Casey Means joins me to talk about her new book, Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and limitless Health, and why you should be doing 5 things a day to improve your health. She also talks about why you shouldn t settle for less than 20 things, and why 5 is better than 20.
00:03:44.620And Casey is his brilliant surgeon sister who is author of this New York Times bestseller, Good Energy.
00:03:54.060The surprising connection between metabolism and limitless health.
00:03:59.880And she joins me for the full show today.
00:04:02.240Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach.
00:04:07.540It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath.
00:04:11.700The app shows whether you're burning fat or carbs and provides tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and stress management.
00:04:19.580You breathe into your Lumen first thing in the morning.
00:04:22.020And then based on your measurements, Lumen will give you a personalized nutrition plan for the day.
00:04:26.320You can also breathe into it right before or after your workouts and your meals to get real-time insights.
00:04:32.560Your metabolism, as we've been discussing, is your body's engine.
00:05:22.520So let's get folks up to speed who haven't heard the interview that I refer to or haven't read the book because, you know, good energy, they may be like, what is that, like vibes?
00:05:32.620Because they're sick of vibes at this point in this election cycle.
00:05:36.660So when we're talking about good energy, we are talking about the very foundational way that our bodies work.
00:05:42.520We're talking about metabolic health, a word that fortunately we're hearing more about these days.
00:05:46.900But we're talking about how our cells power themselves, which might be something that people have never thought about before.
00:05:53.780And yet, metabolic dysfunction is the root cause of nearly every chronic disease torturing American lives today from childhood all the way into our elderly years.
00:06:04.880So it's a term we've got to get familiar with.
00:06:07.000And the reason I wrote this book is because I had trained in the conventional health care system.
00:06:11.400I'd done what every good medical student does, rise the ranks of that academic ladder, went to Stanford Medical School, did five years of head and neck surgery training.
00:06:19.660And at the end of that training, before launching out into being a, you know, private practice or academic attending physician, I looked around me at what was happening in American health more broadly and realized that even though, you know, I'm working hard in my lane as an ear, nose and throat surgeon, more broadly, American health is just getting destroyed.
00:06:44.260Chronic illness is exploding across the lifespan.
00:06:47.180And that's not something that I really learned about in medical school.
00:06:51.000I didn't learn about, you know, why are these diseases going up?
00:06:54.280What are the factors that have changed recently in human history that are making us have this explosion of chronic disease?
00:07:00.740And that's a journey that I needed to go on before really launching out.
00:07:04.760And when I did that, what I found was that when you look at the science through the lens of root causes, not just the symptoms we're treating, not just the drugs that we need, you know, to prescribe to all of these different ailments that we have.
00:07:16.020When we look at root causes, what we find is that nearly every chronic disease torturing American lives today is rooted in metabolic dysfunction.
00:07:23.400And that is an issue with how our bodies literally power themselves.
00:07:26.740So that's what I'm talking about with good energy.
00:07:28.780When our cells make good energy, i.e. have good metabolic health, so many of the conditions that are plaguing us can improve.
00:07:36.500And so that needs to be the central focus of our American health care system.
00:07:39.260And right now it is the intentional blind spot of the American health care system.
00:07:44.000And so that's what this book is all about.
00:07:48.880It covers the biggest thing is food and what we're, you know, and that seems to be the biggest driver of cellular health.
00:07:54.640But it covers some exercise, too, and it covers environmental toxins and things that we may be putting on our bodies and so on.
00:08:00.620So it's got the full panoply of things that will affect your cells and how you can improve.
00:08:05.860That's why I say if people, you know, feel overwhelmed, they can pick and choose and just get started.
00:08:11.000But I think the food being such a huge influencer is empowering because if you're not yet an exerciser, just start thinking about the food.
00:08:22.180If you don't want to think about your shampoo and your makeup and your carpet and all, then just start with the thing that you're most actively involved in because everybody's putting food in their mouth every day.
00:08:33.520And these critical changes can genuinely extend lifespan and improve health along the way.
00:08:43.520The unique thing about this moment in time that we're living right now is that our world has radically changed, just exponential rate of change over the past hundred or so years with industrialization and urbanization and technological advancement.
00:08:59.580But from a cell's perspective, we have, you know, 40 trillion cells in our body.
