don't want to hear it at all. They will ignore it. Right? They will. So we have to have a converse, a difficult conversation first with humility to say, this is what happened during the pandemic. What happens to the human mind when you're in a state of fear, right. You're less likely to engage in critical thinking. You're more likely to be compliant. Then you've got people that have taken it. You've got, you know, this concept of what we call willful blindness, which is when human beings, almost on purpose completely, you know, we turn. We're all vulnerable to it, right? We turn a blind eye to the truth. And this can happen at an individual level, even in a simple sort of a scenario of like a spouse turning a blind eye to the affair of their partner. Right, Right. Okay. You turn a blind eye to the truth in order to feel safe, avoid conflict, reduce anxiety, and to protect prestige and fragile egos. So let's start there. And also, you know, it's very interesting, most people we've Evolved to use our intelligence not to look for objective truth.

[Gary Breca]

Right.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

But actually to conform, to enhance our personal well being, our status. So I think starting from understanding like the human state, first and foremost, with humility, I think it gets people to. Because the way I've been able to help change the narrative when I've been speaking to doctors who are completely don't know what's coming. Yeah. Like for example in India is I start from the beginning with this conversation saying that the greatest enemy of knowledge, you know, is. So the greatest enemy of truth is the illusion of knowledge.

[Gary Breca]

Of truth is the illusion of knowledge. Right.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

So, so that, so that gets people a little bit more open, like, okay, right. And then you talk about the fear and willful blindness stuff and then people are suddenly a bit more open, like, okay, okay, that's. We're all in the same boat here. Yeah, right.

[Gary Breca]

That's how I can actually control them.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And then you, then you walk them through to the situation of the COVID vaccine. But on this issue of the COVID vaccine, Gary, you've got to then unpick some of the problems in modern medicine even before the pandemic, which most people weren't aware of. Like for example, look at Operation Warp Speed now. It sounds great. Well, no, exactly. Well, it makes people think we've got this amazing technology we're going to fast track, blah, blah, blah. But hold on a minute. If you look, for example, the history of fast tracked approved drugs approved by the FDA and other regulators around the world, the quicker you approve it, the more likely it's going to be withdrawn because it's more likely to bypass safety standards.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

So actually by definition, Operation Warp Speed was already saying we're doing warp range warp speed. But by the way, this means we're more likely to miss serious harms.

[Gary Breca]

Yes.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

That was missing from the.

[Gary Breca]

In some cases, the longer safety trials were even waived. Right. Because you just don't simply have time to do a five year.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

But if that's the case, the conversation should be very often say, guys, this is a bit of an experiment.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Where was that conversation in mainstream media, by the way? American public, we are in this pandemic, but let's be a bit more honest here. It's really just affecting the elderly. And there are other things that we're not discussing around high dose vitamin C and supplements and improving your diet. Right.

[Gary Breca]

Ivermectin, all of that was hydroxychloroquine.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

All of that was missed because people say, well, people have this conversation with me, they have friends of family, friends and doctors and say, well, aseem, okay, I get it, you're probably right. But what else could we have done? What was the other solution? I said there were lots of other solutions. You know, we could have focused protection on the elderly. We exaggerated the risk in younger people under 70. Gary, we know now it was probably no worse than the flu, right? Even from the beginning in children it was less lethal than the flu, like near zero.

[Gary Breca]

I read something about five year old and under children's that it was either at or absolutely near near zero. And it looked at some of the other risk factors like chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident on your way to school and comparing the relative risk of the two and saying, okay, well according to the rationale to support vaccinating children at this age, we should definitely not put them in the car to go to school because the chances are exponentially greater they'll pass in a motor vehicle accident on the way to school, which we all know is extraordinarily rare. But I mean, that just shows you how extraordinarily rare. You know, the, the complications were in, in the vaccine. You know, I was having this discussion before you came on today and a lady was saying, I don't understand how, you know, spike protein in one person's blood versus somebody else's blood could be symptomatic or not symptomatic, or could cause a myriad of different symptoms versus a specific symptom. And I said, you know, you're just kind of overthinking it. If you think about how the body methylates and just eliminates waste and people are good methylators or poor methylators of all kinds of, of things. So if we took the listeners that were listening to this podcast right now and divided them into three groups and said, okay, we're going to take these three groups and we're going to feed you all the same amount of mercury laden tuna fish. And you're going to eat this every day for 90 days. At the end of 90 days, a small portion of that group would have deadly mercury poisoning. The next portion might have some complications related to mercury, like brain fog or, or, or water retention or poor focus and concentration or what have you. But then maybe a third of that group is going to have no symptoms at all. So they took in the same amount of poison over the same period of time. One group's deathly ill, one group's kind of marginally okay and the other group's totally fine. That that has to do with how they're methylating how they're clearing this spike protein, which is why you see this whole myriad of symptoms in the people that we purport to protect. And so we. We never. We never really addressed that. And in my opinion, that's why the vaccine gets away with having caused so many conditions, but is not being blamed for so many conditions. If that makes.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah, I completely agree.

