Is this the end for Aseem Malhotra?

Aseem Malhotra has been begging for his comeuppance ever since he started spouting his scientifically illiterate, factually inaccurate rubbish four years ago. He has suffered setbacks before but today he went too far, even for the 'public health' racket. Even his old buddies at Action on Sugar such as Simon Capewell and Jenny Rosborough have finally had enough. Public Health England, the Faculty for Public Health, the Royal Society for Public Health, the British Dietetic Association and more have all lined up to mock his latest headline-grabbing initiative.

I have written what I hope will be an obituary for his narcissistic, attention-seeking career as a TV doctor for the Spectator...

Action on Sugar, a small pressure group set up in 2013, have received a vast amount of media coverage by appealing to the public’s appetite for easy answers. Not only do they focus on a single nutrient, but they have a cartoon villain (‘Big Food’) and an easy answer that absolves consumers from having to take personal responsibility (food reformulation).

In their early days, their chief spokesman was Dr Aseem Malhotra, a Croydon-based cardiologist with a knack for sloganeering. To borrow a phrase from Peter Cook, Malhotra rose without trace. One minute he was writing factually inaccurate articles for the Observer about ‘junk food’, the next minute he was describing himself as a ‘world leading expert in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of heart disease’ who ‘reigns supreme in his fight to raise awareness about the health benefits of a sugar-free diet’.

Malhotra parted company with Action on Sugar some time ago, but he has remained a fixture on breakfast television ever since. Last year, he was in the news after making the extraordinary claim that there is no link between physical inactivity and obesity. Having fallen under the spell of Dr Robert Lustig, an American endocrinologist who blames obesity on high fructose corn syrup (a type of sugar that is barely consumed in the EU due to quotas), he drifted into the low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) movement via Gary Taubes and Nina Teicholz.

This is where this things start to get weird...

Do read the rest. 

Within a year or two Malhotra will be earning his living selling diet books and delivering cherry-picked presentations to credulous low carb cultists on cruise ships. Mark my words. 

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