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The realm of health and nutrition can be daunting. A 2018 study by the National Institutes of Health revealed that 43% of participants struggled to find trustworthy information on healthy diets and nutrition. This ongoing challenge has been evident throughout my life and career, prompting many to inquire about my approach to maintaining health over the years.

In this episode, I engage in a discussion with Dr. Casey Means. Although she prefers not to be addressed as “Dr. Means,” she holds a doctorate from Stanford Medical School. Her experiences at the institution exposed her to the flaws and exploitative nature of the healthcare system, sparking significant changes in her perspective on health. We will delve into these topics during our conversation.

For those intrigued by our dialogue, Dr. Means’ latest book, “Good Energy,” is now available for pre-order at major book retailers.

Resources Mentioned:

• Good Energy
• www.GabrielleReece.com
• @gabbyreece

Show Sponsors:

Time Stamps:

• 00:04:13  – Introduction to Dr. Casey Means and Her Mission
• 00:07:39  – Systemic Failures in Healthcare
• 00:12:01 – The Power of Metabolic Health
• 00:20:01 – Leveraging Technology for Health
• 00:25:01 – Understanding and Managing Metabolic Dysfunction
• 00:35:01 – Practical Steps Towards Better Health
• 00:45:01 – Closing Thoughts and Future Directions

Show Transcript:

[00:05:20] Gabby: The world of health and nutrition can be incredibly overwhelming.

In fact, in 2018, the National Institutes of Health conducted a study in which 43 percent of respondents stated that they quote, had difficulty finding reliable information on healthy diets and nutritional information. This isn’t a new issue. It’s one that I’ve seen throughout my life and career. I’m often asked how have I managed to stay healthy throughout my life?

Well, I mean, the answer, it shifts around depending on the factors like. you know, whether I was playing professional volleyball, maybe I retired, I learned new information. I’ve gotten great new mentors having children. The reality is though, that there are things every one of us can be doing right now to live a healthier life.

And that’s why I’m really excited to be talking with Dr. Casey Means today. Casey, as you hear, she doesn’t like to be called Dr. Means, received her doctorate degree from the Stanford medical school. But while she was there, she also saw how broken and exploitative the healthcare system is. This led to major upheaval in her life and how she thinks about health, all of which we’re going to be talking about today.

And if you enjoy this conversation, her new book, “Good Energy” is available for pre-order wherever books are sold.

Welcome to the Gabby Reece show. Let’s go.

Thank you for coming to the podcast. And you know, one of the impetus for you being here besides that, I love you and all that you do is you do have a new book out. And it’s called good energy. And I think when people hear the word good energy, they think energy. And you’ve really put this into a description of basically your body working and functioning correctly.

I’m not even going to use the word optimum. I’m going to say good energy, getting yourselves, your metabolic function to be correct. And so I just want to know, Why you do so many other things. You created a business in 2020, uh, that a lot of people are familiar with, uh, levels and we’re going to get into that.

Why would you write this book and what is it that you want people to get from this work? What are, what is the question that you had that you found the answer that you wanted to share with people?

[00:07:39] Dr. Casey Means: I mean, I had to write this book cause this book was pouring out of me. It was not an if it just had to. Um, and. And what I want to share with people is just a reimagination of what the future can look like for themselves and for our country and for the planet. And it stems from primarily my work, having trained in the conventional healthcare system, rising the ranks, you know, checking off all the boxes, Stanford medical school, become a surgeon, do all this stuff.

And then, you know, nine years into my training, looking around me and. having all this expertise and training as a head and neck surgeon and realizing I’m in this hospital and Like people aren’t really getting better like patients aren’t getting healthier in our country So day to day I was going through motions of being a surgeon and helping with their sinusitis And they’re hearing issues and this and that but then you pop up for a second and you look around at our country and And our health is getting worse every single year as a society, children, adults, the elderly worse every year.

Life expectancy is going down. The rates are astonishing of chronic illness. And so, you know, there’s this fascinating sort of plausible deniability as a doctor because you’re stressed out and you’re 500, 000 deep in your education and you’re working eight hours a week and you’re trying so hard and you care about the patients.

But the reality is that the system is. abjectly failing at keeping us healthy or reversing diseases once we get them. And so once I started kind of allowing myself the time to pop up and see that, I just couldn’t go back to the operating room because with all that training, You know, you could just say, well, I’ll just keep going and what I’m doing is important, which is true.

I think there, it is, it is important to have surgeons out there, but who else is going to solve this issue other than doctors who are inside the system and seeing that it’s broken. So fundamentally, it was about really sharing with people what some of the, Where are some of the brokenness of our health care system comes from and also the brokenness between a real devil’s bargain that exists right now in our country between a 6 trillion food industry and a 4 trillion health care industry, both of which are essentially benefiting off of our addiction and our illness.

So that was kind of one impetus. The second piece that kind of came to the equation was really starting to understand and ask the question, okay, so if, if we’re getting sicker every year, the more money we spend on healthcare in the United States, the sicker we are getting, then most likely we’re focusing on the wrong problem.

We’re focusing on Whack a mole symptom management, every disease is a different silo, maybe there’s a different problem that we’re missing, where if we spent these inordinate amount of resources, we could actually heal things quickly. And so that journey has been the last six years for me of really trying to figure out why are people sick?

Because we were sick 60, 70 years ago. These diseases didn’t exist, especially in children. And so, you know, like. 50 percent of our country has prediabetes or type 2 diabetes and you know, 30 percent of kids have prediabetes. It’s absolutely insane. These are things that doctors would never have seen in their career, you know, 75 years ago a kid with prediabetes.

And so asking that question what that led me to is like a quite simple answer, which is that the fundamental problem underlying Almost every nine of the 10 leading causes of death in the United States, in addition to many of our sub lethal kind of annoyances of health that we have, like the gout and the migraines and the infertility and the depression and the anxiety, it’s all the same thing.

It’s a fundamental problem called metabolic dysfunction and so coupling sort of the systems issues with this real revelation about, you know, we need to point the arrow of health care towards it. metabolic dysfunction, the trunk of the tree that all these diseases are, um, springing from that vision. And then the real astounding part of it, which was realizing it’s not that hard to understand and improve your metabolic dysfunction.

And then kind of realizing the system wants us to think this is so complicated. It’s so hard and it’s, you know, and, and the reality, and this is what I just, you know, Feel like I was born to share is that it’s not that complicated and I have been deep inside the system And it’s actually not that complicated and us thinking it is is is part of a systems issue that we have to each Individually become empowered to to overcome and understand our metabolic health and improvement and just to wrap up the real Highest level message that I’m here to share with this book is about connection.

It’s all about connection. We live in a system where the system has asked us to think about our bodies as a fragmented set of parts that each need a different specialist to approach, which is just not our true nature. We are connected. beautiful system. We’re also completely connected to everything around us.

We’re constantly eating food and breathing in air and taking photons into ourselves from the sun. And we are just this dynamic hive with everything around us. And so we’ve built this connection into our system, the way we look at diseases, the way we look at our bodies, the way we look at our relationship with the environment.

Even the way we look at our relationship with our people and that is killing us. And so the, the, the way we’re going to dig ourselves out of the chronic disease epidemic is by actually moving away from Fragmentation towards connection on every level Realizing that all the diseases ailing us in the modern industrial Western world are connected by a shared root cause and then fixing that And so this book is about connection systems issues Individual empowerment and a path forward that I think is very bright and very attainable for people and for our country.

[00:13:44] Gabby: You know, I read this book and, um, I’ve also followed you. I have to say something, an interesting observation for me, and this is makes me think about how much you’re feeling the urgency of this, is you, you sort of were sunny. When you first came out and we’re doing interviews and in the last 18 months to two years, I’ve seen you get, um, a little kind of more urgent and tough and even like, Hey, we have to make this change.

And, and the other thing is you said something earlier, it is easier than people think. And you, and you map it out in this book very, very clearly. And so maybe we could, we could just start to visit. Hey, we don’t want to be in these silos. We want to connect everything. And I think what happens with people, because they are.

Think about this. If we don’t feel good, how do we even get to the place physiologically, chemically, to make the better decisions? Because it’s easy if I sit here and I’ve just trained and I had turmeric juice to be like, just figure it out. What if people are, you know, overwhelmed with work? They don’t, they don’t even know what it feels like to feel good, right?

They think that’s the norm. So let’s start there. What is the starting point for somebody who’s deeply behind the eight ball? And does what their doctor tells them they’re scared of their doctors. And by the way, between us, honestly, unless it’s catastrophic, I would be, I’m almost scared to go to the doctors now.

Like if I’ve had an accident or I need a athletic knee surgery, fantastic. I think that we’re the best at that. Something catastrophic. But as far as like care. And then we get in the system.

[00:15:32] Dr. Casey Means: I’m

[00:15:32] Gabby: anxious. I can’t sleep. It starts right, it starts there. Oh, your cholesterol is high. So let’s say someone’s listening to this and they go, okay.

Yeah. Yeah. You say we can dig ourselves out. What is the, what is a, what is a, what’s the first step?

[00:15:48] Dr. Casey Means: Is

[00:15:48] Gabby: it blood work? Is it looking under the hood? And you get very specific and I, and I love this detailed ways and what blood work, like insulin sensitivity and things like this. What is the most important stuff to understand about yourself?

[00:16:02] Dr. Casey Means: What

[00:16:02] Gabby: do you, what do you think that is? Cause I think the, the feeling of feeling overwhelmed is what keeps us from starting. Yeah.

[00:16:09] Dr. Casey Means: There’s so many ways I want to dive into that answer, you know, and it’s, Yeah, because there’s like the highest level, which is more the psychological inspirational level, which is like just knowing that it’s possible.

Like we are, I love this Taoist saying that, Human life, the human body is a process, not an entity. So we think in the Western culture of the body as an entity. It’s a thing separate from other things, and it’s a thing that lives, and then it’s a thing that dies. Neither, both of those things couldn’t be farther from the truth.

We take in 70 metric tons of food in our lifetime. All of that is constantly re 3D printing our bodies into the next version of itself. Literally our body five minutes from now is not the same molecular energetic body it was five minutes ago. minutes ago. That’s not woo. That’s literally chemistry. It’s physics.

It’s so, so, so the reason that’s important is because change is always possible. And this idea that you have a disease or you don’t have a disease, or I, that’s all false, you know, we are a process. And so that is empowering because, you know, we, we just, we, when we put in the inputs, we can rebuild this beautiful, beautiful life from any starting point, you know?

And so, and I think even in medical school, we like. We learned, we didn’t really learn about the concept of disease reversal, which is incredible. You know, it’s like you have diabetes and now that a lot of people have woken up and realized that with amazing lifestyle changes like resistance training and removing the refined carbs, you can actually reverse your diabetes.

They won’t even call it the systems, the powers that be, a cure. They call it a remission, you know, as if, and it’s even in that, it’s like disempowering. So really, so one highest level, it’s like change is possible because we are an incredible process that’s constantly rebuilding ourselves. I think the second, you know, piece is if you don’t know where to start, I mean, this is going to sound so out of left field, but as I’ve gotten older, I think it’s, it’s, this is where I’m at.

Is that like, Ask for, ask for help and I mean from other people, but also just like pray, whatever, whatever you believe, you know, just, we’re so focused on our individual’s culture on, it has to be me and I have to grit my way through it. And I think, but it’s like, you know, we live in this incredible, incredible universe.

And it’s like, I think that just the mental shift of like, whatever you pray to your grandmother, you know, the spirit, the source, whatever, your God. Yeah. Help me. I want to be healthy. I want a better life. I believe I can do better. That can be transformational because it opens up something in your brain of like, we’re moving forward.

Now to get more practical, it’s like, I do absolutely think starting with labs is a great place to start. Because we all need to know where we stand right now on our health journey. And I think we talked a little bit about metabolic health, but I would say to people, you’ve got to understand your metabolic markers because in our country right now, in the way that we are, um, sick, it’s, it’s for, for the vast majority of us.

of us. Metabolic dysfunction is a part of the problem. So each of us should learn to understand that. And I maybe just to back up, I’ll just explain very briefly what metabolism is, um, and, and why the book is called.

[00:19:32] Gabby: I like, I always think because people think of metabolism is like, Oh, I have a fast one. I have a slow one and they don’t really, you know, they don’t really understand.

Yeah. We

[00:19:40] Dr. Casey Means: can make it so simple, but it is so important for everyone to understand. Food metabolism is just fundamentally how you take food energy, which is the potential energy from outside of us and in our bodies, transform it to human energy that powers ourselves. It happens in the cells in the mitochondria, you remember from high school biology, the powerhouse of the cell, but it’s taking that 70 metric tons of potential energy, putting it through ourselves into a human currency of energy.

Why is this important? Because we have over 40 trillion cells in our body. And what is our life? Our life is just the bubbling up of all the trillions of chemical reactions that happen inside of our trillions of cells every second that bubbles up to our lives. All those chemical reactions require a currency of energy to pay for them.

And that is what metabolism does. Food energy, human energy. And unfortunately, in the United States, because of a confluence of factors of our modern industrial world, That mitochondria is broken, so that process of creating human energy is dimmed, our, our energetic force is dimmed in 93 percent of American adult bodies, 93%.

And so what does that do? Well, if you have underpowered anything, phone, machine, city, anything that’s underpowered is not going to function properly. A real first principles concept that people need to understand is that. All disease and all symptoms must result from cellular dysfunction. You cannot have a symptom or disease arise in a vacuum.