00:09:04.900The world is very different than what it's been expecting through all of human history.
00:09:10.100And so what's really happening with our health being destroyed right now in our country is that there is a severe mismatch between what our cells need to thrive and work properly and what our environment looks like right now.
00:09:22.680And that's across lots of different domains.
00:09:24.820It's across, of course, food, which I believe is really that that number one domain that we've got to, you know, get back to the basics, because that that's really the that's the two to three pounds of molecular information that we put in our mouth every day to tell ourselves basically what to be built from and how to function.
00:09:42.780But we're also talking about sleep habits.
00:09:45.400We're talking about the fact that we are sleeping 20 percent less than we were 100 years ago, our emotional health, the fact that we have low grade chronic stress all the time now from these devices in our hands 24 hours a day that, you know, are streaming fear inducing sensationalist, you know, news stories from all around the world straight to our eyeballs when we're at the dinner table.
00:10:06.100And when we're in our beds, we're talking about the sedentary behavior, the fact that Americans are literally sitting 80 percent of the day.
00:10:14.220We're the only bipedal upright mammals, and yet we choose to lock ourselves in a chair for 80 percent of the day, just squandering the miraculous gift of being able to move.
00:10:21.340We're talking about the environmental toxins.
00:10:23.260We're talking about the 80,000 plus synthetic toxins that have entered our food, water, air and homes over the past hundred years by industry virtually unregulated, many of which are destroying our cellular health.
00:10:32.920We're talking about our relationship with light, the fact that we for ever since the incandescent light bulb was invented just a couple hundred years ago.
00:10:40.360And now at the advent of blue light emitting technology, we're literally blasting our retinas with artificial light all the time.
00:10:46.660And this is totally destroying our circadian biology and our core foundational cellular health.
00:10:51.040So these are some of the things that we're we're dealing with as a body, as a group of cells that make up our body that's looking for information from the environment and not getting the signal needs to function.
00:11:02.920So what the chronic disease epidemic really represents is this just sheer and utter confusion of our bodies with the signals that it's getting from all around us.
00:11:13.040And getting back to food, this is the one that I mean, each of these pillars that I'm speaking about has a profound impact on our core cellular health and metabolic health.
00:11:23.440But food, we have to realize we eat somewhere between 40 and 70 metric tons of food in our lifetime.
00:11:31.040And this is not just calories. This is not just energy. This is the building blocks, the atomic molecular building blocks of our cells.
00:11:38.780And what people don't really realize is that our cells are actually constantly turning over throughout our lifetime, even though, you know, I kind of we kind of look the same day to day.
00:11:48.520You know, I'm kind of going to look pretty similar tomorrow that I do today.
00:11:51.920Actually, hundreds of billions of cells are dying and being reborn and they are re 3D printing themselves out of food.
00:11:57.800Isn't that incredible? We don't we don't think about the body that way as a process.
00:12:01.300So we've got to give the body good information every single day and pay that bill of healthy, good food every day because we're constantly, constantly changing over our body.
00:12:14.440Our gut lining, our entire skin cells completely turns over every few weeks.
00:12:19.280So we've got to constantly be feeding the body with good information right now.
00:12:23.200So 70% of our calories are coming from ultra processed, industrially manufactured, frankenfood, ultra processed foods, devoid of nutrients, filled with toxic additives, a modern invention created by food scientists in the past 50 years that now make up the majority of our calories.
00:12:40.220Of course, we're sick. We are eating 70% of that molecular information that builds our body from essentially garbage that does not have what our cells need to function.
00:12:48.800So that's why food is so important. But the second piece is also that food is what tells our genes and our cell signaling pathways what to do.
00:12:57.220We think of our genes as our destiny. It's not true. Our genes are a blueprint and how those genes interact with the environment is what our outcomes are.
00:13:05.560And food is one of those key things that changes our genetic expression.
00:13:09.360I'll give you a simple example that I talk about in the book. You look at a herb like turmeric.
00:13:13.740It has thousands of molecular compounds in it that the earth and that the soil has made for us to help our genes and our cell signaling function properly.
00:13:23.320And one of those is curcumin. Curcumin actually goes into our cells.
00:13:26.780It binds to proteins within the cells and changes the expression, decreases the expression of our key inflammatory pathway, which is called NF kappa B.