[Gary Breca]

Sense to you too.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

But in terms of coming back to what you said earlier, Gary, about how we. This conversation, I think we also have to realize that it was such a intense propaganda campaign behind the whole vaccine stuff. You know, there was a paper published that revealed that on a psychological basis, just to understand the barriers to getting through to the people, we need to get through it. It can be done, but it needs to be done in a certain way. And it will take time.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah, right.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And not everybody comes on board. A different person will take a different amount of time to actually come full circle and say, okay, you know, I got this wrong. I was misled. Right. For whatever reason, but basic personality traits. And the indoctrination was so deep and so strong that one paper that was published revealed that the way that vaccinated people looked at unvaccinated people. Okay. In terms of the way they look to them, perceive them, and thought about them, was similar to how a. A neo Nazi would think and look at an immigrant.

[Gary Breca]

No.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah, yeah. They were so badly persecuted and treated so badly. This was the indoctrination campaign that happened. You know, and Ava Sherrard, and if you know her, but she was a Holocaust survivor, I think she's 90 plus. I met her a couple years ago, and she's a very outspoken, eloquent lady. And, you know, and she said, this is before all of this stuff came out, that the way that the, the pandemic was handled, it reminded her of actually Nazi Germany.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah, right.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And this is the way. The way the unvaccinated were labeled. She was saying, this is akin to how the Jews were labeled.

[Gary Breca]

Wow. They're looking at the unvaccinated because I remember, I mean, even here, you know, the. The certain administrations are talking about the pandemic of the unvaccinated. This isn't a pandemic anymore. It's a pandemic of unvaccinated. They actually had shame signs. They would pull kids out of school, not allow them to return to school or to the playground. It was. It was astounding to me how quickly society actually collapsed, you know, under that. So what do we do now? Where does this stand?

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

I Think Gary, we're, we're, we've moved on a lot that you will see very few people now if you notice on social media talking about the benefits of the code vaccine, people have gone silent.

[Gary Breca]

Right, right, right. Before they talk about the benefits, they'll.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Just, yeah, chill out completely. And then you get, and what's worrying is we're seeing more and more of these conditions, autoimmune conditions, more prevalence of certain. You know, there was a paper from Yale recently that showed that 700 days after people who had seemed to have, I think it was even asymptomatic people, but actually certainly people that were vaccine injured included asymptomatic people, they still had circulating levels of spike protein.

[Gary Breca]

Right.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Like 700 days after having the COVID vaccine.

[Gary Breca]

These are the people, this is what I mean. Like there are some people that can clear the spike protein very well. Yeah, there's some people that can't. Like just like back to our mercury laden tuna fish example. If we ate it all the same for 60 days and then we started the experiment, we said go. Some of us would have deadly, you know, heavy metal toxicity and other was, other ones wouldn't. And it doesn't mean that we got different dosages. It means that the body acted differently to each, each of those dosages. Some can clear very fast and some clear very slowly. Right. And so you get a much more severe symptomology in somebody that, that clears slowly. And I think that very often we're not linking this as the hub of the wheel that links to all of these different spokes. You don't just have to have myocarditis. You can have trigeminal neuralgias and neuralgias, transverse myelitis, you know, these thrombolytic thrombocytopenias, the abnormal platelet clotting, which you know, unfortunately took the life of a very good, very good friend of mine. And so, so now in order to, you know, in order to have the possibility to claw these back, what has to happen, you have to get peer reviewed in. HAPP B is an award winning digital wellness company and we invite you to join us in transforming the way people rest, renew and focus. The goal is to help people take control of how they sleep, how they feel and how they perform, all without taking drugs, supplements or high caffeine energy drinks. The neuroscientists at HAP B have created a set of mood enhancing programs. They're called Vibes. So each vibe uses ultra low frequency signals to mimic the effects of relaxants or stimulants in the body. When the brain detects these signals, it reacts as if you're actually taking the substance, giving you all the benefits without the downsides. So it puts you in control of how you want to feel, when you want to feel it naturally with no chemicals, pills or side effects. Just select a vibe on the Happy app and let the soothing electromagnetic waves wash over your body. At Happy, we believe a more rested world is a better world. It's time to change the vibe now. Let's get back to the ultimate human podcast.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

No, I think we've got more than enough information, Gary, first and foremost to call for a pause that the harm rate is extremely high. And. But as you said, you know, we should utilize this as an opportunity to expose the whole system because how did we get this wrong, why did we get this wrong and what are the solutions? And it all comes back to the fact that Big Pharma have got too much power. There's lack of transparency with their data, and this should be utilized in that way. Gary, we can build from this, but it needs leadership. It needs strong leadership. I know Bobby Kennedy is very strong on this. I hope, and I think that will happen with time and hopefully sooner rather than later, especially because of people around him. And I know this person because I know these people are fully on board with this is President Trump needs to come out and say, listen, I was misled. We need to stop here. We need to call a moratorium. We need to now put the best scientific minds to understanding who's at risk, what are the long term potential risks and find potential cures. That's what we need to do because this problem isn't going away. And the other issue is this is the trust is gone. Right? All the other vaccine uptakes are down. People aren't trusting the medical profession. As you know, it's probably the lowest trust ever. This is not good. All of us. Not if you can't trust your doctor, Gary, who can you trust?

[Gary Breca]

Yeah, so true.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

We were like the last line of protection of, you know, a profession that behaved ethically that you could trust that, you know, use the best of medical science to make decisions for you. It's all gone.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah, I totally.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

So we have to rebuild, but that only happens with an acknowledgement of this COVID vaccine horror.

