Steven Bartlett’s team are hitting back at the BBC hit, claiming he is spreading misinformation and calling the broadcaster ‘disappointing and dishonest’

Steven Bartlett’s production company has hit back at the BBC after an investigation by the broadcaster accused the podcast guru of sharing harmful health information.

The host of The Diary of a CEO has welcomed guests to the podcast who claim Covid is a technological weapon and that autism can be ‘reversed’ with diet.

The Dragon’s Den star, who has no background in healthcare, has now come under fire from top experts for failing to question these debunked claims, and as a result created a distrust of conventional medicine.

The BBC World Service Research looked at the accuracy of health information in 23 episodes of Barlett’s Diary of A CEO podcast and found that 15 contained an average of 14 harmful claims that contradicted scientific evidence.

But Flight Studio, the podcast’s production company, has since called the BBC’s analysis, which includes statements from top scientists, ‘disappointing and unfair’.

It claims that almost 400 episodes of the podcast have been published to date, meaning the BBC has rated less than four percent of the episodes.

The company claimed that some of the guests on the podcast also appeared on the BBC.

A spokesperson for Flight Studio said: ‘The Diary Of A CEO (DOAC) is an open-minded, long-form conversation with world leaders, global experts, CEOs, athletes, authors, actors and other individuals identified for their distinguished and eminent careers and/or resulting life experience.

‘Each guest episode is thoroughly investigated prior to commissioning. DOAC offers guests freedom of expression and believes that progress, growth and learning come from hearing a range of voices, not just those that Steven and the DOAC team necessarily agree with.

‘The BBC claims to have reviewed fifteen specific episodes out of almost four hundred published to date. If any coverage of DOAC focuses on less than 4 percent of episodes with an extremely limited number of guests – some of whom have appeared on the BBC – creating a broader and, in our view, partial story is disappointing, misleading and fair said, unfair.’

Podcasts in Britain are not regulated by media regulator Ofcom, meaning Mr Bartlett is not breaking any broadcasting rules.

One episode flagged by the BBC as having ‘discredited’ views aired in July and featured an interview with Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a controversial doctor known for expressing his anti-Covid vaccine stance on social media.

In the podcast, Dr Malhotra described the Covid jab – which is said to have saved at least 1.6 million lives in Europe alone – as a “net negative for society”.

At the end of the episode, Bartlett defended his decision to highlight Malhotra’s bizarre views, saying he aimed to “present some of the other side” as “the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle” .

Another episode that has come under fire is an October episode with health advice from Dr. Thomas Seyfried, an American professor of biology and genetics based at Boston University.

Dr. Seyfried is an advocate of the ketogenic diet – a high-fat, low-carb eating plan – and emphasizes that it can help treat cancer.

As well as suggesting that eating this way could prevent and even treat the disease, he claimed that radiotherapy and chemotherapy would only improve patients’ lifespans by one to two months, likening modern cancer treatments to ‘medieval medicine’.

Commenting on the BBC’s findings, Prof Heidi Larson said the guests were ‘overstating’ scientific facts that are known to be true.

‘It steers people away from evidence-based medicine. They stop doing things that could have side effects, even though it could save their lives.”