00:13:35.440So you're eating this food and you're actually turning the knob down on inflammatory pathway that drives disease.
00:13:41.720And we could talk about any natural food in this way filled with thousands of chemical compounds natural from the earth, from God to help us live our highest purpose life.
00:13:51.320And we, instead of using that precious gift with real unprocessed food from good soil that's filled with nutrients, we have decided that food is nothing more than calories.
00:14:02.400And it doesn't matter if we eat nutrient-avoid ultra-processed food from a factory for 70% of our calories.
00:14:08.740Well, this is a science experiment that has failed.
00:14:10.840Americans are just absolutely getting astronomically ill, and food is a key piece of that.
00:14:15.960And, you know, unfortunately, there's a lot of systems issues that lead to why we have become enamored with ultra-processed foods because of so many incentives at the level of the farm bill and at the level of how media is funded that essentially make us believe that ultra-processed foods are fine and normal when, in fact, they are not.
00:14:35.280Well, we, I am old enough to have lived through the moment in time when the messaging changed from what's bad for you is sugary foods and fatty foods are fine to fat is the problem, sugar is the solution.
00:14:51.920They took all the fat out of the foods.
00:14:53.300To make them taste better, they put all the sugar in.
00:14:58.160I mean, I, it wasn't that long ago, I guess 20 years ago, that I actually thought a healthy snack would be one of those packs of snack-well cookies.
00:15:15.540And, but one of the illuminating points of the book is that I thought that, and many others think this way,
00:15:21.500because we've been led to believe, we've been defrauded by virtually every person in charge of every industry that touches the food that arrives in our kitchen.
00:15:53.820When the, when Fauci said, get the jab, the majority of Americans did it.
00:15:58.560You know, we, we do listen to doctors, but unfortunately at the highest level of our medical institutions,
00:16:04.960there are conflicts of interest and corruption that are actually making the science that we're getting not as accurate, not as clean as we'd want it to be.
00:16:13.780So you look at some examples, NIH tax funder, taxpayer funded institution that we would ostensibly believe is its sole interest is to keep Americans healthy.
00:16:23.740But 80% of NIH researchers are, have a conflict of interest with, with, with industry.
00:16:31.120So are getting paid also by processed food industry, pharmaceutical industry.
00:16:35.800There was a report that came out that 8,000 NIH funded researchers have a major conflict of interest, a conflict of interest with industry.
00:16:44.980So we would assume that would just be clean, clean money from the NIH, from taxpayers with a singular goal of American health.
00:16:52.400But in fact, it becomes, it ends up becoming a PR arm to do scientific research.
00:16:57.740Um, that's mostly focused on pharmaceutical interventions and our standard conventional, uh, model of care, which is very reactive and very sick care and not focused on root causes.
00:17:07.700Then you go to the USDA, which they jump in on that case.
00:17:11.100So basically you're saying with the, like the FDA or the NIH, the people who are looking at our food and what's okay and what's not okay.
00:17:17.900Suffer from the same conflict as, uh, the FDA did on in dope sick as, as evidenced by that movie where the opioid industry got going because the people who are deciding whether that could be safe and marketed as non-addictive or, you know, whatever the initial disclaimers were there on the take.
00:17:35.520They either are getting money from these drug companies or in the case of the food industry, these, these big food manufacturers, um, or they're banking on joining those companies immediately after their government stint is over.
00:17:47.900Right. Right. Right. I mean, you see this all the time with the revolving door between, you know, FDA commissioner and then pharmaceutical company right after they, they finished got Gottlieb FDA straight to Pfizer.
00:18:00.160It's just back and forth, but it's, it's across every single industry. So NIH, we've got 8,000 major conflicts of interest in researchers, FDA. We've got 75% of the FDA's drug budget coming from pharma, not taxpayers, USDA.
00:18:14.540We've got 95% of the people who made the USDA food guidelines for America, which come out every five years. So from 2000 to 2025 had major conflicts of interest with the processed food industry. You look at medical schools, you've got medical schools receiving huge multimillion dollar grants from, uh, from pharmaceutical companies.
00:18:34.900When I was at Stanford medical school, Stanford medical school received a $3 million grant from Pfizer for curriculum reform. So we've got NIH, USDA, FDA, medical schools, all taking money.