[Gary Breca]

What do we do for the people that have it now that are really, really worried? Do you recommend something like the Peter McCullough spike protein detox or.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Listen, it's great that there are people out there that are Offering solutions because I think people want them. I think there is still limited evidence about how useful these things are. And certainly I've looked at Peter McCullough's protocol and you know, my approach is always first do no harm. So if it's going to potentially do you some good and no harm, why not? Yeah, I think that there are tests around the world that are being that are there that people can look to see whether they've got active spike protein. The spike protein. There are some small bits of data, albeit sponsored by those companies. So pinch of salt augmented nac, for example.

[Gary Breca]

Right.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

N acetylcysteine. Those companies claim that they can denature the spike protein in your body. But irrespective, something you and I very much align on is, you know, we've got this massive issue anyway of poor metabolic health in the United States. So if people optimize their metabolic health, you know, their lifestyle, they're much less likely to suffer the complications of the COVID vaccine and potentially even improve their situation of long Covid or whatever else. So I think that has to be at the base of the solution.

[Gary Breca]

Right? Yeah, I mean, there's. There's no such thing really as long Covid. It's not a prolonged COVID infection. It's the leftover, the byproduct of having been infected. But I know that it makes a lot of people. It just leaves them depleted with brain fog, with poor focus and concentration, with, you know, this water retention, with this terrible response to exercise and there's no zeal for life.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah, you know, absolutely. And the huge psychological component too. Right. The trauma of also what we went through in the pandemic.

[Gary Breca]

Well, a lot of it was isolation. Yeah, you know, absolutely.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Being vaccine injured and then the anxiety related to that. So we need psychological support too. So all. Yeah, you know, it's. It's a healing of society that really is what's required. And the COVID vaccine and the handling of it really, I think, has become the end result of decades of unchecked visible and visible and in invisible power of big corporations. And that needs to be changed and overturned.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah. You know, I know that you're a big advocate talking about, you know, statin prescriptions and how these are over, over prescribed as well. You and I have actually done a whole, whole podcast on it, but I'd be remiss if I didn't just touch on it because it's one of my. It's one of my favorite topics to talk about because, you know, I'm not licensed to practice medicine. So when. But we've had thousands and thousands of. Of clients come through our clinic system. And, and we, I also had access to big data in the life insurance industry, you know, 361 or 381 million lives. And we weren't seeing centenarians, you know, people that were living beyond with age 100, dying with normal pathic levels of cholesterol, what we would call normal. 99 or less. Right. They would die with 106, 130, 170 LDL cholesterol. So I, I wonder if you might just touc on. On that, because there's a lot of interest in LDL cholesterol as a standalone risk marker.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah. So if we start from the basics, cholesterol is a very vital, vital molecule in the body. It has so many roles to play, something that's been ignored for years because we've been conditioned to fear it, involved in production of, of sex hormones, maintaining the structure of cell membranes and having a role in the immune system. And so we start from there, and then we go back to understanding why did cholesterol become so feared. And, you know, from 1920 up until sort of 1950, 1960, there was a trend in increasing heart disease and heart attacks and cardiovascular deaths in the United States, in the Western European countries, and scientists trying to figure out what was causing it. And some scientists came in and thought, okay, this is saturated fat in the diet linked to high cholesterol. And the Framingham study, which was carried out and started in 1948 in Framingham, Massachusetts, and went over several decades to try and look for risk factors for heart disease, find associations with, you know, and they, they determined that smoking was, for example, a risk factor, type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol. But if you look at the Framingham data, and it was then, you know, reanalyzed again by one of its co directors, William Castelli, and published in the journal Atherosclerosis in 1996, he said, unless you're LDL looking at Framingham, which is where all of the cholesterol, you know, most of the data or the guidelines or the thinking on fearing cholesterol came from, he said, unless your LDL is greater than 300 milligrams per deciliter, wow. It is no value in isolation and.

[Gary Breca]

Predicting heart disease in no value in isolation.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

So let's start from there. Okay. And then let's just, let's just build on that. So if we start from that point, and it's true that now we don't.

[Gary Breca]

Like to see it above 99 on the.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Well, well, no, exactly right. It's crazy. So that suggests. And so the people who had LDLs above 300, Gary, were essentially people with familial hyperlipidemia. Lipidemia, a genetic condition, affects 1 in 250 people, where their LDL, they're born with genetically high LDL, which is at least above 190. Okay, right. And often can be as high as 300. Now, those people did develop heart disease prematurely, for sure. But even within that subgroup, 70% of women with FH and 50% of men would not develop premature heart disease. So the question is, can we figure out, is there anything in these people's makeup or any sort of blood markers that could predict whether or not they get heart disease or not? Well, the first thing, and the research I did, published in BMJ Evidence Based Medicine with a number of co authors, we found, first of all, LDL was not a predictor in people with fh. Their LDL levels were the same.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Right. What was a predictor? Lp lipoprotein, Little. A fibrinogen. So clotting abnormalities. Right. And then metabolic abnormalities. You know, so the ones who had FH and low insulin and low waist circumference as a surrogate for optimal metabolic health, their relative risk, Gary, of developing heart disease with FH was only very slightly higher than the healthiest person in the normal population without fh.