It’s a result of cellular dysfunction. And so for many of the diseases we’re seeing today, that dysfunction can be caused by lots of different things. But in 93 percent of adults, part of that dysfunction is a metabolic dysfunction and underpowering. And so for people who are like, Okay, you’re kind of making these big claims.

You’re saying that like all our diseases are related to this process. Well, This is the key. We have, so we have those 40 trillion cells. They all need power. We have 200 cell types in the body. So we’ve got our ovarian theca cells, and we’ve got our liver cells, and our kidney cells, and our astrocytes in the brain, our glial cells in the brain, and our endothelial cells of the blood vessels.

We’ve got all these different types of cells. All came from one cell, which is pretty cool, but 200 different cell types. They all need power. Underpowering, a fundamental dysfunction can look like lots of different diseases because if you have underpowering in an ovarian cell, it’s going to look different than underpowering in a retinal cell or a glial cell or a parasite or a kidney cell.

And so that’s why this trunk of the tree is leading to all these different diseases is because you’ve got the emergence of underpowering happening in different cell types. The biggest blind spot in health care is seeing all the diseases as totally separate things because we classify them based on symptoms, not based on cellular physiology.

And that’s why the more we spend, The sicker we get because we’re basically, you know, tweaking all these little symptoms, but not actually focusing on the trunk of the tree. We’re not focusing inside the cell to actually fix the problem, which is fundamentally this mitochondria being broken. We have to fix the environment because it’s the environment that’s hurting the mitochondria.

It is the constellation of modernity across food. Sleep, movement, stress, toxins, temperature, and light that synergistically, those changes, those rapid changes are uniquely hurting the mitochondria. That is literally why the more we spend on medications, 200 million prescriptions for statins every year, heart disease is going up because we’re not focusing on the reason the cells are actually broken.

So this brings us back to where to start. You got to understand your metabolic health. Where are you? Are you part of that 93%? And the beauty is, Um, you can understand that with five biomarkers that are usually free at your annual physical, but your doctor’s not looking at them through a metabolic lens.

So I’m happy to talk through those if, yeah, I would

[00:23:58] Gabby: like to say the five, but also sometimes also the gauge that they say is normal is, is already too deep into moving towards sickness. Yes. So, um, I think that’s the other thing for people is you don’t want to actually land in average. You want to be way before, and if you’re over, fine, you can work your way back.

But I think that that’s another problem is our metrics is not one of, and I don’t want to use the word optimal and optimum, like an athlete. And we were, we were talking earlier about like, everyone wants to hack their way to everything. And, and I, and I too have a reaction to that. I know you do too. It’s going, no, just for real human health.

Yeah. Yeah. Not like so you can be your best and work all day and never sleep. And that I’m not talking about that, but people have to understand that they’re what’s being considered. Hey, you’re in the fine safe zone. You might already be moving towards sickness. That’s right. And so it’s really important.

And in the insulin, um, test, it’s like, You can sort of show that you’re insulin insensitive almost 15 years prior to diabetes showing up. Is this right? That’s right.

[00:25:05] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah.

[00:25:05] Gabby: So I think, um, you know, maybe we could just say the markers. I would encourage people because this book, Uh, this is one of those types of book that you’ve also made in a manual.

You really break it down, you, you give people, it’s very, very clear. So we’re not going to obviously be going to cover all of that, but maybe we could just mention the markers for metabolic health.

[00:25:27] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah. So there’s different tiers of how deep you want to go in this, but I would say that even at the first tier, the easiest tier, the free tier.

I would say 99 percent of us don’t know where we are on those. So that’s step one. It’s like, get your labs from last year and look these up because they probably were ordered. So the five most basic tests to understand if you’re part of that 93 percent or that 7%, um, and that those, those numbers are based on a recent paper, um, from, from the American College of Cardiology that was looking at large populations.

But those five biomarkers are triglycerides, which is a type of fat in the blood and the body. So triglycerides, fasting glucose, HDL cholesterol, waist circumference, and blood pressure. And so, and again, these are, that 97, that 93%, this is just normal ranges. It’s not even looking at optimal. So if we were looking at optimal, it’d probably be a much even smaller number.

But we want triglycerides, so for normal, this is what the paper put out. It’s triglycerides, less than one 50 fasting glucose, less than 100 HDL above 40 for men or I’m sorry, above 40 for men or 50 for women waist circumference, less than four 35 inches for women or 40 inches for men and a blood pressure less than one 20 over 80.

So if all of those are true and you’re not on medication for one of those, like metformin for glucose or, um, you know, blood pressure medication. Then that means you’re part of that six point eight percent that they would consider optimally Metabolically healthy from and and those again are pretty much free on an annual physical and if you order them yourselves It would just literally be a cholesterol panel and a fasting glucose and you get a tape measure and take your blood pressure So we’re talking 30 maybe and that will give you a sense of whether your body is as what I would call it Making good energy.

That’s it. That’s a signal. It’s like kind of tea leaves that are telling you are your mitochondria Processing Energy properly. Um, then you can go deeper. And I talk about this all in the book and look at things like inflammatory markers, because if you’re metabolically dysfunctional, often inflammation goes up because what could be more threatening to a body than being underpowered?

And the immune system is right there to fight any threats. And so one of the big reasons we have a lot of chronic inflammation in our country is because we’re fundamentally, our cells are like petrified because they’re underpowered. So inflammatory markers, that’s like an HSCRP, C reactive protein, fasting insulin, which as you mentioned, can change.

15 years or so before fasting glucose goes up. So you fasting insulin is very important. Uric acid, uh, liver function tests. The liver is really one of our key metabolic organs. You want those, you want the liver to be pristine. And so having low, uh, low, liver function test is really helpful. And let’s

[00:28:19] Gabby: remind people how regenerative the liver is.

So regenerative. So let’s stay optimistic about the liver because I think in the best way, meaning like when you use the word pristine, people go, well, I, it’s like, yes, but we’re also talking about one of the most regenerative organs in the body. That’s pretty amazing.

[00:28:35] Dr. Casey Means: I would say for every test I’ve mentioned so far, they can change profoundly in two months.

I mean, blood pressure. I’ve seen triglycerides drop 150 points in a month. When people just change their diet, fasting glucose can change, you know, from pre diabetic to normal range, just people changing their lifestyle in two months, every single test I’ve mentioned, including liver function tests can change profoundly in the course of months.

So yeah, absolutely. That’s a great, it’s a great point. So those are some of the, Entry level, second tier, and then of course, the sky’s the limit with how many tests

[00:29:11] Gabby: you want to get. People can go down those rabbit holes, but I just, I think sometimes just really giving them the basic, so you get that loose snapshot, I think is important.

You know, it’s interesting. I, I don’t think I’ve ever had it done. And after I read the book, I said to Laird, you know what we, I need to, I want to get my resting insulin checked because you can make a lot of assumptions based on my lifestyle, but I’m like, why wouldn’t, it wouldn’t hurt to know. Cool. Yeah.

But I, it was funny, even though I live pretty healthy, I still had a tinge of like, Oh, isn’t that funny? Yeah. Yeah. Cause I feel, obviously I feel like I’m pretty healthy, but you always get that, like, Just, there’s a slight apprehension, you know, like, Oh, well, I hope it’s good.

[00:29:54] Dr. Casey Means: Totally. You know, totally. And, and I think that some people don’t want to check their labs because that apprehension is so strong.

I know that’s not the case for you, but no, no, but I’m just, people don’t want to know how much they’re going to have to change their life, which is, which is why. We have to start with the bigger picture like the plan in the book starts with your why and it can’t be a superficial Why like I want to lose weight.

It’s like what is your real deep? Why like we’re here for a very short time on this spectacular planet and like so you kind of got to start there and then and then of course make the lifestyle changes, but But yeah, no, I think the beauty of people shouldn’t be apprehensive For two reasons. One is because they can all change very quickly and because the ways to the solutions are simpler than I think we think.

It’s not about, you know, having to buy all this expensive gym equipment. It’s really basic. It’s like, eat more unprocessed food and, you know, move your body more. So, so it’s all, it’s, it’s very attainable.

[00:30:51] Gabby: So are you, does it surprise you as somebody who went through medical school and I would say probably had traditional training?

Oh, yeah. And feels like, and I want to revisit when you were younger a little bit, um, that you were raised by I don’t want to say traditionally, but pretty traditionally, I know that when you had some, you made a sort of a, a change as a teenager, right? Like you dedicated a certain period of time, uh, to kind of eating better and exercising on a regular basis and all these things.

I think when we look at the system, so when we go to the grocery store, what food is available and also cheap enough and satisfying that we can feed ourselves or our family. Um, Most people work so often that they’re trying to fit in exercise, right? The idea of going outside has become a luxury, not a natural part of living, you know, is, um, when you looked up from that and thought, Oh, wow, it’s set up.

That’s what I remind people. Like it isn’t really set up for you to be successful. And it’s not about getting angry. It’s just about recognizing. Yeah. And so within this, it’s like, we talk a lot about the system. So the food system, the insurance system, how does everyone get rewarded? Certainly not when we’re healthy.

Okay. But so how much is on us? And, and then simultaneously, how are we going to get the system to change? Because it’s dual, right? It’s on us. And you even say that in your book, like, You kind of call out the food guys as you should because it’s, you know, it is it’s profit over well being at this point And then it’s like and it’s on you so I think for me it’s always getting encouraging people Be accountable don’t blame anyone But we do have to be part of this of this change.

Mm

[00:32:52] Dr. Casey Means: hmm.

[00:32:52] Gabby: And so Is it just about dollars? Where I put my dollars? I don’t buy these products at the grocery store, these processed foods. What are you and your brother seeing? Cause you’re, you work, you’re with your brother on this. Um, and he comes from a very different point of view. He comes from a kind of policy government traditional that way.

Yeah. So maybe we could just sort of talk about approaching that because we all kind of, I think, know what the racket is, but what do we do?

[00:33:21] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah. Yeah.

For better or worse, the system’s not changing fast enough for it to help us. So whether we like it or not, whether we want to call it, you know, And personal accountability in some ways has been, you know, lumped in with like elitism or ableism now because, because not everyone, you know, can have access, but that doesn’t change the fact that because the system’s not changing fast enough, we actually do have to take deep ownership for living lives that look different than the people around us if we want to be healthy, because the standard track in our country is going to lead toward illness because of what you said.

Everything. Every single thing in our culture, from the way schools are designed to workplaces, to the food that’s subsidized in our country, to every level, um, is, it’s, it’s, it’s making us sick. Um, and so, so personal accountability and empowerment is, is, is important. It just has to be a part of it, no matter whether we like it or not, because the system’s not helping right now.

And it will, it is, it, it, by definition it has to change because we, we can’t afford to keep going this way. Right, the sick load on the system will break the system. I mean, 75 percent of young people aren’t fit to join the military just because of how sick we are, you know, and And we are the largest, by far, economy on planet Earth in human history.

And 23 percent of our GDP is going towards healthcare. And we’re getting sicker every year. And life expectancy is going down. So that’s only going to go up. Um, so it, it has, it’s totally unsustainable. Um, there’s there’s gonna be a food. I mean, our food crisis, our soil is is not getting better. It’s getting worse.

And so it will change one way or another. But I’m you know, hopefully we can make that a beautiful journey, not a really dark journey for our country. So to get to your to the question. So from the from the personal accountability, accountability perspective, I think part of it is understanding what’s important so that you’re not I think people are feeling paralyzed by how much it feels like it.

They have to do to be healthy. And what I want people to understand is that is by design. Confusion is the product. Because if you are confused about what to do, and fearful about everything, and unconfident about the results of the work you’re putting in, you’re going to be spinning. And I think that’s what a lot of people are doing.

They’re spinning. 80 percent of consumers are confused about nutrition. Think about this. We are the only species on planet Earth with a chronic disease and obesity epidemic. The only species. And we are, we have the biggest brains of any of them. So it’s, so what people have to realize is confusion is part of the business model.

The more nutrition and fitness research we do, The fatter we’re getting. So some, there’s a mismatch between all the expertise and all the publications and all the papers and the outcome. So part of the message really is, which sounds scary, is when it comes to chronic disease prevention, we really need to start trusting ourselves and some of our inner wisdom and some common sense more.

Think about the language of the last few years. Trust the science. Oh, that’s my favorite. What’s the implicit subtext of trust the science? Don’t trust yourself. Yeah, giraffes aren’t obese. They’re trusting themselves. You know what? So, so we’ve been told to not trust ourselves as we get sicker. And now this is not

[00:37:00] Gabby: to say, well, it’s also, it’s that other part too, that you said.

So it’s not only the fear, but it’s also sort of implied, do what we tell you to do. Absolutely. So it’s not only don’t trust yourself, but it’s like, also do this.

[00:37:11] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah. You think about, you know, some of my friends have had babies recently and it’s like, A woman might want to get into a specific position because she’s like, I know that maybe squatting or this or that is going to feel better.

And it’s like, get in the bed, lay down, which is not the right position. You’re not going with gravity. Right, exactly. It’s like, so, so it’s this interesting thing. And so, What, what all that is to say is that, and this is why one of the reasons I wrote a book is to say like, these are what I see from the best evidence I can find of what really does matter.

And it’s not ideologic, it’s not dogmatic, it’s not keto or paleo or carnivore. It’s, let’s go first principles, what matters, and boil it down to like the simple stuff that you can do that I really do believe is going to work and that is possible in our modern world. So an example of this is like, I think a lot of people are confused about exercise.

