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Power Yourself Properly: Dr. Casey Means on Why Metabolic Health is Everything
Join Dr. Casey Meanas at Wanderlust Palmaïa in Playa del Carmen, MX — Dec 7-10, 2023. She’ll be sharing talks on metabolic health, joining live podcast recordings, and moreover giving a plant-based kitchen demo! Join us!
Brain fog, fatigue, unvarying exhaustion. Sound familiar? Yeah, you, me and theoretically the unshortened modern world. What gives? Dr. Casey Means suggests it’s a problem with power: the cellular machinery that is set up to fuel our function isn’t working correctly, and frankly, it’s our fault (not our mitochondria’s). In an interview leading up to the release of her new book, Good Energy, we asked Dr. Ways why metabolic dysfuntion has wilt so rampant and the shifts she recommends taking to get our cells firing properly once again.
Wanderlust: Metabolic health is a relatively new concept in the wellness world. What would you tell someone who’s never heard of metabolic health well-nigh why it matters and why this became your primary focus?
Dr. Casey Means: Metabolic health is the foundation of all health. This is considering every one of our 40 trillion cells require energy to do their work, and that energy comes from metabolic processes. It comes from how we convert supplies energy to cellular energy—this is metabolism. In 93.2% of American persons today, metabolic dysfunction is present. That percentage should be tropical to 0%!
This ways that in the vast majority of American adults, there is a problem with how our persons fundamentally power themselves.
This is the uncontrived result of the modern industrial nutrition and lifestyle, which are synergistically hurting the metabolic machinery of our cells. Most significantly unauthentic are mitochondria, which you might remember from upper school biology are the “powerhouses of the cell.” Many synthetic environmental toxins hurt our mitochondria. Lack of sleep hurts our mitochondria. Refined sugars and grains hurt our mitochondria. Sitting too much hurts our mitochondria. Even chronic fear stunts our worthiness for mitochondria to do their weightier work.
When our metabolic machinery does not work properly, we are like underpowered machines, sputtering withal to do the daily work of our lives. When our cells are sputtering to do the trillions of chemical reactions they need to do every day, this creates a struggling body… which emerges as symptoms and disease. So, it’s not surprising that 9 of the 10 leading causes of death in the United States right now are fundamentally rooted in metabolic dysfunction. Our nutrition and lifestyles are killing us, and they’re killing us considering they’re hurting our metabolism.
This is my mission in life to evangelize. And I believe that until the healthcare system orients virtually metabolic optimization, we will alimony getting sicker, and no value of meds, surgeries, or increasing healthcare dollars are going to fix it—unless we shift to focusing on the right problem.
As individuals, to revolutionize our energy, minimize our symptoms, have sharp persons and brains, and live long healthy lives, a focus on metabolic and mitochondrial health is foundational. We have to power ourselves properly surpassing we can do anything else.
WL: Who or what has been the biggest influence on guiding your studies in health and medicine toward cellular health?
CM: The biggest influences for me have been the forward-thinking, fearless medical leaders who have put the pieces together of functional medicine, the concept of “food as medicine,” and metabolic health. I am indebted to the friendship and collaboration with Drs. Mark Hyman, Robert Lustig, David Perlmutter, Sara Gottfried, Dom D’Agostino, Terry Wahls, Ben Bikman, Molly Maloof—their writing and content has reverted my life. Follow all of them and read their books and watch your life get better!
There are many others as well, like Drs. Jeffrey Bland, William Li, Howard Luks, Chris Palmer, Steve Gundry, and many others…
I moreover revere so many of the content creators and thinkers who have pushed the wittiness forward in health, like Jeff Krasno, Shawn Stevenson, Kayla Barnes, Mona Sharma, Ben Greenfield, Dave Asprey, Louisa Nicola, and more.
I am moreover tightly inspired by the regenerative farming polity and leaders, like Molly Chester at Apricot Lane Farms, Will Harris at White Oak Pastures, and Jesse and Ana Smith at White Buffalo Land Trust.
WL: People don’t often turn to their doctors for recipes. Have you unchangingly had a wont toward cuisine/a talent in the kitchen? Do your explorations in the kitchen act as a counterpoint to your medical pursuits, or do you find the two elements to be complementary?
CM: I have been inspired by the power of supplies since an early age. As an undergraduate at Stanford, I studied nutrigenomics, which planted the seed for helping me understand how supplies compounds can unquestionably transpiration our gene expression, and that our genes withal are not our destiny. In fact, it is the interaction between the environment, what we put in our bodies, how we live, in conversation with our genetic lawmaking that determines our fate.
When I was a young child, I was very overweight, and at 14 I went lanugo a path of learning all well-nigh nutrition, reading tons books from the library, studying science, and starting to melt my own supplies and eliminate processed food. The weight came off fairly effortlessly, and this tightly entrenched in me the power of real rood.
Something we don’t think well-nigh often is that the soul is 100% entirely made of food. Every whit in our soul is made from food. Essentially, pregnancy is the process of 3D printing a human from supplies in the mother’s body! It’s incredible! And it’s not only the towers blocks for the body, it’s moreover the instructions and serves as information that goes into the soul to tell the soul what to do.
As such, I’ve unchangingly had a sense of deep awe at the fact that eating, and cooking, is basically the transmutation and transformation of environmental energy into human energy… environmental matter into human matter… Environmental potential into human potential… It’s all one, it’s all connected, and the quality of the supplies becomes the quality of our lives.
Food, eating, cooking, gardening… it’s inextricably linked to the human soul and to human health, and I think our healthcare system would be a lot increasingly functional if doctors saw things this way.
There’s no getting virtually the fact that we are what we eat, and what we’re eating in the country in the United States these days is ultra processed, industrially manufactured, lifeless, nutrient depleted, and covered and filled with toxins. It’s so obvious why we’re sick, and what we need to do to fix it. It starts with food.
WL: What’s the one thing that a person can do today to level up their metabolic health?
CM: Buy supplies from a farmer’s market! Eating unprocessed supplies that’s been grown in healthy thriving soil is the weightier possible thing you can do for your health.
WL: What is your favorite wellness modality: from yoga to unprepossessed plunges, red light therapy to acupuncture… is there one that you’d never want to leave overdue in your journey?
CM: Too many to count! One of my favorite things to do in any unprepossessed environment is to find a soul of frigid water and jump in it to get my self-ruling unprepossessed therapy. This might be an Alpine Lake in Wyoming during a hiking trip, a glacier Lake in Montana during a visitor off-site, an icy river in the middle of winter when visiting friends in Bend Oregon… I can’t help but jump into unprepossessed persons of water! I moreover don’t go anywhere without ear plugs, an eye mask, turmeric, magnesium, l-theanine, violaceous essential oil, and valerian root. You never know what the sleeping conditions are going to be when you’re traveling, and having my little sleep set is incredible!
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Casey Means, MD is a physician, Chief Medical Officer and Co-founder of metabolic health visitor Levels, Lecturer at Stanford in Food, Design, and Technology, Associate Editor of the International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention, and tragedian of Good Energy: The Surprising Connecting Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.
Her mission is to maximize human potential and reverse the epidemic of preventable chronic disease by empowering individuals with tech-enabled tools that can inform smart, personalized, and sustainable dietary and lifestyle choices. Dr. Means’s perspective has been recently featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Men’s Health, Forbes, Business Insider, Techcrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, The Hill, Metabolism, Endocrine Today, and more.
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