[Gary Breca]

Wow. But high LP and fibrinogen. Fibrinogen.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Okay, Those are the two. Okay. And then of course, other things. Diabetes, high triglycerides, et cetera, smoking, hypertension. So, because it's really interesting, because I utilize all this information, I manage people with fh and many of them don't. They're not on cholesterol or in drugs. So that's the first thing. That's fh. The other side of it is, let's play devil's advocate here on the side of the people pushing the cholesterol hypothesis and why they did that. They found that people who had genetically low cholesterol, okay, those people didn't develop heart disease, they didn't live any longer, but they didn't develop heart disease. They didn't tend to. Right. And they call this Mendelian randomization studies. Right. Where they basically take people with certain markers and they look, they follow them up and find out there was no disease in that particular group because of what they predicted. Wow. Now that's different. So that's where they thought, okay, we've got very high Cholesterol causing heart disease prematurely. Very low cholesterol, no heart disease. It must be a linear relationship, like you lower the. So they went with this hypothesis to say, okay, if we lower the cholesterol. So they started doing these drugs were developed before statins. Can't remember the names of all of them, but they were drugs that randomized trials using cholesterol lowering drugs and even some dietary trials. And they kept doing these trials and there was no benefit. They were low in cholesterol, but there was no benefit. It wasn't preventing heart attacks. So they kept thinking we must be doing it wrong, or maybe we're not lowering the cholesterol enough. Suddenly they can discover statins.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Okay. And statins are now showing a benefit, albeit small, which we'll talk about. However, what we know now, what wasn't fully appreciated then is statins have an independent effect on. On inflammation and clotting. That's how they benefit, right? Probably. That's how they have a benefit. Nothing to do with cholesterol. Okay, let's move forward. Let's take the. Let's go another step forward. One of the other interesting findings from Framingham, which was never publicized, that Once you hit 50, as your cholesterol dropped, your mortality rate increased, cardiovascular death rate increased.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Right.

[Gary Breca]

So as your cholesterol dropped, your mortality rate went up.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Because most of the issues around heart attacks coming up to the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, that was really getting a lot of people's attention that people were having heart attacks under the age of 60.

[Gary Breca]

Right, yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

That was killing people in their 40s and 50s. Right. But after 50 or so, myself, a number of scientists in 2016, published in BMJ open a systematic review. Well, we looked at basically all the observational studies of people. It was involving over 70,000 participants in many studies looking to see, was there an association with LDL cholesterol in heart disease in people over 60. First of all, we found no association. Surprised at zero. And an inverse association with all cause mortality. In other words, this is definitely not.

[Gary Breca]

Making the media, man.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

You kind of knew this from your work.

[Gary Breca]

Definitely not.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

The higher ldl, less likely ought to die. So why was that? LDL has a role in clearing bacterial toxins. Right. In the immune system. And older people are more vulnerable, dying from infections and even probably linked to cancer as well. So there's probably some protective mechanism there from ldl. So you've got no association with heart disease in older people. Right. So the next question is, okay, there was a mantra that was being pushed in cardiology amongst doctors, amongst the profession for a very long time, that the lower your ldl, using mainly drugs, but potentially diet as well, this linear relationship, as you lower ldl, you get a reduction in heart attacks and strokes. And that's a linear relationship. And the lower the better. Right, Right. To the extent where his name, if I remember correctly, is his surname was Roberts. I think it was William Roberts who. In one of the cardiology journals. He's an editor of one of the major cardiology journals. 2011, he wrote a paper, an article which was entitled it's the cholesterol. Stupid, right?

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And in that he wrote, I mean, you read it and you just think this is just unbelievable. He wrote, basically, you can be an obese, diabetic, sedentary smoker and as long as your cholesterol is low enough, you will never develop heart disease.

[Gary Breca]

Oh my God. Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Right. So we tested this hypothesis by actually looking at industry sponsors.

[Gary Breca]

Is he still practicing today?

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

I think he probably is. I mean, these people, to be honest. Listen, I'm a compassionate guy and I'm open to people, you know, changing their minds, but people who still continue to cling to this, they need cardiologists, lipidologists, doctors out there, having heard this and they still cling to this hypothesis, I think they need to hang their heads in shame.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah, I would agree with you.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

You know, enough is enough. Gary, honestly, we'd be too polite with these people now. Right. They're reigniting the cholesterol hypothesis with these new drugs because it's a huge cash cow. This is a trillion dollar industry. Right. So we've got to understand this is what, you know, part of the reason why we are where we are. But myself and our second author in this paper, a systematic review to cardiologists in 2020 in BMJ evidence based medicine, we looked at 35 randomized control trials involving some of the new cholesterol lowering drugs like Repatha statins and Ezetimibe to find is there a relationship. Right. From those trials, we looked at all the trials where they looked, they measured LDL reduction and looked at cardiovascular events and we put it all together, we found no relationship.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

So really when you put it all together, from going back to Castelli's report.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And then most recently, Gary, this is brilliant. Only last week, publication in Journal of American Journal of Cardiology Advances. I know one of the lead co author, Nick Norwitz, brilliant guy. They did a study taking people who are known as. Just to explain to our listeners these are called lean mass, hyper responders. So these are subset of people who go keto or low carb, usually slim. Okay.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

About 10% of them. When they go keto low carb, their LDL shoots up through the roof.

[Gary Breca]

Right.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Really high, up to about 300.

[Gary Breca]

Oh, okay.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Wow. Really high. So what they did was they. They used something called clearly, which is a more advanced.

[Gary Breca]

The heart imaging. Yeah, clearly scan.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Clearly scan. Looking at plaque.