What to do? Do I do a hit? Do I do yoga? Do I do Pilates? Do I do zone two? Do I walk? I heard steps don’t matter. Everyone’s confused. So then they’re like paralyzed. And

[00:38:12] Gabby: do you, but do you think that the hacking world has also led to this because now it’s like, Oh, measure your, you know, heart rate variability.

So many people talk about that. I’m like, you are so far away. from needing to understand what your heart rate variability is because you need to be actually going for a walk.

[00:38:29] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah.

[00:38:29] Gabby: It’s like, Oh, my whoops said, and I, I, Yeah. And so these first principles, let’s break them down because let’s say it’s, it’s movement, it’s sleep, it’s hydration, it’s what, it’s what we’re eating, it’s love and connection and um, get rid of the toxins, outside environment, toxins, be

[00:38:49] Dr. Casey Means: outside, get out in the sun.

We spend 93 percent of our time indoors.

[00:38:54] Gabby: And then 93 percent of us are metabolically unhealthy. Yeah, that’s kind of interesting. Yeah, it is

[00:38:59] Dr. Casey Means: interesting.

[00:38:59] Gabby: Um, so, and, and I’m going to table one for now, except maybe we can just talk about maybe our cleaners and makeup, for example. Outside environmental toxins, I know, feel people go, what can I do?

My water, my air, like it’s everywhere. So with that, it’s sort of like, okay, clean things that you put on your skin. Yeah. And. You know, kind of keep your immune system strong actually to defend. I almost, I don’t want to say put the environment ones last, but they’re the furthest from my reach.

[00:39:31] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah. Do you know

[00:39:31] Gabby: what I mean?

Like if I’m freaking out about the air because I look around and I see stuff or the water that I have access to that within itself creates this whole other level. Yeah. So maybe let’s, let’s talk about these first principle things and what we can do and, and let’s sort of, Do a nod to environmental. So yeah, and you even talk about it So, you know what makeups and cleaning products and things you wash your hair with and brush your teeth with I would suggest for people not to drink water out of plastic bottles It’s very difficult to do if you’re traveling and whatever if you can avoid it, right?

And I’m always fascinated even like all the foods Even if you got something healthy, it’s all, it’s all wrapped in plastic. And that’s where you can freak out.

[00:40:19] Dr. Casey Means: You can. And we shouldn’t be freaking out. No, no. Don’t freak out. Minimizing. We have, we’re, we’re focusing on compassion that we, we are. Each of us is the parent, the mother, the father to our 40 trillion cells and all the mitochondria within them.

Just like we would care for an infant who has some basic needs, diaper change, temperature, sleep, milk. We have some basic needs for ourselves so that they don’t get crushed and so that we don’t totally destroy our mitochondria. And so it’s, it’s, it’s not about freaking out. It’s about compassionately, it’s first principles.

We are gonna give that, those cells, are these little babies that we’re tasked to take care of in this life. What they need to function properly which thanks to molecular biology research We pretty much understand kind of what they need to function properly and we’re gonna take away the things that hurt them as best we Can and when we do those things put the good stuff in Match the needs of the cells to what we’re actually exposing them to and then pull back some of the stressors.

We move towards health It’s really that simple. And the checklist is just like for a baby, it’s those four things. It’s like seven or eight things for ourselves, you know? And so, so it’s, it’s definitely, we gotta stop freaking out. Cause that’s also part of the problem. It’s like. It really needs to come from love.

Like you need, like love your body like you would an infant and you know, give it what it needs, take away what’s hurting it. And I think across those pillars, you know, that’s obviously what the book goes into and we can talk through some of those. I’d love to

[00:41:51] Gabby: talk to, because again, you know, people love how to measure it and like, Oh, so let’s just start with sleep because none of us are, what are we sleep two hours less than we did a hundred years ago.

[00:42:03] Dr. Casey Means: 25 percent less. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:42:06] Gabby: And, you know, this whole idea with circadian rhythm, we’re still connected to the sun.

[00:42:12] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah.

[00:42:12] Gabby: So what, what are your sort of best practices?

[00:42:15] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah. So there’s three aspects of sleep that we really want to improve, which is quantity, quality, and consistency. And the research shows that all three of those aspects of sleep are uniquely important for our metabolic health.

Sleep is this incredible time of repair. When a lot of the trash is cleaned out from ourselves, so we get, we get rid of some of the sort of metabolic toxins that generated throughout the day and create a fresher slate for the morning amongst, you know, many other incredible things that happened during sleep.

The other really important part about sleep is that it is. a cue to our cells of what time it is. So there’s this really interesting, you know, aspect of our biology that’s called chronobiology, which is essentially biology that’s based on time. And there are specific activities that are meant to happen during daylight hours.

In the body and specific things that are supposed to happen at nighttime hours. We’re diurnal animals, which means we’re awake during the day and we’re asleep at night. And there is different biology. What has happened is that in our modern world, the light bulb was invented, was invented in the, I believe, the 18 sixties.

And what’s interesting is that disease rates started going up then because. we went from being diurnal animals to essentially being exposed to light all the time. And that is really hurting our biology. So just to, to think about, okay, it’s dark inside our bodies. The only way our bodies really know what time it is is by cues that we give it.

And there’s three main ones. And this we’ll get back to sleep. One is when we expose our eyeballs. two photon light energy, just this light energy hitting the retina. That’s one. Two is sleep timing. And when we’re sleeping, how much we’re sleeping and three is meal timing. Those are the ways we basically tell the body that doesn’t know what time it is that our biology can be the way it’s supposed to be.

So it’s sleep. We all kind of know about Sleep quality and sleep quantity. What this means is we want to get between about seven and eight hours of really high quality time of sleep per night. That seems to be the sweet spot for most people for metabolic health, seven to eight hours. That does not mean seven to eight hours In bed because we lose about 10 to 15 percent of sleep to like micro awakenings and things like that.

So that probably means more like eight to nine and a half hours in bed. This is one thing that I do think is helpful to track because people overestimate their sleep by like 30 percent and that’s really hurting us. And so you, you might need to get seven, eight hours of sleep. And you think you are, but you’re actually getting like five hours and 40 minutes, and there’s been studies on that.

It’s fascinating. So quantity, we want to get about seven, eight hours. Good time of sleep quality. We want, you know, a good amount of deep sleep and REM sleep, and we want the sleep phases to be right. But consistency is one that we don’t talk about a lot, which is Basically, a set bedtime and a set wake time that’s really consistent day to day.

And that’s, again, it’s important for in training the body with a sense of a schedule that sets our biology and genetics up for, for health. So there’s a concept that I was exposed to in, in researching the book that I hadn’t heard about, which was a concept called social jet lag with sleep. And this, this is how we measure sleep consistency.

So what you do is you basically take your Essentially your work days and then your kind of non work days and you look at the sleep midpoint between the two. So let’s say you’re just working a conventional, you know, Monday through Friday week, and then you have a weekend Saturday to Sunday. You would look at your sleep wake time and bedtime and find the midpoint.

So if I slept from 12 to 8 on the weekends, my midpoint is 4 a. m. And if on weekdays I slept from 10 to 6, My midpoint is 2 a. m. If the midpoint in sleep is more than two hours, That is two hours of social jet lag that confers a doubling of the risk of obesity, diabetes, metabolic disease. So just having essentially bedtimes that shift between weekdays and weeknights.

And I looked at this for myself when I started writing the book and I realized that my midpoints were all over the place. On nights that I was writing, I’d stay up till 3 a. m. and sleep till 11. And then I’d get really tired, of course, so I’d go to bed at 9 p. m. the next night and wake up at 6. And like, It is profoundly bad for our health.

So sleep consistency is one that we also really want to focus on, um, because it’s, it’s again, it’s a way to help the body understand what time it is so it can implement the genetic and metabolic pathways at the right time. And

[00:47:08] Gabby: doesn’t this, isn’t even like your brain gets rinsed right at night. So just kind of cognitive function.

And I think. I mean, it’s amazing. And I think it’s what, so for people to understand, it’s like, so your body can do its job, give it some consistency. So it goes, okay, we’re ready. Now we’re going to do X, Y, and Z instead of, okay, are we doing it now? Are we not doing it? I’m not actually a great sleeper. Um, it’s been a thing of source of constant experimentation.

Are you a good sleeper?

[00:47:40] Dr. Casey Means: I am great at quantity. I get the right amount of sleep. Generally, I’m pretty good at quality consistency has been my hardest, hardest thing because I’m a night owl and my parents were night owls. And so I’ll stay up late, get tired, go to bed early, stay up late and do that cycle. I have now.

That has gotten a lot better for me because my partner who I live with has a very set bedtime. And it’s so funny. I get asked all the time, like, what are your sleep hacks? And I’m like, well, find someone who has a better sleep schedule than you.

[00:48:11] Gabby: I live with a really pushy sleep disciplinarian. Yeah. I mean, if Lara could go to bed at eight 30 every night and I’m like, We have no life, you know, and my, you know, my, my youngest daughter is, I’ll call her, she’ll be out cause she, as she should, right.

She’s a junior in high school and it’ll be Friday night and I’ll call her like at nine and say, Hey, I’m just checking on you one last time. I’m going to go to bed. She’s like, It’s nine o’clock. So like I’ll take magnesium and, and try to do certain things, but I think the consistency around, I know you said this is the one that you have a tricky dance with, but it does seem sleep begets sleep, but also your body starts to know, Oh, it’s that time.

I’m gonna, it’s like people waking up without the alarm clock as well. Cause it’s sort of like, Oh, I’m in that rhythm.

[00:48:55] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah. And a lot of me going to bed more consistently has been about almost like going back to childlike behaviors, bedtime, bedtime. So at night, you know, we are turning the lights down. We put dimmers.

We have a few red lights in the house because even very light light stimulation after dark can really set back our melatonin, which makes us sleepy. So melatonin. Incredible molecule that we produce them from the pineal gland in the brain when the sun goes down exposure to blue light after dark can set back our melatonin by 90 minutes.

So that’s so when I learned that, I thought, Oh, my gosh. So maybe I’m not this, like, irresponsible night owl, maybe I actually just need to like turn off the lights. Maybe it’s not, you know, an inherent flaw in me. It’s more like there’s a bio biological thing happening that I didn’t realize. So got the red lights on Amazon.

We dim the lights and then This, the other piece of the ritual that’s really helpful is after dinner, basically taking a set of sleep supplements that really helped me. So it’s the magnesium L3 and I had to take some GABA, I tell, I take some L theanine. Um, that’s like another cue to my body that we’re getting towards bed.

Um, I’ll still use the devices because you know, I’m human, but I, you know, I try and put it all on red light and dark mode, all that. And then, um, we do like a, yeah, like a five minute, um, sleepy time meditation. And once that goes on, it’s like a childhood story. It’s like my body knows it’s time to go to bed.

So it has been about creating ritual around it in a very easy way. I mean, all of that together takes like seven minutes to do right. So, and making things easy.

[00:50:34] Gabby: In the book, you talk about six pillars, uh, with the nutrition, with eating. Um, it’s so fascinating, the relationship we have with food. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s a beautiful relationship.

It’s a gathering and it’s the hardest one. It’s the one that I think is really the big dance for people.

[00:50:56] Dr. Casey Means: I, I, I am my, probably my favorite section of the entire book is, um, The sixth principle, which is finding on food, because I think that, I think that part of our journey back to a healthier relationship with food has to, has to come down to like honoring it and kind of worshiping it in a way.

Because when I have come to respect food for what it really is, it makes it so much easier for me to eat healthier because the reality is that every atom, every single molecule in your entire body is 100 percent built from food. You are food, you know, you, and, and again, coming back to the 70 metrics, tons of food that you eat in your lifetime.

You are just this big 3d printer. That’s using food as the ink to reprint your cells every single day. We turn over our gut lining every two to four weeks. We turn over entire skin every 50 days or so. It’s amazing. So, so food is what you are putting in is you, and I really love to meditate on food. Like.

What qualities, what qualities do I want to be, you know, strong, resilient, like, like colorful. So I look for those properties in food because it is, it is becoming me. Like what is on my counter is me. And, and then the second piece is thinking about that. That’s also what really helps motivate me to. Really choose food from higher quality sources.

I think in the past I’ve thought like, oh, local is frivolous and farmers markets are nice to have. But the reality is, is that. If the food, the way it was grown is industrial and sterile and in a factory and it was poison was sprayed on it with pesticides and the animals were tortured, like I’m taking on all of that because it’s actually I’m 100 percent molecularly food.

So food is the building block. Food is also the molecular information that tells your body what to do. Literally food compounds. go into our cells, sit on our genome and change our gene expression. And so I can use food as a tool to create the life I want. If I feel like I’m, you know, kind of feeling worked up or angry, you know, I know that I can, maybe I can have a little bit more magnesium or melatonin promoting foods, pistachios, pumpkin seeds.

I can use those as a way to modulate my reality. If I, and feeling inflamed, you know, I, you know, in red and splotchy and whatever, I can use turmeric and, and know that curcumin is literally going to change the gene expression of my master inflammatory gene. If I have been on an airplane and I know I’ve been exposed to a lot of radiation, I know that I can use cruciferous vegetables, isothiocyanates my immune system.

