Coming up on today's show.

Wake up, wake up.

All right? Experts are not necessarily what you think they might be.

You become an expert in this world by working closely with the pharmaceutical companies.

And if you don't, you are by definition not an expert.

And therefore everything you say can be dismissed as being the rantings of some idiotic zealot who doesn't like anything about medicine or something.

There's a group in Oxford University who hold all the data on cholesterol lowering medications

and statins specifically. They hold all these data and they will never let anybody else see it and they

produce these papers in the Lancet on a regular basis saying how wonderful statins are and we say

can we see the data and they go no I'm not conspiracy theorists I have facts

back all this up the reality is these guys do not have unfortunately your best interest

at heart anymore.

When it comes to health, how do we begin to decipher what is true and what isn't?

Anything written in a major medical journal,

should be treated with great suspicion.

It's difficult.

I've had people ask me this question many times.

I was giving a talk in Aberdeen University where I went to where I went to university to study medicine and

amazingly some professor asked me to come and give a talk to the students and one of the questions was how do you know if a paper,

how do you decide if a paper is valid or the research is valid?

And in part I sort of referred them to Fat Swaller when a woman asked the

fat Swaller, tell me what is jazz and he replied if you going to ask you'll never know and there's a little bit of that

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