[Gary Breca]

Soft plaques.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Soft plaques. Right. And. But looking. And they did this in their participants where the median duration that they'd LDLs of that high was a 4.7 years. And then they took them 100 people. Exactly. And they measured over one year to see was there any relationship between plot progression and ldl. Right. And it was very minimal to zero progression. There was no relationship at all.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And people with LDLs of around, you know, between 200, 260, but some of them were up at 500. Nick Norwitz, his own LDL is 560 odd.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

This guy's a young medical student. Student, you know, brilliant at what he's doing. Brilliant researcher. And this is what they found. There was no relationship with APOB or ldl. The only relationship that related to plaque regression is if you already had a bit of plaque already, but not with ldl. So, Gary, you put it all together.

[Gary Breca]

It's so sinister.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

This is my approach, and I'm very explicit with my patients and I tell them in my consultations that lowering your LDL cholesterol is absolutely not part of my management plan in preventing your heart disease progressing, reversing your heart disease, or managing your risk.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And because this is what the data.

[Gary Breca]

Tells us, and you know, what's astounding is, you know, we would see in the folks that had cholesterol lowering drugs, you would see the downstream consequences of joint pain, of water retention, of weight, brain fog, of all kinds of even early onset cognitive decline across multiple categories.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah.

[Gary Breca]

And, you know, one of the things I. I bring up a lot is that we rarely if ever will do trials on looking at medications, multiple medications in the same biome. So we, you know, you have a little bit of elevated ldl, so now you're on a statin and your blood pressure was high the last couple of visits. So now you're on a basal block, beta block, or you're maybe an ACE inhibitor, or maybe you're on a diuretic and you're a little bit sad. So now you're on an ssri and we start to put these different pharmaceutical compounds into the same biome to treat different consequences. But we've never looked at what happens in the synergistic pharmacological impact of multiple medications, at least I've never been able to find those studies and I've looked for them before to say what happens when you, when you put somebody on psychiatric medication or narcotic. We know about major drug interactions, right, Contraindications. But contraindications are, you know, drugs that you don't want to combine because they do something sinister relatively quickly. But what about when somebody is on a statin and on an SSRI and on a beta blocker or a calcium channel blocker and they're on a little bit of thyroid medication and you know, they're on a corticosteroid for some anti inflammatory which by the way is not uncommon, you know, at. What is it, at age 60 or 65? What's the number of medications the average American is on? I forget the number. It's five or seven.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah.

[Gary Breca]

And we've never studied all of these together. So we're just, we're putting these into the same pool very often unnecessarily. And one of the things that we knew from the mortality space was the more pharmaceuticals you were on, the easier it was for me to predict your life, life expectancy, because I could not only predict the onset of, but the severity of and how quickly you would statistically succumb to certain conditions. You know, you, you've also highlighted a lot that inflammation, not cholesterol per se is the issue. And I want to drill into that for a second because we're seeing like metabolic syndrome and it's, and I think Maha has thrown of a piece, a bright light on this. We're seeing metabolic syndrome start to occur in younger and younger and younger ages. I mean you have 13 year olds, 14 year olds, 15 year olds starting to show the early signs of metabolic syndrome. I'm in my 50s. It used to be reserved for when you got to my age. Right. This is when you start doing your colonoscopies, of course. And you, you know, you start doing all the preventing wearing readers because everybody's wearing readers. So do you wear readers, the readers, the glasses?

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

No, I. Long distance since I was 16.

[Gary Breca]

We're doing good. Yeah, we're doing good.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Sign of intelligence, apparently.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah, I do feel smarter. I wear the blue light ones because it makes me feel smarter. So this, this myriad of combination of abdominal obesity, you know, hypertension, hyper cholesterolemia, low HDL cholesterol, hydroglyceride high insulin.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah.

[Gary Breca]

And that, and that the, the genesis of this is the inflammatory process, not necessarily the presence of, of cholesterol.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Oh, yes, and completely.

[Gary Breca]

And I wondered if you, I wonder if you might speak on that for a minute. I mean, the, you know, I often liken cholesterol to the fireman that gets called to the scene of the fire to put the fire out.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yes.

[Gary Breca]

Right. I mean, if, if no one called.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

The fire, the immune system, isn't it. Exactly. It's responding.

[Gary Breca]

And, and they don't just show up. I mean, if, if there wasn't a fire in this building we're sitting in right now, a fireman's not just going to all of a sudden barge in the store and cholesterol is the same way. It's not just going to show up to the arterial wall. Past the arterial wall, begin to make foam cells with. Without something calling it to that site.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah.

[Gary Breca]

And so can you talk a little bit about the inflammatory cascade and then maybe for the listener, what would they test for? Like a C. Reactive protein or something? What would they test for and how would they best management. Manage it?

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah. So I think the underlying process that drives the inflammation, if you like the. So I think the best way to think about this and break it down, Gary, is that our immune system is obviously involved in all these processes of disease. Our bodies are designed to respond to any toxins that come into the body.

[Gary Breca]

True.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

You know, whether it's diet, whether it's something in the water supply, whether it's something in the air, whether it's something injected into us, even chronic stress, in a way activates the immune system. Immune system has a role to play acutely to deal with pathogens. But the problem is that when it's over activated, constantly responding to some kind of threat in the body, or responding to a toxin, then the collateral damage of that immune response is that our own tissues start to get damaged. Right. And certainly when it comes to heart disease, if you look at insulin resistance, essentially the way to explain that is that we've had too much insulin, which is of course a really important hormone in the body that has so many functions, fat storage, metabolizing of glucose, for example, is that if it's over activated and too high, and that response to high glycemics, index, carbohydrates, ultra processed food, for example, then chronically raised insulin itself is directly toxic to the inner lining of the heart arteries, the endothelium.