Antioxidants response elements like this is real like this is real. So it is a powerful molecular messenger that I can use to create the life I want. And so when I really sit in that awe and and another piece of the offer me and it gets back to sunlight and why everything’s connected. It’s like. This is what’s so fascinating about metabolism to me, you know, photons travel 92 million miles through space from the Sun to our planet and inside Plants is the chloroplasts We remember this from biology The chloroplasts have the ability to take that Sun energy and convert it store it in the bonds of starches So like glucose and starch So the sun’s energy that traveled through space is stored in the energy of plants.

Interestingly, the chloroplasts are essentially identical to our mitochondria. It’s almost the same thing. Then we either eat the plants or animals eat the plants, and then we eat the animals and we liberate the sun’s energy in our mitochondria to create. ATP, our currency of energy to power our thoughts, our feelings, our movement, our lives, our movement towards our highest purpose.

So we’re just this cycle of liberating solar energy in our mitochondria. And, and so food, food is, it’s miraculous. It’s beautiful. I just in awe of it. And so I think when you start to really see food that way as this tool that is powerful, it is cosmic, it is miraculous. It makes it easier to, to eat healthy.

And when we’re You know, you know, you look at, I look at you lay some goldfish out, you know, on the ground on the table. And it’s like, it’s just homogeneous one after the other, after the other, they’re all the same, they’re all quality controlled. That, I look at that and I think it’s almost like how they want us to think, like groupthink, you know, all be on the same bandwagon.

Whereas you go to the farmer’s market, every tomato is different. Every carrot’s a little funky looking. There’s hairs growing out of the carrots. Everything’s, it’s almost like Critical thinking, independent thought versus like homogeneity and group think. And it’s like, so to really just thinking like, who do I want to be?

What do I want to feel? And then find food that inspires that in you. Like, you know, what’s healthy. You can look at a plate, you know, and don’t let people confuse you into thinking otherwise. I think so the, the first, the, one of the principles of those six principles is that food is a matching problem.

Eating is a matching problem. Your cells have needs. Food has molecules, and if you match the molecules from the food, to what the cell needs, you will essentially move so much closer to health. And that is actually from that principle. That is where the very simple eating plan and good energy comes from, which is that you literally want to get five specific components, ideally into all your meals, because it will meet the needs for most of us for ourselves, which is a fiber source.

a probiotic source, an antioxidant source, a healthy protein source, and an omega 3 source. And really just having like five or six sources from each of those categories that you love, that you always have in your kitchen, and making sure you’re including a few of those with every meal, you will move closer to health.

It’s really kind of that simple. And the beauty is that In that sort of principles matching problem based approach, it can apply to anything vegan, keto, paleo, you can make that happen with all of them. So, um, so that that’s really, again, it’s just like, give yourselves what they need. And, uh, a lot opens up for us.

[00:57:23] Gabby: Yeah. And I feel like food has become, um, Almost a another it’s obviously become like another drug. Yeah, right. Like the process the processed food and people don’t realize to that. The tendency to overeat. I’ve never overeaten a salad or a lot. If you eat wild meat, I eat way less of it. Uh, it’s so nutrient dense.

It’s tougher. It’s like you have to chew it more. Um, when we eat the real stuff, you’re not going to really overeat and also your body gets what it needs. So you’re, you’re satisfied. And so when we get into that, you can’t eat just one. It’s because it’s set up perfectly engineered for that, for that to happen.

Um, you guys do talk about seed oils. Yeah. It’s funny because I’ll, you know, you’ll talk to certain people and they don’t, um, They’re sort of like, uh, we have bigger fish to fry. And I’m like, I understand that. But I think if people are trying and making this effort, then, you know, supporting them with, Hey, if you can avoid these oils because of the process they go through to become, the oil that they are.

Um, it is hard on us.

[00:58:33] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah. Yeah. Well, two things. I feel like something you just said might be like the most empowering message that people can hear in the, in the nutrition conversation, which is that when you eat the wild meat, uh, or the real food, the salad, you eat less. This is a key point. Cause I think a lot of us are just like, dominated by our cravings.

And like you said, that’s by design, the food is engineered that way. But I think what people need to realize with this, this matching problem concept is that when you meet the needs of the cells, you will stop being hungry. It’s literally that, that’s simple. And we have all these cells in our gut that have nutrient receptors.

And when a nutrient binds in the right way to that nutrient receptor, we’re going to be able to eat it. We produce that cell produces a hormone that makes us satiated. It’s actually that simple. And unfortunately with our ultra processed diet, where all those nutrients are depleted and our industrial agriculture system, which makes the food less nutrient rich.

So it’s less nutrient rich food. And then it’s ultra processed or those nutrient sensing cells are never really getting what they need. We could be eating all day and not actually putting in the things that stimulate the cell to make the satiety hormone. This is why that farmers market local food actually matters because the average piece of food in the United States travels 1, 500 miles to your plate every day that it’s out of the soil.

It’s losing its nutrient value. So think about the cell less nutrients to hit it to say satiety hormones. So you’re like, I’m dominated by my cravings. I don’t know what to do. Eat the highest quality, real food. You can to basically allow the nutrient sensing cells to feel that they’ve gotten what they want so that you can create satiety hormones that will just make you feel not hungry.

It’s an Ozempic. We talk about this all day long. It’s a GLP one agonist. GLP one is made by the L cells of our guts naturally. When they are able to interact with fiber, amino acids from protein and healthy fats. So if we eat a high protein diet filled with fiber, which of course is going to be less processed food and we’re getting healthy omega three fats and things like that, we’ll produce it.

But no one talks about that, that we can actually make this. And so I certainly have compassion for people with cravings because I, I was, you know, It’s 220 pounds in eighth grade. I get it. But real food actually in so many ways is the answer. We’re eating ourselves to death in America because we’re not actually giving the body the stuff it needs to produce satiety hormones.

And you know, there’s a million papers that play this out on a quantitative level. But um, the more real food nutrients we can get in the body that actually stimulate our satiety cells, the better. And, and that the simple way to do that is actually just eating. Real unprocessed food from that’s hopefully separated from the earth, not as long ago because it’ll have the most nutrients.

So that’s, that’s kind of just, I just wanted to, I just think you made such an important point there. Seed oils kind of gets into this too because the issue with seed oils is that they now become the most dominant fat in the human diet. And they’re not meeting any really of our needs in the cells.

They’re just empty, empty fats that are filling, you know, you take that 70 metric tons of food that we eat. If most, if the fat in that is a seed oil, that’s not going to really do anything to help your health. Then you’re just like missing so much opportunity to put things that actually could be good molecular information for your body in.

So that’s one problem. It’s just crowding out the healthy fats that are really helpful.

[01:02:14] Gabby: And people don’t realize that it’s going to be the fat that makes you.

[01:02:19] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah.

[01:02:19] Gabby: I think when we get the right amount of good fat, we stop eating. I think we stop eating. And so you’ll, you’ll get people that are like, uh, they’re freaked out about the fat and then, or they’re eating this other kind of fat and, and so I don’t, I think that the really good fat is what makes us go, okay, I’m done.

[01:02:35] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah. It’s a hugely satiating macronutrient. But the real problem with, there’s two problems with seed oils, one of which people talk about, one of which people are not talking about, but which is so important. It’s a little technical, but I think, I think your audience can understand it. Yeah. So one is that Omega or seed oils are very high in Omega 6 fats, which tend to, when in excess of Omega 3s, when skewed towards Omega 6s, it’s a pro inflammatory trigger in the body.

And that’s very real. Omega 6 fats and omega 3 fats incorporate into our cell membranes, which are made of fat, and they should be in like a one to one ratio. Now we’re eating 20 to one omega 6 to omega 3s. Why that is pro inflammatory is because our immune cells, this is so cool, like this is such cool biochemistry, our immune systems are floating around trying to fight threats in our body.

And what they want to do is, there’s a bacteria. Eat the bacteria, destroy it, inflammatory response goes down because they fix the issue. One of the ways that that happens is that immune cells actually literally snip fat from cell membranes and they create these inflammatory molecules that if they snip omega 3s, they can make downstream mediators that reduce inflammation, which are called pro resolving mediators.

And if they don’t, if they snip omega 6s instead, it promotes a pro, like, keep the inflammation up. So, and what’s really fascinating is that actually, like, when you take Advil or Motrin, part of what it’s doing is actually blocking that conversion process of making the pro inflammatory molecules. So, so if you have a higher density of the omega 3s in the cell membranes, those immune cells are going to have a higher likelihood of Snipping a fat to to manufacture the pro resolving mediators that will make you less.

It’s very real. Like this is this is I think understanding the biochemistry a little bit is really motivating because you’re like it’s not just Just hand wavy. It’s like, we’re, we’re giving, these cells are blind and they need to be around stuff to grab and to snip that is going to help our health. And so when you’re eating these seed oils, you’re literally just loading your cell membranes with a fat that’s going to create more of the chronic inflammation and that dangerous signal in the body, which is.

Which is just so bad for our health because if you’re, if you’re in danger in the body on that molecular level of chronic inflammation, ultimately chronic inflammation is this is cellular fear, you are going to divert the body’s resources towards defense and alarm rather than thriving repair and health.

So that’s why one of the reasons why seed oils matter. The second reason is because. So we have essentially there’s in the omega 3 and omega 6 fat conversation, there’s a series of chemical reactions that happen to get you to the ones that actually matter in the body. So for instance, on omega 3s, plant based omega 3s, you start with something called alpha linolenic acid, and then it goes through a series of conversions to get to EPA and DHA, which is what a lot of people take, you know, supplements for EPA and DHA, which is actually the one that matters for our cell membranes.

That’s the anti inflammatory molecule. To get from ALA, that plant based omega 3, like from chia seeds, to EPA and DHA, which is what we need, five, six step process where the, essentially an enzyme, a protein converts it, and they’re called elongases and desaturase enzymes. Well, the omega 6 fats use the exact same enzymes to convert themselves down that pathway from linoleic acid down to arachidonic acid, which is pro inflammatory.

If you are overloading the body with seed oils and omega 6 fats, you block the enzymes that let you convert the omega 3 fats to the helpful one. So you’re out competing a set of enzymes. Not only are you overloading the body with omega 6s, you are blocking any of those omega 3s that you put in from plants to get the ones that you need to be healthy.

So I like to think about like, okay, when I read my labels in the grocery store and I put down everything that has seed oils, I am freeing up these protein enzymes in my body, the elongases and the desaturase enzymes so that all those plant based omega 3s that I’m spending money on, like chia seeds and hemp seeds and flax seeds can turn to the EPA to create cell membranes that will create health for me.

So just kind of having some of those mental frameworks for like realizing why we’re doing this. So it’s not just feels like a task, but I think it’s a lot of the nuance gets really missed and people say, well, seed oils don’t matter. It does matter. It does matter. It’s an, it’s in,

[01:07:24] Gabby: that’s the thing. People have 70 percent of the shelves.

Yeah. So that’s the thing. It’s that also that accumulation. If once in a while you go out and, It’s in a salad dressing or God forbid you eat a French fry from a reheated oil. I mean, who doesn’t love a good French fry now and again? Um, but it’s the accumulation that it’s in every thing. It’s

[01:07:43] Dr. Casey Means: in salad dressings.

It’s in every baked good. It’s in bread. It’s in pasta. It’s even in healthy

[01:07:48] Gabby: foods. It’s so frustrating. Hummus. What, I mean, you know, so I, I just want to bring that up because again, if people are making the effort, I want to get them information that supports and rewards their efforts and really trying to highlight some basic landmines that we’re all navigating at the moment.

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But so will your skin and your hair.

I’m not going to get too deep into supplementation. I do want to bring up though, um, vitamin D as in dog, vitamin C. And, uh, because I think now we’re, I don’t want us to get deaf to the importance of vitamin D since COVID because everyone talked about, Oh, all, so many people were vitamin D deficient, how vitamin D deficient everyone is.

But this still is and will always be a very important supplement.

[01:10:42] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah, it’s one that I definitely take every day. I take a vitamin D K2. I take probably at this point about 10, 000 IU per day, sometimes more. And this is a, this is one of the tests that I think is valuable to get tested every year because While it’s very hard to become like to over consume vitamin D in a supplement, toxicity is very rare.

You do want to know where you stand, but the vast majority of Americans are insufficient in vitamin D, and this is involved in hundreds of chemical reactions in the body that are so critical for health. It’s so easy, right? And so, um, A lot of lab tests will say that, you know, if you’re above 20, you’re fine.

In terms of vitamin D, we want to be up towards that 60 to 90 range, which is actually really tough to get to. And part of that involves going outside more, you know, we can definitely take the supplement, but There’s almost no substitute for spending more time outdoors. You obviously don’t want to get sunburn, uh, but you do want to be able to synthesize your own vitamin D.

And since we are spending over 93 percent of our time indoors, I think we become very, um, you know, we’re not, we’re not, we’re not good manufacturers of vitamin D. So that’s one that I would recommend testing every year. So probably the average person can certainly take two to five thousand IUs even if they haven’t tested.

Um, but if you’re really low, that’s when you can feel more comfortable taking the 10 and 20, 000 or even going in and getting a vitamin D shot, you know, and, uh, in higher doses and then rechecking every few months. Yeah. So

[01:12:14] Gabby: I just want to remind that and you have a whole list of supplements and you talk about even what they’re responsible for and supportive of in the book.

So it’s not just a list, it’s, you know, you, you, you do this, the entire book is responsible with, you know, studies and research and all of that. And uh, and so, um, so getting back to food principles, cause again, food, I’m happy to spend the time on it because it really is the one that takes people down. Yes.