00:18:47.300And then you add on the professional organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics or the American diabetes association, which work to create the guidelines that doctors practice by and that doctors actually, if they step out of line of what the clinical practice guidelines are, they're at risk for liability.
00:19:03.740And then these professional organizations are getting a majority of their budget from industry. You've got the American Academy of Pediatrics getting money from Abbott and from me Johnson and from vaccine manufacturers. These are the organizations that write the guidelines.
00:19:17.540So then it's no surprise that you look at the recent American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines for treatment of childhood obesity. And all of a sudden what crops up is that they're recommending as first line treatment for childhood obesity, uh, GLP one agonist injections, weekly injections for kids. Oh, Zempic.
00:19:34.880And so you, you just look at every single layer of our government agencies, how doctors are taught and who's making the guidelines and the money is astronomical. What's going in from industry. And that's of course going to cloud the way research is done and how we even think about health in the body.
00:19:53.920So I, as a medical student and all my peers who go into medical school to with this very noble intent to help people and to improve children's health, improve American health. We go to these elite institutions with just wanting to work our butts off. What happens? You, you, you enter a curriculum where the science is conflicted.
00:20:16.320The science that you're seeing at its most foundational level has conflict of interest where the school has been funded by pharmaceutical industry. You know, the medical school is not getting funded by big kale or big exercise. They're being funded by big pharma and where the guidelines that you have to learn and memorize and practice by also have a conflict of interest.
00:20:36.300So what you get is all these doctors who, you know, we start, you start medical school around age 21, 22, you're young and you know, you're, you're, you're deeply, um, deeply trusting of this system. Right. But what you see is that the body is a hundred separate parts. You see that what your path is going to be is to go through four years of medical school and then pick one of a hundred different surgical or medical subspecialties that you're going to focus on just one little part of the body.
00:21:03.960You see that really what a disease is is a collection of, you know, uh, symptoms and signs. And you don't really think about disease until it gets to that place. And then you just need to, you know, figure out what the symptoms are, label the disease and prescribe a medication or do a surgery. You don't think about proactive health. You don't think about root cause health. You don't think about environmental factors because that's not what being taught. And then you go into your practice and you're getting pressure from everyone around you, from the administrative staff, the bureaucrats and the billers to basically
00:21:33.720see as many patients as you possibly can because you are paid by volume, which further, uh, insidiously pushes you to, to not think about root causes, how to really reverse or prevent disease. Cause that takes a long time, right? That takes long conversations with the patient. What's easier. What's faster is to see the patient label their signs and symptoms as a disease and then give them a drug or send them for surgery. That's what's fast. And since we have this system, this incentive structure in American healthcare,
00:22:03.720volume, how many patients, how many patients can I see per week, the outcomes is not really the thing that we're focused on. So you're taking these incredible, great, bright, young minds and putting them into a system that at every level has conflicts. That's pushing us to see the body as a collection of separate parts. That's inevitable to get disease. And that your job as a doctor is to label that disease and give it a pill or a surgery. And that, that unfortunately is where we're at.
00:22:33.660And why doctors, um, even with the best intentions are not focused on root causes. There's no incentive to do so. And there's little education.
00:22:41.640I think about it sometimes with respect to the very, very wealthy people. I know I'm talking billionaire wealthy. I don't know that many of them, but I know some, and they all live into their nineties. Now, how do they do that? It's because they have an individual doctor who's on staff or constantly available to them. I mean, take the most extreme case, Queen Elizabeth, right? How did she live in, you know,
00:23:03.540to 93 and her entire life? She was probably eating clean. She had people around her monitoring things like her blood glucose, just to make sure she was where she needed to be on all these things. Full-time attention and care. I think about my old boss at Fox news, Rupert Murdoch, same thing. He's like in his mid nineties, he's had falls and things like that, but onward he trudges.
00:23:21.640And then I've known younger people who are with the B on the money front and they've got, they travel for business and I I'll see them on a business trip and they'll have their own food that they've brought with them. And I've asked more than one of these guys, like, why are you bringing your own food? We're at this beautiful event. Like I'm sure, I'm sure they're going to feed us. No, because they know if they put themselves in the care of just some random chef in some random place, they're not going to get the right beef. One guy I knew multi multi-billionaire, one of the richest Americans we have has his own cows.