[Gary Breca]

Ah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And that's what happens. Essentially. That's the pro that's why, for example, even very well controlled type 1 diabetics, the most well controlled will have a life expectancy 10 years less than average.

[Gary Breca]

Right.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And mainly die of complications of cardiovascular disease, predominantly because of the insulin. Right. So that's the issue. That's that we, it's not fully understood the mechanisms, but we know that high insulin is not good.

[Gary Breca]

Right.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And the cells even becoming resistant to the way that insulin works is what we call insulin resistance, usually because of chronically raised insulin. But it could also be happening at a cellular level through different mechanisms, for example, through stress, through inactivity as well. So these are how they all interact. I think what's positive and gives us hope is, and we know this from, there's some good research out there on this and we know from clinical practice that when you intervene to reduce insulin. Right. Through lifestyle measures, then a lot of these conditions, these markers, these manifestations of high triglycerides in the blood, high blood pressure, you know, high blood glucose.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

They start to improve. And the, the quickest and the low hanging fruit for us to, the way to, for us to do that is really to go low carb. That seems to be the most effective, quickest way. There are other ways to do it too. Yeah, but low carb, you know, you reduce the foods that are causing the, the rapid surges in glucose which then cause a rapid surge in insulin.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

From the diet. And that's how you can manage it.

[Gary Breca]

I use WHOOP every single day. You guys see me post my sleep scores all the time. What gets measured and tracked is what you can improve. You'll start to notice what happens when you eat too close to bedtime, if you have alcohol, what makes your sleep deeper, what prolongs your sleep, how you improve your REM sleep. You can even start to track metrics like heart rate variability, respiratory rate and your actual pulse rate. These are all indications of how well you're recovering during sleep. I always say that people don't really have sleep hygiene or good sleep routine. And WHOOP will help you develop one and prove that it's working. Ready to unlock the best version of yourself? Try WHOOP for one month on us and start the journey towards a healthier you. Head to joinwop.com ultimate that's join W-O-Op.com forward/ultimate to get started. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. Yeah, and I think that all too often we're not looking at it as multifactorial, we're just looking at as a single Number, if this is high, you have a high risk. Let's just push that one number down.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Of course.

[Gary Breca]

And it's, it's too, too, too linear. You know, there's, there's a lot of talk about you potentially stepping into a role in the, in the new administration and maybe in a myriad of things. But around the, the Maha movement with, with Bobby Kennedy, what would be some of your agenda items? Early agenda items? Day one, especially as a, as a cardiologist.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah. I think we have to put to the forefront that man managing metabolic syndrome. Improving metabolic health has to be a priority for all Americans. Gary. 93% of American adults have suboptimal metabolic health. 93%. Right, that is.

[Gary Breca]

And when you say suboptimal metabolic health, because it sounds like a little bit of a word salad to people who don't come from our.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

So you want all your five markers to be in the, in the normal rate. So waist.

[Gary Breca]

I should write these down.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah. Waist, circumference, triglycerides, HDL blood pressure, glucose. That's it. If you have all those five, you're in a much better state. Not just from a heart disease, but. Yeah. Even cancer.

[Gary Breca]

5% right.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

After smoking, it's likely. I mean obesity is called the second biggest cause of cancer after smoking, but if you go before obesity, it's insistent, so it's likely to be even more beneficial.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Right. Alzheimer's is considered type 3 diabetes.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah. So Muslim resistance in the brain.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah. Mental health problems, we now know has a huge component linked to diet. There's a lot of work being done in Stanford for metabolic psychiatry unit, which I've been involved in.

[Gary Breca]

I actually interviewed a Stanford metabolic psychiatrist. I had him on my podcast. Forget his name. Who, who, what was his name? Max. The Har.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

The Harvard Gardner. Not Chris Gardner. Chris. Chris Palmer.

[Gary Breca]

Palmer, yeah. Chris Palmer. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Very interesting guy.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah.

[Gary Breca]

I don't know why it slipped me.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

So. So mental health as well, because of.

[Gary Breca]

Course these even drug resistant mental illness, like the actual drug resistant. Really the really bad.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

100%. So I think that would be a big focus certainly that I would, you know, across the board where. But what also that means, Gary, linked to that is empowering doctors with nutrition education to manage chronic disease. Most of the doctors don't know about the basics of this and it's not rocket science. We can teach them quite quickly so they can do it. But also thinking Gary as well, and this is really important. The elephant in the room, if you like, is that most of what drives our Behaviors are socially and environmentally conditioned more than we like to think. You know, there's all this kind of mantra and to some degree, listen, I'm, I am probably one of the most disciplined people I know in terms of. I've really pushed the boundaries in everything I've tried to do, whether it's been sport excelling in sport, whether it's pursuing career in cardiology, whatever else. Right. But I also know that our environment plays such a big role in terms of. Before I was fully aware this is up until my early 30s, I mean I was a, a proper sugar addict. I mean I was, you know, consuming sugar like you wouldn't believe and I just thought it was fine, it was healthy and I was addicted. Right.