Yes. And, you know, something that I just want to remind people, too, is We do have a pill for everything, right? Whether it’s depression, cholesterol. Don’t get me started on cholesterol. I have very high cholesterol, super genetically high, like 234. Since I’m in my twenties, I started getting measured at that point.

And everyone’s like, Oh, you know, big particles, small particles. It’s just, I have high cholesterol. And then when I learned from Lustig, actually from Robert Lustig, that, that the line is not straight from the high cholesterol to heart disease. So I just, you know, it’s like, so we’ve have all these pills for, you know, everything, and we’ve never been more depressed, more infertile, had more, you know, heart issues, diabetes.

And so I just bring that up because I’m not saying to people. Hey, don’t take your medicine. I’m saying this is this is the time now to have these conversations. We have enough proof Showing that it just is not working.

[01:13:47] Dr. Casey Means: Mm hmm.

[01:13:47] Gabby: So we need to all make a change.

[01:13:49] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah,

[01:13:49] Gabby: that’s it I’m not saying, you know doctors are good or bad I’m just simply saying hey this system that we’ve been doing for probably about 30 40 years 35 40 years It’s it’s not working, right?

[01:14:02] Dr. Casey Means: It’s the medicalization of chronic lifestyle illnesses Yes And it’s I think we’d probably both agree that if there’s an acute issue An acute issue meaning something that will immediately be life threatening to you that is not based in diet and lifestyle so this would be something like A fractured skull or an appendix bursting or very complicated childbirth.

This is where our system has produced many miracles. And this is, and, and should be lauded, you know, it’s, we should be supportive of the amazing technological innovations that we have for things like that. What the problem is, is that the system has taken the trust engendered by acute disease management and asked us to give it over to chronic disease management, which has, as you said, been an abject failure as we’ve medicalized diseases that are rooted in diet and lifestyle.

the rates have all gone up. So the more pills we prescribe for most of these diseases, these chronic diseases, the rates have gone up. So you just have to step back and think about that a little bit of, okay, so that’s not working. So, so what do we do instead?

[01:15:11] Gabby: And I’m not emotionally attached to this. Um, I, that was a good 10 or 15 years ago.

I probably had those feelings and now it’s like, Hey, what do we need to do? to, um, one by one, learn how to help ourselves and our families and our friends to improve this. So, um, so talking, going back, so we talked about seed oils, um, uh, and, and now is there any other principles in food that feel more important to you that I, that I missed?

[01:15:40] Dr. Casey Means: I think we, we’ve covered a lot about food. I think, you know, I, there’s really eight things that I asked people to focus on. It’s including those five things that we talked about, fiber, a probiotic source, an antioxidant source, significant healthy protein, omega three sources, and keeping those things at the ready in your kitchen.

So making a meal is really just mixing and matching and then getting rid of what we call the unholy Trinity, which is Refined ultra processed sugars, refined ultra processed grains and refined ultra processed seed oils. That means reading every label and if those things are present, putting it down. So really freeing up space within your diet to focus on the things that are really going to help yourselves.

Um, and I think once we can become really second nature with the sources of those helpful things and really becoming familiar with label reading, it actually can be quite second nature and get more. It’s not that simple, but we really try and focus on those simple principles.

[01:16:38] Gabby: So let’s talk about, uh, kids because one of the things I I’m getting, uh, you don’t have children yet, um, um, but you’re, you’re a family person.

You’re very close, you know, you’re close to your brother who was involved with this book as well. Once he had a child, some kind of lights, um, bells and whistles went off and also the passing of your mother. So with kids. Um, you know, and I always laugh, like your brother talks about the puffs, you know, that that’s like the first suggested food now from a pediatric pamphlet, like, Oh, it’s a puff.

So a lot of parents, it’s a little bit like the iPad and I’m, I’m just being totally transparent. I remember I used to fly in the airplane and I’d see a parent and, uh, they’d have their kid and, and, uh, the kid I’d be like, Oh, I would never put my kid on the iPad on a six hour flight. Then you have kids and you go, Oh yeah, you’re going to stay, be quiet and sit still.

It’s still, you know, we can get back to running around outside. Once we land, we’re going to avoid getting into a hassle with the other passengers on the plane. And, and sometimes that ease, that food, that convenient little snacky, weird food that is so there’s so much of it now,

[01:17:52] Dr. Casey Means: and it’s

[01:17:52] Gabby: even hidden under the guides of it’s like healthy puffy snacks for your kids.

Do you, do you guys visit the idea about, uh, a strategy for parents because. They’re, they do get overwhelmed, and it is so easy.

[01:18:10] Dr. Casey Means: Mm, mm hmm. I mean, I think big picture, part of it is just

[01:18:16] Gabby: Is this go back to the why?

[01:18:18] Dr. Casey Means: Well, well, it’s also just waking up to what’s really happening, because I think a lot of parents don’t think about The behavioral issues they’re dealing with in the home and how those could be related to food, you know, and so it’s like not even knowing that that’s a lever that could really help make life like a lot easier in a lot of other ways.

Um, and I think that. It’s also just, I’ve talked to a lot of parents who actually aren’t really aware of how bad things are with kids right now with health. Like 45 percent of children overweight or obese now, 45 percent like that could be zero. It was zero in the past. It was close to

[01:18:55] Gabby: watch old footage of like high school kids doing like that, the test physical fitness test.

And they almost all look the same. Like they’re underweight. That’s right. That’s how healthy they are.

[01:19:04] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah. And now like you want, you see kids coming out of school and it’s like very unhealthy looking. You’ve got over 20 percent of teens with fatty liver disease. Like this is non alcoholic fatty liver disease.

This is because of food. You know, this is a very important organ and it’s like pathologic in a, Fifth of children, you’ve got 30% of young adults with pre-diabetes now. Unbelievable. Um, and then of course, the rates of things like autism and A DHD and, um, so many of these, uh, neurodevelopmental and behavioral disorders going off the charts.

40% of 18 year olds. meet criteria for mental illness. And so we see these trends. And I think the issue is that because of the way our system has divorced us from an understanding of foundational root cause connected metabolic health, we don’t see how actually quite simple it would be to use levers like, you know, food to really get on top of a lot of these things for our children are really, The sad but important truth that I think people don’t understand is that for our system, the healthcare industry, there is nothing more profitable than a chronically ill child.

They have you forever. They have you forever. You have a patient who starts racking up the comorbidities, all these different diseases, uh, starting young. Because we don’t have a disease reversal culture, they’re going to have forever, they’re going to have a harder, sadder, more tortured life going through, you know, dozens of specialists, dozens of pills, and create millions of dollars, probably for the healthcare industry over the course of their lifetime.

This is rooted in our broken food system. And so part of it is just like waking up and like seeing what’s really happening. Um, maybe as like a boost to understand why actually investing that time. You know, in food for the Children could actually, like, save a lot of the difficult things that parents are dealing with right now, and especially my brother always talked about.

I don’t have Children yet, so it’s very just like with the iPad. Like, I’m not going to pine on. I understand how challenging this is for for families right now. Um, yeah. You know, cooking real food, getting their kids to eat real food. But you also

[01:21:28] Gabby: give a list of businesses that are doing it better. So there are processed foods that

[01:21:33] Dr. Casey Means: are packaged foods that meet a lot of the good energy criteria.

So you give

[01:21:37] Gabby: the, the, the, the list in there. So that’s the other thing. I just want to bring that up.

[01:21:42] Dr. Casey Means: Grass fed cheese, grass fed beef sticks, you know, like. Little packets of guacamole and hummus that have no seed oils. Like there’s a bunch of, you know, some of the pouches are actually quite healthy. So there are some great brands that we highlight that are doing really good work.

And so there are grab and go things. But, you know, the investment in sitting down and having meals as a family and preparing food and realizing that in those first couple years, when you do have full control over what that child is eating, take it. Like they don’t need the puffs. They’re not asking. for the processed food.

So, so just my brother speaks more to this because he actually is a parent. But like in those early years, when you have control, they’ll eat anything. They’ll eat sardines. They’ll eat, set the pallet to set the pallet because that’s the other

[01:22:31] Gabby: thing is the sweetness. If you drink a Coca Cola when you’re little, if that’s your litmus for sweet, that’s pretty high.

[01:22:38] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah.

[01:22:39] Gabby: And so the notion of a blueberry. You know, give it to them when they can and, and it does take more effort, but, but the other part of this is what’s more important? Nothing. Yeah. There just isn’t. And I do think, um, and listen, I gave my kids. on some certain levels as they got older free reign, no voodoo.

And they don’t have a relation, a weird relationship with food. And, but yeah, one will say, Oh, my skin’s breaking out. I’m not going to eat sugar for a while. So they understand how to also utilize it as a tool. Doesn’t mean they do it all the time. Cause sometimes they want to go eat a talkie or whatever the hell it is.

Yeah. But I’m just saying it’s, it’s letting them also understand where you say what’s food, what’s fun and knowing what the difference is. Um, but, but yeah, But also I did really appreciate that list because you weren’t saying, Hey, don’t eat any of this. You were saying, and also these sort of, if you need something on the fly, these brands are doing a good job.

Um, and, and listen, family meals are important. My joke, the thing I love is in our house when I’m like, get downstairs and we’re having family dinner and we’re going to be together. But. So what, you know, and I’m willing to do that, you know, and even though it feels at times force and I have a kid rolling their eyes next to me or, you know, it all swings around and they, they swing around.

So I just really appreciated that you talked about that. Um, you also give, uh, Some really nice strategies for exercise, you know, where it’s like, Hey, even journaling and all, you know, all kinds of things. So for you on principles of exercise, um, and as somebody who’s like a scientist, what was your relationship with exercise and, and, uh, And how did you sort of dive into thinking what’s important?

[01:24:27] Dr. Casey Means: Well, one of the, one of the conclusions I think I came to with writing this book is that, is that in a sense, our obsession with the concept of exercise As a country is actually part of the problem. I feel so funny saying this to you because you’re like one of the most. It’s

[01:24:49] Gabby: exhausting. It’s well, people will be tired by the rent, the room that they use thinking about what they’re not doing or doing.

Right. It’s a nightmare.

[01:24:59] Dr. Casey Means: Well, it’s that, but it’s also, it’s also that we think of exercise as a thing. thing to check off the list each day. It’s one more item on the to do list. And we, we, our concept of exercise, you know, the Barry’s bootcamp class, the SoulCycle class, it’s like one hour and then we’ve done it.

This is a problem because it’s very recent. I mean, 150 years ago, 70 percent of the country was involved in agriculture. They were on their feet. All day long. Now it’s less than 1%. So we were moving all day long. And for our biology to be healthy, I’m not even gonna say optimized, healthy, the human body, all those cells actually need to be moving all throughout the day.

So I think a real reframe that we have to have is away from this concept of exercise as a bout of activity to realizing that the human body to be healthy actually needs low grade movement. All throughout the day and that that is actually a different signature in our biology than just checking the workout off the list.

We should also ideally do that workout, but there is no getting around the fact that we got to get our bodies up and moving more throughout the day. So again, coming back to kind of thinking about the cell and really understanding why this is important. Yeah. There are two things that basically allow us to take sugar out of the bloodstream to process it for energy.

One is we eat food, the blood sugar goes up, and insulin is released, and that helps us take the glucose out of the bloodstream and, you know, put it either towards energy or towards fat storage. There’s another thing, too, though. It’s moving our muscles. Muscle contraction allows glucose channels to come from inside the cell, to the outside of the cell to let glucose in.

It doesn’t need to be hard exercise. It’s literally just moving the muscles like walking. So think about two different people. One finds a way to move around for a few minutes every hour. They do a few air squats every half hour. They took a two to three minute walk around the block every hour. So they actually listen to their Apple watch alerts that say, stand up, you know, the little stand up pings.

They are going to be pushing those glucose channels to the cell membrane. All day. So their biology actually has, has this metabolic activity happening all day. Now let’s think about the person who sits for eight hours. The average American sits for over 80 percent of their 24 hour period. That person sits all day, no stimulus to push those glucose channels to the membrane.

And then they exercise for an hour at the end of the day or the beginning of the day. And yes, they get all the benefits from that, but it’s for that period around the workout. Those are two different biologies. Ideally we’d have both, but. A big reframe I think we have to have is how do we actually get in motion?

We’re not going back to all of us working in agriculture. So what it means is looking at our daily lives, taking stock of all the activities we do every day. Maybe it’s opening the mail, cooking dinner, uh, grocery shopping, catching up with our partners, catching up with our kids. Whatever, you know, working at the computer, look at all our activities and start to think about how do I make more of them standing or walking?

That’s actually something we really need to do in our modern world. And so what that could look like is, yeah, maybe instead of doing Instacart, you go back to actually going to the grocery store and walking around and doing it because you want to get those, those steps. Maybe it’s that you stand at your counter when you’re opening your mail as opposed to sitting down.

Maybe it is getting that treadmill desk. They’re now. 100 on Amazon and you can easily get 15, 000 steps just by walking, you know, a little bit while you’re working and answering emails. Maybe it’s every time you go on social media, you commit to walking around while you’re doing it. Maybe instead of sitting down on the couch with your partner, you’re throwing a football in the backyard.

So it’s finding ways to convert our modern day seated activities into movement so that we’re moving more throughout the day. This really, the point gets hit home. When we look at the data on steps, which is some of the most profound data that I saw researching the entire book, top journals, Journal of American Medical Association, JAMA, looking at thousands of people with 10 plus year follow up.

