Not lengthy earlier than the 2024 election, Dr. Casey Means wrote a letter to her Good Vitality e-newsletter subscribers with a health-related wishlist for the following Administration.
In it had been priorities that echo these of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Well being and Human Providers: investigating toxins within the meals provide, incentivizing wholesome meals purchases with meals stamps, changing manufacturing unit farming with regenerative farming.
“Greater than something, I want to see our future White Home rally Individuals to be wholesome and match,” wrote Means, a doctor who President Trump nominated on Might 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 e book 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 steadily about how medication are overprescribed and that many trendy illnesses are brought on by preventable life-style circumstances. She believes that youngsters ought to be served extra nutritious meals at school lunches, and he or she voices skepticism about seed oils. And he or she believes there are far too many chemical compounds within the U.S. meals provide.
These similarities are partly why she was nominated, President Trump stated in a Might 8 information convention. “Bobby actually thought she was nice, I don’t know her,” Trump stated, after a reporter requested in regards to the alternative. Means’ pinned submit 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.”
Learn Extra: How Having a Child Is Altering Underneath Trump
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, labored within the administration of President Gerald Ford as an assistant to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, a political centrist.
Of their 2024 e book, the siblings make a number of factors that will seemingly be embraced by Democrats. One is that vitamin and train play an enormous position in our total well being (certainly one of Michelle Obama’s signature public well being campaigns, Let’s Transfer!, tried to scale back childhood weight problems by train), and that the pharmaceutical and meals industries have an excessive amount of affect over on a regular basis Individuals.
However a few of Casey Means’ concepts are extra controversial. In her interview with Tucker Carlson, she stated that contraception tablets are overprescribed and that they sign a “disrespect of life.” She stated Ozempic has “a stranglehold on the U.S. inhabitants” and convinces individuals that there’s a magic capsule that may save them from power well being points. And he or she questioned why infants in America had been getting hepatitis B vaccines after delivery, a follow that the U.S. Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention (CDC) recommends.
She additionally calls into query the protection of childhood vaccines, writing in her e-newsletter, “There’s rising proof that the overall burden of the present excessive and rising vaccine schedule is inflicting well being declines in susceptible youngsters.”
Although many docs don’t align with Means’ positions on medical points, some say that the choose will assist advance Individuals’ well being.
Learn Extra: Trump Administration Cuts Funding for Autism Analysis—Even As It Goals to Discover the Trigger
“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 challenge going through Individuals’ well being.” Means criticized Mozaffarian in a previous e-newsletter for main a 2021 examine that assessed the healthfulness of sure meals, denouncing it for being funded by corporations that make ultra-processed meals. (He declined to touch upon the criticism.)
Means’ perspective in regards to the significance of well being and train suits into the sphere of purposeful drugs, which focuses on figuring out and treating the foundation reason behind illnesses somewhat than simply treating signs. It disrupts conventional drugs’s give attention to pharmaceuticals—which is an efficient factor, says Dr. David Perlmutter, a neurologist and advocate for low-carb diets and purposeful drugs.
“What Casey brings to the highlight is this attitude that we must always actually be specializing in well being and retaining individuals 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 monitor their real-time metabolic measures by using steady glucose monitoring. (She is the corporate’s chief medical officer; it’s unclear whether or not she would step down from that position as surgeon normal.) Means has additionally appeared on Perlmutter’s podcast. In 2021, the 2 co-authored an op-ed in MedPage As we speak, an internet site for well being professionals, criticizing the Biden Administration and federal pointers for not recommending, of their view, a low-enough most threshold for each day added sugar.
Means went to school and medical faculty 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 e book, that she wasn’t studying the foundation causes of why individuals had been getting sick.
Learn Extra: Medicaid Expansions Saved Tens of Hundreds of Lives, Examine Finds
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 position, 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 e-newsletter. 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 and marketing lies.”
The poem touches on vaccinations, advertising and marketing, and medicines, together with stanzas that echo a number of speaking factors espoused by the MAHA and MAGA actions:
“I’d give boys man-boobs by 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 train girls that cooking is one thing to dread,/That delivery wants management and a hospital mattress.”
Discussion about this post