[Gary Breca]

You know, probably. Why? Because you know, you're naturally thin and so you, you know, if you're not morbidly obese and you're thin and you can eat a lot of sugar, I.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Mean and you're active. But what we've now discovered now is even if you're slim and active, eating too much sugar is still going to give you.

[Gary Breca]

Right.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Significant harm. Right. So all those plays into it. But, but I think that. What. So why. The reason I'm saying this is if you look at the. What's driven the chronic disease problem, the big low hanging fruit with overwhelming evidence, if not the most important driver. One of the most important drivers is the food environment. Right.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

You know, it's most of the default option in the United States for most people is ultra processed food.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Right. So it has to have an environmental approach too on a policy level. And the way we do it, we have to think about. But what I would suggest the way we could start thinking about it is America led the world in tobacco control. Right. And you know, and that meant reducing the effective availability of tobacco in the environment. And the way to do that was increasing its price. Right. That automatically. That's economics 101.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

You get rid of.

[Gary Breca]

Bobby Kennedy's just gotten 25 states to sign on to, you know, the SNAP program prohibiting the use of our, our, our, you know, our welfare dollars for, for sodas. Yeah. I think there's a 10 billion dollar hole right there. 110. $120 billion a year spent on SNAP programs for the, for the most vulnerable. And 10 billion of that going to, you know, high fructose corn, so laden sodas completely. Which is pretty.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

That's exactly the kind of astounding.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah. And it's also the kind of idiocracy that flies in the face face of conventional thinking. Because everyone purports to want to protect and serve the. The least fortunate. And yet these are the ones that are continually preyed upon by.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Targeted.

[Gary Breca]

Targeted by these corrupt practices. In fact, if you could rew. Rewrite something in the. In public health policy, what. Where would you start? If you had the pen right now?

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah, okay, right, Trump's pen. Okay, fine. So ultra processed food, first of all, public health education campaign for everybody. Ultra processed food is a new tobacco.

[Gary Breca]

It is the new tobacco.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

It's the new tobacco.

[Gary Breca]

Like that.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

So 60% of the calories consumed in the United States come from ultra processed food. To give people an idea like we're all. And it's interesting, Gary, if you go back to 1970, 50% of adults were smokers. So there are some parallels here. Right now it's way less than 20%, but it's huge of huge drops.

[Gary Breca]

But cardiovascular disease. Yeah, it's still gone up even though smoking's gone down. Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

So the death rates went down, but now then platted and start to go up again. Right. So that would be one thing. I would listen. I'm against prohibition and banning stuff, but I think there are certain environments and places where those foods should not be available or sold. Hospitals, we should ban the sale of ultra processed food in hospitals. They shouldn't be getting served to patients.

[Gary Breca]

Maybe even public schools. Could we go there too?

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And schools as well. I was gonna comment to that. So schools and hospitals, let's ban ultra processed food availability. Right. Cause that what it does is it legitimizes the acceptability of those foods. There was a study very interestingly done by Kelly Brownell many years ago that showed that hospitals that sold fast food had junk food on sale. People who visitors of that hospital were four times more likely to leave the hospital and purchase junk food than people have never gone to the hospital in the first place.

[Gary Breca]

Are you kidding me?

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah. So it's almost like having this subliminal kind of effect on your mind. Like, oh, this is. If it's being sold in the hospital, it must be fine. It's not going to be bad for your health. Right. So that's certainly what I just showed you the video.

[Gary Breca]

My buddy is sitting in the ICU unit.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

It's Mad matters. What do we do with tobacco? We banned advertising of tobacco. Let's ban the advertising of ultra processed food. Right. Especially as you've talked already, they target some of the most vulnerable members of society, especially children.

[Gary Breca]

And what's sad is that even for Someone as astute as myself. Even as astute as yourself. You know, like when I checked into my Airbnb, I mean we're here in Austin, Texas. We opened the, the pantry below the steps and, and just for some fun, you know, one of my social media manager turned on the video and we started grabbing things off the shelf and there's a big bottle of, you know, vegetable oil and, and it says heart Healthy and there's a big American Heart association label on it with a big beautiful red heart. You know, you walk down the cereal aisle and it says fortified or enriched. Which, you know the word fortified, the word enriched or you know, natural fruit flavor or we actually put whatever is not on the label that really is, isn't even related to the food. Like non GMO or, and, or gluten free or vegan as if of that health washing. Health washing, that's the word.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

You know, it's actually an exploitation of behavioral psychology. So we know. I need, I knew about this work when I was doing stuff in the UK and advising government there is that people purchase foods based more upon the marketing than actually what the nutritional content.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And the food industry know that.

[Gary Breca]

You know, and I heard Alex Lugaver say one time, he said a couple of things are really kind of funny. One, one was if you're, if your grocery store has a health food section, what does that tell you about the rest of the store? But also that. Oh, did I say Alex? Oh, I meant Max Lugovar. Sorry, Max. I do know it's Max Lugaver. But, and, and, and the other thing he said was that, you know, real health foods don't have, don't make claims. Right. Like when you, you know, there's no claim on the avocado.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Exactly.