Showed that people who walked just more than 7, 000 steps a day, not even 10, 000, but 7, 000 steps a day or more had a 50 to 70 percent lower chance of dying in the follow up period than the people who walked less than that. And a lot of people will say, Oh, I heard steps don’t matter. The research absolutely says the opposite.

There’s been follow up studies showing that just getting above 7, 000 steps, and other studies looked at like 8, 000 to 12, 000 steps, confers about a 50 percent decreased risk of type 2 diabetes. obesity, depression, cancer, Alzheimer’s, dementia, and premature mortality. And I think through that framework that we just talked about, it’s not about the steps.

It’s not about the physical act of steps. It’s a proxy metric for moving your body more throughout the day, as opposed to in that one day. Discrete period so so that’s a big takeaway is move more low grade movement. It doesn’t have to be hard It can literally be slow walking when it comes to exercise So this is like the more like intense exercise Very important and all the research is clear exercise is great for metabolic health when I think of the framework I have for exercises We want to make more mitochondria that are more efficient and go through more substrates.

So make more energy. Basically, I think about exercise that lens. So resistance training, we’re literally printing more mitochondria. So that means better metabolic health. You’re literally making more energy. It’s a stimulus to make more mitochondria and to have them do more work. Walking doesn’t so much stimulate more mitochondria, but you’re processing tons of glucose.

So having each mitochondria do more work. Uh, high intensity interval training, hit training, really high, you know, heart rate. That’s going to be an incredible mitophagy signal. So recycling old mitochondria and then getting newer, happier, more efficient ones, and we’ll help you make more mitochondria. So biogenesis as well.

And then we think about like zone two training, which is more that lower grade endurance, um, activity. A different stimulus to the mitochondria also kind of mitophagy biogenesis. So, so walking is really glucose disposal throughout the entire day. And then these different types of exercise strength, tainting zone to high intensity interval training are all about how do we push the mitochondria to be better, so more.

More mitochondria, more efficient, processing more stuff. And so you can see through that framework, like it is very important, but it doesn’t substitute for the baseline.

[01:31:58] Gabby: Yeah. I need to do more baseline. I’ll be honest with you. I think I train pretty hard and then all of a sudden I could then just go to work.

[01:32:06] Dr. Casey Means: And it’s

[01:32:07] Gabby: a really important reminder. I appreciate that. Sometimes, you know, just even if it’s go for a walk, I mean, I’m on my feet, but still, it’s a really, it’s an important message, even for people who are exercising in these fixed windows. So I really appreciate that. Something that you said in the book, I thought was really, um, not only interesting, but I think would A lot of people is talking about glycation and I couldn’t help it, but like, even, you know, whether, whether it’s capillaries, but wrinkles.

I mean, if you really want to hit people where they pay attention, Casey, talk about wrinkles. Can you just explain what, you know, glycation is and, uh, and why it’s could be so damaging?

[01:32:54] Dr. Casey Means: Oh my gosh. Yes. This is so fascinating. So glycation is a process where if we have excess sugar floating around in the bloodstream and you have a higher concentration essentially of sugar.

It’s gonna stick to things. It’s a sticky molecule. It will form, um, bonds with things that it bumps into and it’ll kind of, it’s kind of indiscriminate about it. So it’ll, it’ll bind to blood vessel walls. That’s obviously not good. You don’t want to like start that process. It will bind to proteins in the cells around the cells.

It’ll bind to DNA. But collagen in our skin is the most abundant protein in the human body. And so when we have high blood sugar and high sugar in the, in the fluid around cells, it will stick to collagen. And what happens when collagen gets glycated, so sugar sticking to it, is that it goes from having these really nice linear sheets of collagen to being cross linked.

It causes it to basically be a jumble of collagen, and that is what causes wrinkles. And so people with higher blood sugar and higher glycation of collagen, tend to have premature aging. So one of the best things we can possibly do for our skin health is to keep our blood sugar levels under control. And actually the relationship between skin health and glucose goes for literally over a dozen skin conditions from hair loss conditions like alopecia areata to acne, which is very much driven by insulin resistance.

There’s cultures in the world who have no acne, who have much better metabolic health, uh, premature aging, um, psoriasis, eczema. And so that data is fascinating. So actually just keeping our blood sugar under control is really, really important. And just to draw the connection for people of like, okay, we’ve talked about metabolism, mitochondria and glucose has all related.

When we talk about that food through the mitochondria to energy metabolic process, one of the key things from food that we use to convert to energy, human energy is glucose. And so when our mitochondria inside the cells are being damaged from all those environmental pillars that we talked about, food, lack of movement, lack of sleep, environmental toxins, too much stress all the time.

Bad light hygiene, et cetera, the mitochondria get hurt. They can’t process that glucose to energy as effectively. And so the cell and its infinite wisdom says, okay, well the mitochondria can’t do the work. So we want less glucose coming into the cell because it can’t process it. And that is why the cell puts up a block to glucose coming in, which is what insulin resistance is.

So it actually stops that insulin signal from transmitting into the cell to bring glucose channels, the cell membrane. So because of that, you can understand how then glucose would rise in the bloodstream. And so, so when people are saying, okay, how is this all related? It’s because it’s a core problem inside the cell that’s caused by the environment leading to a backup basically that then causes the cell to block the entry of glucose.

It rises in the bloodstream and then you get issues like glycation,

[01:36:04] Gabby: et

[01:36:04] Dr. Casey Means: cetera. And so, and of course blood sugar going up on our lab test is what’s represents prediabetes and type 2 diabetes, which is. Affecting 50 percent of American adults and the way that we approach it in our culture is like, Oh, well, we need to, you know, we literally treat type two diabetes late stage with insulin, which is, I hope in this conversation, this becomes clear.

Like there’s, if you just are jamming more glucose inside the cell, but the cell can’t actually process it. It’s kind of like you’re hiding it from the bloodstream inside the cell. What we really need to do is increase the capacity of the mitochondria to actually just process more of it. And so that’s, of course, comes back to environment and the pillars.

[01:36:48] Gabby: But I always loved that because I thought, well, if we can’t get people because we want to say, hey, have a higher quality of life and feel good and have more energy, we’ll be like, listen, if you want to have less wrinkles. Wrinkles. I mean, it’s like insanity, but it does make a difference. And so I just, I had to bring that up.

[01:37:05] Dr. Casey Means: Right. If the blindness and the amputation hearing loss of all of that is not

[01:37:11] Gabby: COS and your infertility,

[01:37:12] Dr. Casey Means: Alzheimer’s, dementia,

[01:37:13] Gabby: wrinkles, wrinkles,

[01:37:14] Dr. Casey Means: and acne.

[01:37:15] Gabby: Oh, yeah. Acne. For younger folks. Of course. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. So I think it’s, you know, and people understanding about, um, and again, you’re very good friends with Dr.

Lustig, but his whole thing about teaching people about consuming sugar without fiber and how that goes straight to the liver, um, it’s really getting people to understand that the importance of that one hidden, you know, those two drinks every day, it’s just two drinks. It’s like, yes, this is wreaking havoc on our systems.

Yeah. So really to be mindful, like orange juice. Maybe not so much, you know, right if you can help it, right? Exactly. It’s the

[01:37:48] Dr. Casey Means: orange.

[01:37:49] Gabby: Yes. Yeah, I know

[01:37:50] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah, and one of those metabolic tests speaking of glycation hemoglobin A1c Which is like a long term marker of our average blood sugar levels the reason we can do that test is because sugar sticks to Hemoglobin that is glycation of our red blood cells and that’s what we measure when we’re testing hemoglobin A1c so glycation is very real and Even shows up in the way we test for for metabolic issues.

So hemoglobin A1c Which is the test that most people have probably had before it comes as a protein And it’s literally looking at the percent of hemoglobin molecules in your bloodstream that have sugar stuck to them, which is the same thing that’s causing premature wrinkles. Yeah.

[01:38:27] Gabby: All these things. So, um, you know, you do talk about hydration, uh, do you have, I don’t want to say hacks, but like, will you see minerals?

Cause if we’re on shore for getting is, you know, and, and I forget plenty to drink throughout the day. So at the end of the day, sometimes, and I, especially with me, I, I had a fib after Covid and it could be my age. It’s very common for women. Middle-aged women. Mm-Hmm. . I just said that out loud. Um, to have some AFib, I have, I have my heart checked.

Everything’s fine. But really making sure you’re not dehydrated, especially before bed. Mm-Hmm. . ’cause it’s much better on the heart. It’s much easier on the heart. It’s tough on the heart when you go to bed, dehydrated amongst a million other things. But do you have, uh. Just any practices. I mean you’re here with your Yeti, but or it’s just that reminder.

[01:39:18] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah, I think It’s just the reminder. I don’t have any good hacks. It’s just like with sleep inconsistency, hydration is one of my hard things that I struggle with some, you know I’d like just getting enough water in but something very motivating that I do I should just put this on a post it and read it every morning, which is dr Richard Johnson who wrote the incredible book nature wants us to be fat about emeritus at University of Colorado It’s an amazing book, but he actually feels like a huge part of the obesity epidemic solving it is actually getting people to just hydrate more, literally hydrate yourself to weight loss.

And the reason very briefly is that when we make fat, we store water. And so it’s called metabolic water. And so a response to being dehydrated is for your body to actually put on more fat so you can store metabolic water. And the perfect example of this. is the camel, which actually has humps and the purpose of the humps is fat to store water because they live in the desert.

And so when we think about our own fat, it’s like, Oh my gosh, am I actually like having camel physiology where I’m putting on fat because my body thinks I’m in a desert and dehydrated. And so having some nice clean water with electrolytes. Is a strategy. There’s actually been research showing that if you put water fountains more prominently in middle schools Obesity rates go down in the schools if you, if you get kids to drink one more glass of water per day.

So I do need to do a better job of reminding myself of that because it’s, it’s just so easy to forget.

[01:40:54] Gabby: We think we’re hungry and we’re just dehydrated or we think we have a headache, but we’re actually just dehydrated. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s just kind of bringing that up from a policy standpoint. And again, I know this is where you and your brother come together and maybe you could share the story, um, just to.

you know, your, your dynamic going through a health situation with your mother. And, um, that also being a unifying, it felt like from the outside. component for you and your brother. Um, but from a sort of a policy or a healthcare point of view, is there anything that we can do to help move, kind of start writing this big ship, you know, into, into, into a different direction?

[01:41:41] Dr. Casey Means: Oh my gosh. Yeah. I think this, this is where my brother Callie, who’s my coauthor, he’s just, he’s really a brilliant thinker on this because he comes from, I come from the medical world. He comes from. Policy business school has worked on campaigns was in P. R. And so he really gets the systems issues in his and speaks to Congress regularly.

And I think that a big Um, there’s several, there’s several very simple policy changes that could happen to have a monumental impact on the health issues that we’re dealing with in the country today. Because so much of why we’re sick is actually rooted in some very simple broken business model incentives that, that create the reality in our country, which is that every institution that touches our health in the United States.

makes more money when we’re sick and less money when we’re healthy. So that because of that simple business model problem that we are more profitable when sick and the fact that health care is not only the largest industry in the United States, it’s It’s the fastest growing industry in the United States.

And the way that it’s not a non, it’s not a nonprofit, it’s not a philanthropic organization. We have to realize this. It’s a business designed to grow. And with the current system, it grows with more people getting more things done to them for a longer period of time. And that’s chronic illness. So working backwards from that.

We have to change some of those incentives and that could actually happen very, very quickly. One thing we need to do, uh, which, which Callie talks about is, is there could literally be an executive order that prevents pharmaceutical companies from, uh, buying ad spots on mainstream television. It was just us in London and what Australia, New Zealand, allows

[01:43:37] Gabby: it.

Every other country do not allow it.

[01:43:39] Dr. Casey Means: Why are we advertising prescription medications to people, right? It’s very strange when you think about it. And yet 60 percent of the ad spend for mainstream media comes from pharma. And I think a key point here is that you need to realize is that because of that, you are not the customer of the news outlet, the pharmaceutical company is.

So that is of course going to change the way that we talk about health on TV, the way we talk about different interventions. And so just literally limiting. The ability of ads for where we get our information to be purchased by an industry that benefits off our illness would obviously be a good, and that would literally just be catching up with so much of the rest of the

[01:44:23] Gabby: world.

Yeah, and those outlets that make all that money are not going to do research or investigate what, if it’s good or not. And they certainly

[01:44:30] Dr. Casey Means: did not during COVID. We didn’t see a single, even though the vast majority of people who were dying of COVID, had comorbidities that were preventable lifestyle conditions.

They never talked about it. Virtually one minute was not spent on talking about actually getting metabolically healthy as a strategy. So that, so you see, we saw it. And I think this is why there’s a lot of distrust now in media is because of the epic failure to speak of the holistic issues during COVID, which is, you know, a great awakening that I think is happening.

And. Um, so there’s that. I think the second piece is we’ve got to clean up the farm bills, which are the part of our legislation that actually makes unhealthy food cheapest. So people think that, well, the reason that we’re buying this stuff is because it’s cheaper and that’s just the way it is. Processed food is cheaper.

Processed food is cheaper because your taxpayer dollars are subsidized in the food to be cheaper through the farm bill, which has been corrupted by big ag and processed food. And probably in some ways, healthcare has their, their hands in it. So we have billions and millions of dollars that actually go to support farmers, but the, the dollars are being pushed towards commodity crops that could turn into processed foods like corn, soy, and wheat.

