Not lengthy earlier than the 2024 election, Dr. Casey Means wrote a letter to her Good Vitality publication subscribers with a health-related wishlist for the subsequent Administration.
In it had been priorities that echo these of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Well being and Human Companies: investigating toxins within the meals provide, incentivizing wholesome meals purchases with meals stamps, changing manufacturing facility farming with regenerative farming.
“Greater than something, I wish to see our future White Home rally People to be wholesome and match,” wrote Means, a doctor who President Trump nominated on Could 7 for U.S. Surgeon Basic. Trump discarded his first choose, Dr. Janette Neshiewat, a day earlier than she was scheduled to look earlier than a Senate committee.
Means, who co-wrote the 2024 ebook Good Vitality: The Stunning Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Well being along with her brother Calley Means, holds many beliefs on well being that mirror Kennedy’s. She writes continuously about how medicine are overprescribed and that many fashionable illnesses are brought on by preventable life-style circumstances. She believes that kids must be served extra nutritious meals at school lunches, and she or he voices skepticism about seed oils. And she or he believes there are far too many chemical substances within the U.S. meals provide.
These similarities are partly why she was nominated, President Trump stated in a Could 8 information convention. “Bobby actually thought she was nice, I don’t know her,” Trump stated, after a reporter asked concerning the selection. Means’ pinned post on X is a celebration of Kennedy’s swearing-in ceremony on the White Home, which she referred to as a “BEAUTIFUL AND MOMENTOUS DAY FOR AMERICA.”
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Means and her brother Calley, a startup founder, are central figures within the Make America Wholesome Once more motion, and within the months main as much as the election, they appeared collectively on Joe Rogan’s and Tucker Carlson’s podcasts. Their father, Grady Means, worked in the administration of President Gerald Ford as an assistant to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, a political centrist.
Of their 2024 ebook, the siblings make a number of factors that may probably be embraced by Democrats. One is that vitamin and train play an enormous function in our total well being (one in all Michelle Obama’s signature public well being campaigns, Let’s Transfer!, tried to cut back childhood weight problems by means of train), and that the pharmaceutical and meals industries have an excessive amount of affect over on a regular basis People.
However a few of Casey Means’ concepts are extra controversial. In her interview with Tucker Carlson, she stated that contraception capsules are overprescribed and that they sign a “disrespect of life.” She stated Ozempic has “a stranglehold on the U.S. inhabitants” and convinces folks that there’s a magic capsule that may save them from persistent well being points. And she or he questioned why infants in America had been getting hepatitis B vaccines after start, a apply that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends.
She additionally calls into query the protection of childhood vaccines, writing in her publication, “There may be rising proof that the full burden of the present excessive and rising vaccine schedule is inflicting well being declines in susceptible kids.”
Although many docs don’t align with Means’ positions on medical points, some say that the choose will assist advance People’ well being.
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“I’m glad to see a nominee for surgeon normal who is concentrated on meals and diet-related train,” says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Meals is Medication Institute at Tufts College. “That is the highest subject dealing with People’ well being.” Means criticized Mozaffarian in a previous newsletter for main a 2021 study that assessed the healthfulness of sure meals, denouncing it for being funded by corporations that make ultra-processed foods. (He declined to touch upon the criticism.)
Means’ perspective concerning the significance of well being and train suits into the sector of useful drugs, which focuses on figuring out and treating the basis reason for ailments relatively than simply treating signs. It disrupts conventional drugs’s deal with prescribed drugs—which is an efficient factor, says Dr. David Perlmutter, a neurologist and advocate for low-carb diets and useful drugs.
“What Casey brings to the highlight is this angle that we must always actually be specializing in well being and protecting folks wholesome,” says Perlmutter, who has identified Means for eight years. “Our well being care system now has little or no to do with well being. It has to do with treating illness.”
Perlmutter appeared on a podcast episode for Ranges, the tech firm Means co-founded in 2019 that helps customers observe their real-time metabolic measures by means of the usage of steady glucose monitoring. (She is the corporate’s chief medical officer; it’s unclear whether or not she would step down from that function as surgeon normal.) Means has additionally appeared on Perlmutter’s podcast. In 2021, the 2 co-authored an op-ed in MedPage At present, a web site for well being professionals, criticizing the Biden Administration and federal pointers for not recommending, of their view, a low-enough most threshold for day by day added sugar.
Means went to school and medical college at Stanford College. She started a medical residency within the division of otolaryngology-head & neck surgical procedure at Oregon Well being and Science College, however dropped out in her fifth yr after realizing, she wrote in her ebook, that she wasn’t studying the basis causes of why folks had been getting sick.
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She was an editor for the Worldwide Journal for Illness Reversal and Prevention, a peer-reviewed publication that paperwork the science of vitamin and life-style, from 2019 to 2022. In that function, Means primarily edited poems, essays, and artwork work, in response to Kim Allan Williams, the journal’s editor in chief. “I can’t reply a lot besides outdoors of her eye for artwork and literature. She was nice at that!” he wrote in an e mail inquiring about her tenure there.
Means has additionally dabbled in poetry in her publication. A poem she wrote in April (with the assistance of AI, she notes) referred to as “The Satan’s Wellness Plan” begins: “If I had been the satan, I’d ditch the disguise—/No pitchfork, no flames, simply advertising lies.”
The poem touches on vaccinations, advertising, and drugs, together with stanzas that echo a number of speaking factors espoused by the MAHA and MAGA actions:
“I’d give boys man-boobs by means of poisonous meals,/And name masculine energy aggressive and lewd./I’d whisper, “You’re an excessive amount of, too loud,”/And disgrace males’s hearth as one thing impolite.
I’d flood your screens with porn on demand,/Until contact means pixels, not holding a hand./I’d educate girls that cooking is one thing to dread,/That start wants management and a hospital mattress.”
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