[Gary Breca]

Like when you look at the avocados and tomatoes and lettuce and spinach. Yeah. There's not like big health claims in those areas, but you go to cereals and completely processed garbage.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Rule of thumb, I tell my patients if it's, if it's advertised or marked as healthy, it's likely the opposite. It's gon. Opposite effect on your health.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Right. Because it's how these corporations work. But the other thing to add in, another really important thing that we need to think about as well, Gary, is people having enough income to afford to live a healthy life. One shocking statistic I came across recently, I really couldn't believe it. It really touched my heart as well. And I was, is that, you know, the largest employer in the United States is the Health care industry. More than 18 million people employed by the health care industry. Right. In the United States, 20. Around 24% of. Of men and about 35% of women who are health working in the healthcare industry as, as care assistants or healthcare workers. Right. Are earning less than $15 per hour.

[Gary Breca]

No.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Okay. And 1 million children of healthcare workers are living in poverty.

[Gary Breca]

No.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

I mean, how is that acceptable? Like, how can any. I mean, I, I've mentioned a few people even in Maha, even I had a conversation today, this morning with some senior people in Maha just doing together and they were shocked. They were absolutely shocked. They couldn't believe it.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

So one of the things is we can say let's start in our own backyard. Okay. Let's see. Let's. Let's work through the hospitals. Let's make sure that our staff are as healthy as they can be. Let's improve their metabolic health. Let's improve their environments. Let's make sure they've got a fair income. You know, if they got at least $15 an hour, it's been estimated you cut poverty levels by 50% very quickly.

[Gary Breca]

Wow.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Amongst those healthcare workers.

[Gary Breca]

And we can afford to do it now?

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Absolutely.

[Gary Breca]

Especially if we start trimming some of the fat.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

But not just that in terms of people say, well, where's the money? Aseem, I've had this conversation in the UK with policymakers like, well, the money's there. It's in the wrong place. You've got these big corporations who I'm all for people making money through merit and through innovation and doing good stuff. But their business model is fraud, Gary. And there's billions and billions and maybe trillions of dollars hidden in tax havens, which is not being put back into the public purse. Right. You could very quickly sort the problems out in America with some bold leadership that says, listen, you know what, you know, people say tax the rich. I don't think that sounds right. Let's tax the fraudsters, which, by the way, which happen to be some of the richest people in America.

[Gary Breca]

Yeah, yeah. Wow. I could not agree with you more. And I really pray that you get to step into a role.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And Gary, one other thing I really do. I would also say, you know President Trump's book, talk about making America great again, Bobby Kennedy says it's this. In the 60s, America was considered the moral authority in the world. Right. And it made sense. Up until about 1970. 1980, the health of Americans, the average American was better than most other western industries.

[Gary Breca]

This is actually very true.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Right?

[Gary Breca]

Yes.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

But it Was this economic policies? I'm sure they were, well, intentional by Reagan. We had Margaret Thatcher in the UK of complete deregulation of these industries where they had a regard then for multiple stakeholders that their businesses would look after, fine, you know, their profits. But actually it was about public good. Right. They've now just purely care about their investors and their shareholders and to the detriment of the public because of these policies. And then they've got more and more power and society that functions well, society that functions well throughout history. Knowing human nature, Gary, is also to stop any single entity getting so much power that it can then be abused. We have to have relative.

[Gary Breca]

And it's so hard to dislodge now you see a lot of what's going on now is the entrenched, deeply ingrained, completely deep rooted, you know, spheres of influence that it's very difficult to uproot.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

And it's become tyrannical. Yeah, right. Jordan Peterson says tyranny's tyranny emerges when people are afraid to say what they think. When you have something to say, being silent is a lie. Okay. Or when everyone lies all the time. The tyranny is complete. And you see that even for example, with the COVID vaccine, with statins. I have many doctors who talk to me and say, I see my completely with you. Thank you. They get emotional, but I'm afraid to speak out. I hear that all the time now. Gary, this is a symptom of a corporate tyranny. That's what we need to label it as. And once people, everyone knows that, then we can reform it. We need industry, but we need to reform them. We created these industries through laws that, by the way, most of us didn't know were being changed behind the scenes to allow them to have so much power. But we have the power of the people and terms of policymakers to change the legal entity that is a corporation to get them back to what they used to be in America, which is actually helping doing public good.

[Gary Breca]

Awesome. What does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

I think to act with courageous compassion.

[Gary Breca]

Well, you're doing that.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

I'm trying my best. It's work in progress.

[Gary Breca]

You're doing that and I know that you've taken a lot of flack for. And by the way, I also want to give another, you know, plug for, for your documentary do no Farm.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

First do no Farm. Yeah.

[Gary Breca]

First do no Farm.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Yeah.

[Gary Breca]

Absolutely amazing. We're going to link it in the show notes below. I may be an investor in this because I really want to help you get the the, the word out. And I pray for you all the time and I hope that you get this position and you can help us become healthier again.

[Dr. Aseem Malhotra]

Thank you, my friend.

[Gary Breca]

Dr. Malhotra. I could talk to you all day, man. I, I, I hope you'll come back on for a going to take you into my VIP group. Now, you know, my VIPs, we, they, they have a lot of questions for you and, and I always give them a chance to ask questions to you directly. If you're interested in becoming one of my Ultimate Human VIPs, just go over to theultimatehuman.com VIP Sign up to be one of my VIPs. It's 97 bucks. 97 bucks a month. And I pour myself into this group. This is where we get to do live. Q. And as with people like Dr. Aseem Malhotra and many, many others, I was in there yesterday with Joe Rogan. That was a, an amazing one. You can ask any question that you want, especially in these large group formats. So for the rest of you guys, I hope that you enjoyed this podcast. And as always, that's just science.