A minute fraction legumes, which are, you know, disease preventing and reversing like, like less than 5 percent and virtually none of it goes towards organic food. So I love what Mark Hyman talks about in the book food fix that he wrote, which is basically like you need to realize that we are in real dollars each paying four times over for the ultra processed food that we eat.

If we go into McDonald’s and buy a burger and fries and a soda, it is not 5. It’s probably closer to a hundred dollars. And this is not like, This is real because you are paying for the food itself, the five to 10. You are paying for your future health, current and future healthcare costs to both for you and everyone else in the country through your taxpayer dollars.

You are paying for the environmental destruction that’s happening by creating conventionally grown food like that, that’s decimating our topsoil and, uh, you know, filling the Gulf of Mexico with pesticides and killing all the fish. Um, So you’re paying for health care costs, environmental costs, the food itself, and you’re paying for the farm bill subsidies through your taxpayer dollars.

So you are paying for the food four times over. So we got to get louder about that. So farm bill subsidies, that’s the second one. A third one that we talk about is We have to get the added sugar out of the national school lunch program because we spend billions of dollars feeding Around 3 billion meals are served in public schools each year It’s the largest fast food chain in the country is school lunches and right now We’re allowing that food to be filled with added sugar that this is a no brainer like we could just You know, be putting that food, that money, say no added sugar in the school lunch program, but it’s just monumental amounts of sugar that are going towards kids and the USDA guidelines right now say that 10 percent of a child’s diet can come from added sugar.

This is not fruit sugar. This is refined processed sugar. That should be obviously zero. We don’t, we don’t recommend cigarettes and meth to kids. Why are we recommending added sugar? It’s, there’s a percentage they’re allowing and that could just. They could just so easily say it’s zero. Yeah. We’re not going to, if you have it, like, but we don’t need to recommend it.

[01:48:04] Gabby: Well, in other countries like France, you can see that for no more money, they feed their kids. Real food. If you look at their school menus. Yeah, because everyone would think oh, it’s a cost situation. It’s not. Nope So what is that? Is that school boards? Is that is that your Congressman who is that?

[01:48:22] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah.

Well in that particular case I mean Kraft Heinz struck a deal with the USDA to put Lunchables in schools. So it’s Lunchables Yeah, this is last year. Yeah. And it’s, um, so it’s, it’s at that level. I

[01:48:35] Gabby: mean, I’m laughing because it’s just like, you’ve got to be kidding. Lunchable. And then we’re like, Hey, and then we want you to sit down and concentrate.

And

[01:48:41] Dr. Casey Means: yeah, the teachers, I feel so, you know, so, so this is all at the level of Congress. And one thing my brother talks a lot, a lot is that like the next president, you know, Would be wise to actually approach this more from an executive order standpoint because Congress is it’s just so There are so many conflicts right now That we’re not making any progress and you know, Callie’s talked to a lot of Congress people many of them don’t really understand these issues like about About the soil decimation and about the problems with processed foods and the problem of monocropping and monocropping and food companies spend five times more on lobbying to Congress than oil companies.

I mean, we are, they’re spending so much money getting in these people’s offices and the average person like you or I are not calling the Congress people. So what they’re hearing all day from very seemingly respectable people, they have suits. So we, so. I mean, I don’t want to say everyone should just pick up their phone and call their congressman because I am not, I’m not confident that’s going to be the thing.

Is

[01:49:50] Gabby: Cali doing any organized, is there an organized portal that we can, is there a place we can send people if they want to learn more or do more?

[01:49:59] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah, I mean, so Cali has started a nonprofit, um, that, uh, that is going to be doing more policy and legislation, literally writing the executive orders. And then.

You know, Mark Hyman has his food fix organization, which goes in lobbies in Congress. So I think reading food fix, looking at food fix dot org. Um, but there’s some simple things. So like get the sugar out of school lunches, change the farm bills, get pharma advertising out of our mainstream media. We need to stop allowing.

nutrition schools, medical schools, and the NIH who do our research and teach our doctors from, if they’re going to be accepting federal funding. Didn’t, weren’t you used to be, didn’t you do research at the NIH? Yeah. Yeah. So if they’re accepting federal funding, they should not be allowed to accept federal, they should not be allowed to, um, to accept funding from the pharmaceutical or food industry, which right now is making up a huge percentage of the operating budget of medical schools.

Stanford. While I was a student at Stanford Medical School accepted a 3 million grant from Pfizer to help shape the curriculum. And there’s literally articles still on the Stanford website saying up and down. This grant is an educational grant that will not change the way we approach what we’re teaching.

Like it’s, it’s to support, you know, but not, there’s no change. Strings attached, but like when you have 3 million coming in from Pfizer, Pfizer, are you going to really be pushing the students to question exercise more, right? Acupuncture, stress management tactics. So, so money, I think money flowing in to our federal organizations and our federally funded medical schools and nutrition schools, we’ve got to get the money from industry out of those schools.

So that’s just a few examples of things that I think could be really helpful to just take some of the compromised nature out of these institutions of trust that are in our, we assume have our health in mind, but things get really muddy.

[01:51:59] Gabby: Yeah.

[01:52:00] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah.

[01:52:00] Gabby: I know it took a lot of energy and a lot of your years to go to medical school and to become a real doctor, but I think it’s very important that you are, because you’re a willingness to say, Hey, I went in the direction that was right to help people to practice medicine.

And I realized, because that’s a huge investment on your part. And most of us can’t change course because you go, well, I invested years and I invested money into this and I could have a nice life and it’d be fine. So I think it’s important because the message is not going to land if you’re a naturopath or, and also the courage to say, Even though it would have been fine for me.

I had to move systems. And so I, I, I just want to say, I know that it was an investment, but it was an investment in this message. Um, so I, I just, I have, I could go on and on. Um, I just have a, a question and this is very, this is like a personal question. Cause you’re, you’re a powerful woman, um, you know, intelligent, accomplished.

Can you, can you share why you created levels in 2020? Yeah. First of all, where, where did that come from? And that’s a whole, um, you know, a whole other undertaking. Yeah.

[01:53:25] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah. And so connected to all of this because, you know, I left the surgical world and said, you know, I’m devoting my life. I became a doctor to help people thrive and I’m not like I’m doing something that can sometimes be positive.

I’m helping with sinusitis and this and that, but I’m not truly making people healthier. So I, I’m going to devote my life to why people are sick and helping them be truly healthy. That’s why I became a doctor and that wasn’t really what I was doing day in, day out. So I looked at the issues and I thought like, where is the leverage?

And I think that there’s an amazing confluence of factors happening right now where just in the last two to two to five years or so. There’s this new kind of revolution happening with direct to consumer testing, where we can actually get rid of the middleman of the doctor, who is often a gatekeeper of our information.

And patients who have more of their own health information do better. There has been a lot of research to show that. The more And yet the patronizing infantilizing system of the health care system says, Oh, it’s dangerous for people to have their information. In many states, patients don’t even own their own health care records.

The doctor owns them or the hospital. Crazy. It’s your body’s information. And then we say, Oh, it’s dangerous if you have this because you may make bad decisions. It’s all crazy. So I thought, well, the system’s not really changing from the bottom up and I’m kind of a libertarian. And I really do believe that.

You know, people and consumer, if we’re, if we’re in a capitalist society, then consumer decision making is going to actually really be probably the fastest thing, you know, to change things. And so what if we gave people access to a technology that helps them understand how much the food is hurting them and they can see a chart of their glucose levels after eating this food, and then they become inspired to really be the owners of that information and make the decisions for themselves.

So, so, you know, and I say this in the book, and I say this all the time, don’t, you don’t need to trust me. Anything I said in this episode, don’t trust, literally do not trust me. Trust yourself. Yeah, because we now have the tools. We have the access to information to understand our own bodies. We are all capable of understanding our basic biomarkers, and then you can experiment and you can retest and you can see what works for you and prove it to yourself.

So there’s this amazing direct consumer sort of thing happening over the past several years that you There is this access to obviously wearables, so I’m wearing an Aura right now, which just gives me some of the more superficial metrics, like through the skin is how I mean superficial, like heart rate or heart rate variability and sleep data and steps.

There’s also bio wearables, which are actually on your body and have an, a probe that’s doing a lab test 24 hours a day. That’s the continuous glucose monitors, which is what levels gives access to people to so they can see their glucose response in real time to food and close that feedback loop. And then there’s lab testing that we can literally order online and go into, walk into a lab and get that done on our schedule.

So that’s like function health levels has. Uh, blood work that we offer people inside tracker, um, next health. There’s lots of Genova diagnostics. You literally order tests for yourself. So between these things, we can understand our own body like never before and make decisions for our own health, be an end of one experiment, not just part of the average.

And so that’s very exciting. So that’s what inspired me to, to start levels was to give people increased access to this technology, the continuous glucose monitor that can help them be the owner of their health information and their metabolic, this really crucial metabolic biomarker of glucose and learn how.

sleep deprivation and processed food and fiber and walks after meals, how that all can come together to keep your glucose more stable, which is a really amazing readout of how things are happening inside yourselves.

[01:57:17] Gabby: Yeah. And I thought it was interesting. Like if you’re tired, a food will impact you differently than if you’re well rested.

Um, now Do you have to go to your doctor to get the, they can just go online and order one or how does it work?

[01:57:31] Dr. Casey Means: You go online levelshealth. com and you can essentially you buy a year long membership, which gets you access to the software that interprets the glucose data. And in that year membership, you get access to a telemedicine consultation.

So you are getting a prescription from a doctor, but you don’t have to go through your doctor. Then, um, from a pharmacy, these continuous glucose monitors are shipped to your home every month. Um, and you can do that every month for a year, you could do it a couple of times. You pay essentially per month for the sensors, um, and then you put the sensor on your body and you pair it with your smartphone.

And just like you said, if you’re tired and you eat a high carb meal, you can see how that’s different. If you’re rested and eat a high carb meal. If you walk after a meal versus not walk after a meal, you can see what happens to your blood sugar levels. And what we’re trying to do with this is just build this.

This sort of body awareness of how all these aspects of our, our diet and lifestyle are affecting us. And so if you’re the type of person who often mid morning feels like you crash and maybe feel low energy or you need a cup of coffee at 11, well, So you might just be thinking that’s your normal, but you might look at your CGM, your glucose monitor and see your breakfast actually spiked your glucose a hundred points and then you crashed and that’s when you felt tired and simply adding healthy fat and fiber to that meal stabilizes the blood sugar and you don’t have the crash.

So little like pearls like that, that can truly be life changing for people. And we’ve also had members reverse their prediabetes, reverse their PCOS, lose 80 pounds. Like Really amazing things happen when you learn to, to stabilize your glucose. So that was about empowerment. It was about understanding and being the CEO of your metabolic health.

And then of course that fed into a lot of the messages that are in the book, which is just sort of like the, You know, my hope would be that everyone who starts Levels would read the book as part of the educational framework for sort of getting what you’re doing. And then the Levels blog includes a lot of the information as well.

Levelshealth. com slash blog, just like podcasts. Yeah. So a lot of education. How stressful

[01:59:36] Gabby: was doing the business?

[01:59:39] Dr. Casey Means: You know, because it’s so mission based, the mission of the company is to reverse the metabolic disease epidemic. And I had four incredible co founders. There were five of us and everyone is deeply mission aligned and has a personal reason why they are focused on metabolic health.

Like my co founder, Josh, was pre diabetic at like 30, even though he was a CrossFit instructor. He was like jacked and pre diabetic. And You know, so each of us have a reason for, for doing this. That’s a deeper than just business. And I think to me, you know, purpose is the ultimate motivator. And so, yeah, there were busy times for sure, but it’s like, this is what I feel like I was born to do.

And I think my co founders felt the same way. And so it made it really exciting. And like, we were really in something together,

[02:00:26] Gabby: you know, and listening to you, obviously you’re a very intelligent person. And, um, and I think. You know, becoming a doctor, creating a business, and then trying to balance life. How are you, because I know you’re in a relationship, how are you doing, how do, did you sort of say, Hey, I had to just really focus on myself and my work, and then there was an opening, I have more bandwidth to have a relationship, because I think a lot of people go through that.

They, they’re, they’re sort of trying to build this life and then, um, it’s sort of like exercise often say like life isn’t a thing you’re going to do over there. Um, what, what showed up for you that you were able to balance it? Cause I know, I don’t want to isolate women, but I think for women it’s, it can be a little harder to sort of go like, I want to build this kick ass life, but I, I also don’t want to forego, you know, intimacy or having a real connection or relationship with them.

Did you, was there some way that you know this worked out for you or something you figured out besides obviously someone coming along at the right time? Because I think it’s something we’re all A lot of people are trying to navigate.

[02:01:46] Dr. Casey Means: I think, well, I’ll start just by saying that when I was in my surgical residency, I burnt out in like a major way. I was very depressed, very clinical depression. You know, I understood what it feels like to be like really, I think at rock bottom from a burnout perspective. And so in a sense, I’m so grateful for that experience because A lot.

I learned so much from it. Like I learned how I can pull myself out of that through living a healthier life. I quit being a surgeon and I gave myself some time to recover before starting levels. And, um,

[02:02:20] Gabby: Now, when you quit, it’s not like everyone around you was like, good job.

[02:02:24] Dr. Casey Means: No.

