NHS advice on carbs is 'harmful'
I first heard of consultant cardiologist, Dr Aseem Malhotra, when I saw him talking on TV in 2012.
He was saying how obscene it was that the London Olympic organisers had chosen to have junk food companies as sponsors of the most famous sporting event in the world.
I remember thinking: “This guy is good. It’s about time someone got passionate about this.”
Having followed his work since then, I've come to realise a few key things about Aseem.
He stands up for what he believes in based on scientific studies and what he’s witnessed in his own patients.
Aseem will tell you sugar is public enemy number one, saturated fat does not clog your arteries (but guess what can... too much sugar), and that NHS healthy eating advice on how much sugar we can eat per day is “outdated, flawed, wrong, and harmful advice.”
Want to know the optimal number of teaspoons of sugar you can eat per day to stay healthy? Zero, according to Aseem.
FYI: a can of cola has about nine teaspoons of added sugar.
After treating thousands of people with heart disease, Aseem knows a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to great health and longevity.
He wrote ‘The Pioppi Diet’ so he could tell the world how some people in a small Mediterranean village were managing to live healthily to the age of 100.
As you’ll hear in my interview with Aseem, the Pioppi people’s success may be down to their lower consumption of refined carbs and other sugary foods.
Time and again, the carb factor rears its head whenever we talk about health and disease.
Take diabetes for example. It's a condition centred on an intolerance to metabolising carbohydrates.
And guess how much money diabetes costs the NHS? Over £1.5m per hour.
But get this…research shows 30,000 type 1 diabetics reduced their insulin requirements by up to 80%simply by cutting out starchy carbohydrates.
Then there’s the fat debate.
In this episode of #healthHackers, Aseem also tells us why we shouldn’t fear saturated fats like butter and cheese.
In fact, he says there’s some evidence that some dairy fats may even be protective against heart disease.
However, Aseem acknowledges that science is always evolving and doctors need to keep up to date.
In our interview, he quotes David Sackett, one of the fathers of evidence based medicine who reportedly once told junior doctors, “half of what you’ll learn in medical school will either be shown to be dead wrong or out of date within five years of your graduation; the trouble is nobody can tell you which half - so the most important thing to learn is how to learn on your own”.