Dr Aseem Malhotra is an Interventional Cardiologist and this year has been appointed as Consultant Clinical Associate to The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges.
He is the Science Director of campaign group Action On Sugar and is Honorary Consulatant Cardiologist at Frimley Park Hospital. He has been the central catalyst in igniting the debate around the harms of excess sugar consumption in the UK through commentaries in the BMJ and mainstream media.
Dr Aseem has managed to galvanise leading academics, the media and politicians into making sugar reduction a health priority and has been invited twice to number 10 downing street in the past year because of his tireless campaigning on tackling the obesity epidemic.
In October last year he busted the myth of saturated fat and heart disease in the BMJ in a commentary that became one of the most read medical journal articles in the world for 2013. His assertions appear to be correct with many subsequent studies implicating sugar as an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease and possible protective effects of saturated fats from dairy foods in two large scale Cambridge MRC studies.
Aseem gave a speech at the British Medical Association’s annual representative meeting in June last year where his motion calling for a ban on the sale of all junk food in hospitals received an overwhelming majority. He has developed a passion for writing on various health related issues. He has published numerous articles in various Guardian, Observer, BBC online, Huffington Post, The Mirror, Daily Mail, Telegraph and the Sun. He also has a Observations from the Heart column in the BMJ.
He regularly makes appearances on all the major news channels including BBC, Sky News, ITV and Channel 4 and is not afraid to take on vested interests that engage in behaviours that he believes undermine public health. Most recently Aseem co-authored a letter to NICE highlighting possible biases in their recent recommendations for prescription of statins to those at low risk. This letter was also signed by the president of the Royal College of Physicians, Sir Richard Thompson and Clare Gerada.
Dr Aseem has managed to engage respectable medical bodies and celebrity figures such as Jamie Oliver and the England Football captain Steven Gerrard in campaigns to improve school food and ensuring access to automatic defibrillators in all public places. Thanks to Aseem's work this has now become government policy that AEDs will be introduced into all new schools. He is on the British Heart Foundations chain of survival steering group.
He is concerned about the harms of over diagnosis and over treatment and has been instrumental in bringing the BMJ's "too much medicine" campaign to mainstream media for public awareness. Aseem is arguably the most influential secondary care doctor in the UK on issues that effect public health.
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