[02:02:25] Gabby: How many people, they thought you lost the plot?

[02:02:27] Dr. Casey Means: My brother thought I had lost my mind because I had invested nine years into this and we just, that was very, a lot of conflict. So it’s so fun that we wrote this book together because obviously things have evolved, but you know, he had to go on his own journey to understand why I did what I did and obviously now understands, but yeah, you know, but I think looking around me and I’m a very sensitive person and.

And when you have an unconscious patient on the operating room table and they are putting all their trust in you and think that you’re their savior and you’re literally cutting into their naked unconscious body, like, and you’re someone who’s very sensitive and also very contrarian and that’s just the way I was raised.

I’m always thinking about why. If you don’t really believe what you’re doing or you think there’s a possibility that there’s a way you could have prevented them from being on that table, like you, you, like that, that’s what happened. I had to just, so, so, so leaving and quitting was not really that hard for me because I just thought once I started, once that genie came out of the bottle that I, I really started to believe and then do the research to understand that I actually thought most of the surgeries I was doing were preventable.

I could not continue doing that because then it felt like I was just exploiting the. the knowledge gap between me and the patient. Like I knew something that could maybe help them, but, but I wasn’t incentivized or paid to help them stay out of the operating room. So for me, I’m very ideological about things.

And so it was just like, I’m not doing this anymore because I know something different. And I cannot, I can no longer be a part of this system that I think is profiting off the disempowerment of people and off the sickness of people. So it wasn’t. And so, you know, A lot of that was just kind of conviction and standing very firmly and then just continuing to keep learning and questing my assumptions.

But, um, you know, in terms of work life balance, Did you think

[02:04:20] Gabby: your mission was going to get in the way of being able to have that balance?

[02:04:24] Dr. Casey Means: Um,

you know, I think the honest answer to a lot of this is that, like, I think a lot of this comes down to my spirituality. Like, I think that when my mom passed away, um, You know, there was something that like transferred I think from her to me of a sense of just like total confidence and like there is a bigger picture and there is something there.

This is a very mystical sort of like world that we live in. And, um, and yeah, that’s it. I had this deep knowing that everything was exactly the way it was supposed to be. And that like a partner and everything like that, that the journey was right. And so just kind of waking up every morning and trying to just be as present as possible.

And, um, and not overthink things too much. I think over the past few years, I have leaned in a lot more to following my body awareness and my intuition rather than just my rational, you know, thinking brain. Um, and, and I think, you know, a lot of. What keeps me feeling balanced is I try and really tune into hearing the signals in my body and in the world around me of where I should be moving and where I should be going.

And so taking that small amount of time to tune in and, Whatever you want to call it, intuition, body awareness. It actually saves me so much time, right? Cause I’m not constantly being flopping around between what I think is the right decision. I’m really only going towards things that I feel are the right pull.

And, um, I had a therapist who I worked with after residency or, sorry, after my mom passed away. Who really helped me understand, you know, we did the whole like healing the childhood wounds and all that stuff and it was great and and really understanding my limiting beliefs, but one thing we committed to or she helped me really realize is that like, I’m not going to do anything in my life that I feel like I should do like shoulds are out.

It’s a short time we’re here for. Like, why would I do anything that I feel like is an expectation of me that I don’t feel spiritually pulled to do? So I’m gonna do things that feel like I’m magnetized towards the yes. A full body yes. A fuck yes. And I’m not gonna do the things that, Like, I feel like I should, should do just because the world expects it of me as a woman, as a daughter, anything, because I’m going to bring bad energy to that.

I am going to bring resentment. I am going to, and that’s not going to help anyone. What people really want from me in my family, everywhere, is to show up with light and with joy. And, and so, so that is a lot of how I feel balanced, is that I’m just, you know, Committed to creating the space in my life to hear signals and hear my own intuition.

Because when I do that, it saves me an infinite amount of time. And so like to give a concrete example of this, um, which I’ve never like shared on a podcast, but I think after my mom passed away, she was like obsessed with holidays and birthdays and Christmas and everything was over the top. And she was a stay at home mom and she got so much joy from this.

So when she passed away, I thought, well, this is now my job. I have to do holidays for our family and I have to make sure everything’s perfect and the decorations. And I’m like, because that’s. That’s what kept our family together. You know, we, we, and what I realized is that I didn’t really enjoy doing it and I felt like I should, but I was kind of being a bit, I was like, you know, I would, I would end up being angry and tired and, you know, there’s your turkey

[02:07:58] Gabby: dinner.

[02:07:58] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah, exactly. So I did this for a little bit and then I was working with this wonderful therapist and I realized that we could do nothing. On Christmas, we could do nothing. And if we’re together and having a great time together and everyone’s rested and feels good. It’s magical. And so and so really solidifying that.

And I really take that into every aspect of my life as I follow the polls rather than the shoulds and And it’s, it’s, that’s been the, and I, there’s a deep trust in the magical, mystical nature of this infinite, eternal universe that we’re living in and that we’re a part of. And yeah, kind of always looking for magic and letting that help draw me.

And so that’s of course like what led me to my partner and how I operate in our relationship. And it’s helped me be more feminine. It’s helped me be more. receptive, you know, to, to things as opposed to being an overdoer and an over giver, because, you know, again, I’m, I’m following what feels good. And ultimately that lets me give so much more light to the world and to my partner and to people because I’m not depleted.

And so I write about this a little bit in the book in the last chapter, which aside from the food off chapter is my favorite, which is, I say, And this gets kind of back to women, like the fallacy in our culture, I think, and maybe a dark side of, there are many benefits, beautiful aspects of feminism, but maybe one of the dark sides of feminism is that you took these life giving beings, women who have this miraculous capacity to give life.

And you basically like asked them to do everything. Like you’re going to work, you’re going to have children, you’re going to be a mother, you’re going to be. You have to do everything and women have gotten very depleted, I think. And that shows up in the fact that like over 40 percent of women at some point in their life will take a Psychoactive medication for like depression and anxiety like women I think are struggling in many ways They are feeling really depleted and infertility is skyrocketing and that’s no surprise You can’t take something life giving and then squeeze Every little bit of profit and productivity out of them and expect them to still be able to do that miraculous thing The same thing is happening with industrial agriculture Soil gives us life.

Soil gives us all our food. It is a life giving organism, just like a woman. And we have said, Oh, well, we’re so smart. The, you know, we just need to squeeze every last ounce of, of, of productivity out of this life giving thing so we can have more. What happened? The soil has collapsed. The topsoil has died.

Our food system is incredibly fragile. And we’re actually going to be producing less and could potentially have a total food shortage because we had the hubris to think that these cyclical beings, women, soil, seasons were so smart to outsmart cycles. And the thing about cycles is that they have peaks, but they also need rest.

By taking women and saying, you need to be peak all the time, soil, you need to be peak all the time. We’re hurting them. So part of, I think the message in the book is like, we need to like, slow down, get outdoors, look at nature, learn from nature and unplug from this, like productivity obsessed culture and realize that maximal productivity, like fertility comes is requires.

Rest and requires the yin period of the cycle, you only get the yang sustainably if you invest in the yin and women have forgotten that. And this is a point that I think is important for women is that every, a lot of women, I think the narrative social media is that they’re expecting people to hand them the yen.

They’re saying, I want the patriarchy to get, you know, we need to, I want someone, my husband, my partner, my workplace to give me. The rest. And yet we as women aren’t even defending ourselves. We’re not defending our own time. We’re not setting boundaries. We’re not asking for help. We still are bought in to taking pride in the overgiving.

So a message I have, I think, for women and because it’s, it’s played out in my life is like, We need to start the journey by believing in the miraculous power of God. cyclical, life giving, spiritual nature of ourselves. And in that deep knowing of us as part of nature, know that we need the yin, know that we need the rest, know that we need to receive and be receptive for the sake of humanity, not because we’re selfish and buy into it, believe it.

And I think when you stand in that power, that goddess energy, People will give it to you and that’s, I understand that’s a little privilege to say, cause there are people, but like, we’re not even standing in that power. So women actually have to start the journey and we need to start by understanding our own, how we are connected to all of this.

[02:13:11] Gabby: And, um, but I think that gets back to the, no, but I agree. And I think as a society, if we’re all feeling better and healthier and eating better, we’re all going to be able to participate in those cycles. Collectively more, I think the disconnect to your point with our food, with our bodies, with our nature is creating it, that we’re, it’s just the whole thing’s out of whack.

So I think, I think that that’s also a representation.

[02:13:33] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah. Yeah. But like, it’s, you know, I remember in older, other relationships, I would really, I would feel guilty if I like slept more than my partner or something, or I would feel guilty if I didn’t do this and that. And now I’m like, I am doing, I’m investing in my yin so that I can be.

I can get everything.

[02:13:51] Gabby: Oh yeah. I get invited to do all kinds of things with Laird that I say no to, believe me. Do you want to do this? I’m like, no,

[02:13:57] Dr. Casey Means: don’t. Yeah.

[02:13:57] Gabby: So

[02:13:58] Dr. Casey Means: I don’t know. That’s the balance.

[02:14:00] Gabby: Is there any last invitation that I missed something, um, that you, that you would like to give to the listener? I feel like you’ve made a lot of, not only, you know, hard hitting facts, but also some very beautiful reminders and invitations, but I just want to make sure, um, That I didn’t forget.

Oh, I also want to mention you do have some detox protocols in there too. I mean, some ideas about how to help, you know, lighten the system from a lot of the stuff that we put it under. So this book really has a lot of stuff in it. So I didn’t want to forget that. But, um, yeah, is there any, anything else?

[02:14:39] Dr. Casey Means: Man, we’ve covered, we’ve covered the full gamut. I think, I think that, um,

You know, I think the last thing I would leave with is sort of, it is the last chapter of the book, which is called ‘Fearlessness,’ the highest level of good energy. And, and just, just to just a brief mention that. Um, our mitochondria are these, you know, miraculous sensitive parts of our cells and they are very, um, they are very sensitive to fear signals and to cortisol and stress hormones.

And I think that the world we’re living in, we are very fearful of the world as a culture. Most Americans live in daily fear when you ask them on a survey, they are not safe. And. And I think a lot of this, um, the journey to optimal health and optimal metabolic health and even blood sugar control actually involves examining our relationship with fear and working to create a sense in our body, no matter what the reality might be outside of our body, that it is safe.

And that happens through our thoughts, which we do have control over. And so there’s two pieces to this. One is examining. Your life and really taking on a stock of what is causing fear in your life. Whether it is the device in your hand that 24 hours a day can stream the pain and suffering of 8 billion people straight to your eyeballs, which is incredibly unnatural and is only about a 20 year old phenomenon that we even have that possibility.

Sure, we had newspapers, but like, it is totally different now. It is literally every single person’s pain on planet Earth can be streamed to your eyeballs. That is crushing our metabolic health and our mitochondria. So it is that. Maybe it is Childhood trauma that you have not resolved and I’ve not gone on that journey because our culture is very individualistic and we stigmatize mental health care and we don’t live with our grandparents and elders who can help us process these things.

Whatever it is, we live in a culture where we do not examine You know, things like maybe childhood issues that we need to get over that might be putting a grip on our psyche for the rest of our lives. That is our responsibility to unpack and process, or maybe it’s something bigger. Maybe it is that our Western de spiritualized perspective on life in the body that, It puts us in a state of constant existential fear about mortality and about death and about, you know, these things that other cultures, indigenous, Eastern, they examine these things, the Stoics.

So many other cultures think about death, meditate on death. They create frameworks for thinking about, you know, the cycles of life and death. We don’t. So whether it’s fear inducing media, childhood issues. Uh, existential fear of death, whatever it is, we have to take on a stock and create a sense of safety in our bodies through our thoughts to have optimal biology.

The world, almost every industry in the Western world profits off of this. Our fear profits off us thinking that the world is an unsafe place. We need to realize that’s part of our chronic disease epidemic and figure out how to protect ourselves from that information from the phones, devices. Twitter, Reddit, whatever, and do the work to feel safe in our bodies.

And, um, that is under recognized, I think, as part of the mainstream health conversation. And I think people also need to realize that the, the healthcare industry Weaponizes fear of death to get us to take the pills and do the surgeries and just keep your eyes open About that and and think about the fear triggers in your life and how to how to heal them because the body will respond And that’s going to limit our ability to kind of get to that highest level of health.

So I think that’s just the last, um, piece of it.

[02:18:41] Gabby: Yeah. Well, the book is good energy. Did you do, you didn’t do it on tape, did you? I did. Really? I recorded the audio book. Yeah, that’s amazing. I still, I say this often for certain types of books. It’s really nice to have it in your hand though. I think it’s a good in your hand.

Casey means you’re a really an inspiring badass. And, uh, I just appreciate the work that you’re doing. Uh, it’s so important. And I, I think occasionally you should go by just Dr. Casey means thanks for your time.

About Dr. Casey Means

Casey Means is the Chief Medical Officer and co-founder of Levels, a health technology company with the mission of reversing the world’s metabolic health crisis. She has been on the faculty at Stanford University, lecturing on metabolic health and health technology. She received her undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford, where she was President of her class. She graduated from Stanford Medical School and trained in Head & Neck Surgery at Oregon Health and Science University before leaving traditional medicine to devote her life to tackling the root cause of why Americans are sick. Calley Means is Co-Founder of TrueMed, and an advocate for policy to change health incentives. He is a graduate of Stanford and Harvard Business School.