‘British cardiologist, public health activist Malhotra eyes Big Pharma, vaccines - sound familiar?’
Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist and public health activist, is on the front lines in a battle against what he sees as a corrupted medical system
But what makes Malhotra and Kennedy slightly different is that Malhotra is a physician-turned-advocate, challenging the influence of Big Pharma and – like Kennedy – bad food, while pushing for a radical rethinking of healthcare.
Kennedy, now a top federal official, is an attorney who previously led a nonprofit, the Children's Health Defense, known for anti-vaccine advocacy.
Malhotra says he became a medical doctor in 2001, driven by a childhood ambition to become a cardiologist. He specialized in interventional cardiology, performing keyhole heart surgeries to treat acute heart attacks in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).
“I was eating, breathing, and sleeping those procedures,” he said in an interview for the Full Measure After Hours podcast.
But over time, Malhotra says, he noticed a troubling trend: Despite advances in medical technology, patients were getting sicker, and chronic diseases like obesity and heart disease were spiraling out of control.
This was more than a decade ago and before such recognition had become so widespread. At the time, his outspoken advocacy on related health topics branded him as being controversial, much like Kennedy.
In 2004, the World Health Organization flagged obesity as a global crisis, yet Malhotra saw no progress. Heart disease, once predicted to be eradicated by Nobel Prize-winning discoveries about LDL cholesterol in the late 1990s, remained a leading killer.
“We had not managed to fulfill the dreams of curbing heart disease,” he said. Combining his clinical experience with critical analysis, he began to suspect that the information guiding doctors – on cholesterol, statins, and more – was “massively corrupted by powerful vested interests,” namely the pharmaceutical and food industries.
Malhotra’s public activism largely kicked off in 2011 with a front-page piece in The Observer, part of the Guardian Group, titled “I Mend Hearts, Then I See Our Hospitals Serve Junk Food to My Patients.”
The article stemmed from a jarring anecdote: After performing emergency heart stenting on a patient, he found the man served a burger and fries the next morning.
“He looked at me and said, ‘Doc, how do you expect me to change my lifestyle if you’re serving me the same crap that likely brought me here?’” Malhotra recounted to me. The moment crystallized a systemic failure – hospitals, meant to heal, were feeding patients the very foods driving their illnesses.
Malhotra’s critique wasn’t just about hospital food; it was a broader indictment of medicine’s ignorance of nutrition’s role in health.
“There’s a very poor understanding of the impact of nutrition on chronic disease,” he said, noting that medical schools barely cover it – a gap exploited by industries profiting from sickness.
By the time COVID-19 hit, Malhotra was a known figure, having co-founded Action on Sugar, which pushed for the UK’s soda tax. His pre-Covid work earned him both praise and backlash.
He recalled critics acting as though it was "crazy" that he said sugar is bad for you back in 2011. Yet his persistence paid off as the dangers of processed foods gained wider recognition.
During the pandemic, his outspokenness intensified. In 2020, when a London teaching hospital boasted on Twitter (now X) about receiving 1,000 free Krispy Kreme donuts for staff, Malhotra called it a poor example amid a crisis worsened by obesity-related conditions.
The backlash was swift – mainstream doctors, including diabetologists, mocked him by posting donut-eating photos, a reaction he compared to Big Tobacco’s historical capture of physicians promoting cigarettes.
“It’s reminiscent of how doctors were shown smoking Camels in their clinics,” he said.