00:23:51.640That are butchered on his own ranch. And that's the beef he travels. It's just like, there is a level of eating and wellness that the average person has no idea about, but it's, you don't actually have to be a billionaire to get it. You just have to have the information truly in this book, good energy by Dr. Casey means, and listen to the life changes you can bring on for yourself.
00:24:15.300You know, Megan, it's true. I also, I see this as well in a community of people who are, who have awoken to this idea that the reasons we're sick in America, the reasons that life expectancy right now is going down in America.
00:24:33.740And a child born today is on track to live 600 days less than someone who is age 40 right now. Like this is astronomical. We spend almost two X more than any other high income country in the world on healthcare.
00:24:50.740We also spend 23% of the largest GDP in the world on quote unquote healthcare. And we're not even able to keep life expectancy stable. It's going down in our country.
00:25:02.920If, if, if that doesn't kind of rip you out of your slumber, I don't know what will. And, and, and so it's not for a lack of medication, right? We're, we're prescribing medications just more and more. The more statins we prescribe, the more heart disease we're getting, the more ozempic we're prescribing, the more obesity rates are going up. The more SSRIs we're prescribing, the more people have depression, you know, the, the it's, it's not correlating with the amount of drugs.
00:25:30.860So there's something else going on. That's insidious. That's environmental. And like you say, people who are aware of what's going on are doing essentially everything they can to protect their bodies from the normal inputs that you are going to be exposed to. If you're just living in America day today, all of these invisible threats around us annoyed listening to this, because I know you guys are tight with RFKJ and I know Callie, this is an interesting piece of your story.
00:25:58.200Callie's your brother. And I've been following him for years on Twitter and watching him and listening to his expertise as well. But I know he's connected with RFKJ and helped him come up with Maha and that, you know, you guys have been doing some input there. But here's what's so infuriating. RFKJ has been raising some of these issues for a long time. He's an environmental lawyer. He's an environmental lawyer at heart. That's how he actually made his living.
00:26:20.540And Casey, no sooner did he pop up and say, like, I don't know about these vaccines. Forget COVID vaccine long before that. Like, we're pumping these babies through a lot with a lot of shots at a very early age and they don't really need this stuff.
00:26:34.140And then his warnings went well beyond vaccines. He came on this show a couple of years ago and said, you know, why, where do all the ticks come from? Why is autism shooting up? Like all these things. And nobody would platform him at all.
00:26:48.120They decided he was part of the so-called disinformation dozen. That was the Biden White House. He was totally silenced on raising the alarm on a lot of these same issues because there really are. And you sound like a conspiracy theorist when you're like the powerful forces are silencing him.
00:27:06.260No, they actually were. Because they really do have financial skin in keeping him and probably you and Callie quiet.
00:27:17.060Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it really, this all comes back to money, unfortunately. And when you realize that around 60% of mainstream media's advertising funding is coming from the pharmaceutical industry.
00:27:31.360I mean, you can't watch five minutes of commercial on TV without seeing a medication commercial. And you realize that the funny thing is that these companies that are paying that much to have the ad spots on mainstream media, they're not actually really trying to advertise to you, the consumer.
00:27:50.640They're trying to get a direct line of communication to the media companies so that they can have an impact on the message that goes out that makes our news.
00:27:59.800That's a key point is that it's not about getting you to talk to your doctor about Ozempic. It's about having a direct line of communication to the to the media network so they can have more control over what is said and who is platformed.
00:28:12.080And this is why the emergence of independent media is one of the most disruptive and exactly what you're doing, right?
00:28:19.000It's the most disruptive and powerful force right now in the world, because what you see is that when you look at independent media that are getting hundreds of millions of downloads per month, what are they talking about?
00:28:34.900Root cause health, the dietary and lifestyle factors like getting sunshine and taking supplements and eating real food and regenerative agriculture.
00:28:44.500This is what's being talked about on independent media when we're not in a chokehold from the advertisers to talk about a specific dogmatic narrative about that pharmaceuticals are the only way to be healthy.
00:28:55.780And so I think that's very, very heartening. And, you know, I think we're in a really interesting moment right now where post covid, which was just the the probably the worst public policy disaster in in human history, where covid was really fundamentally a metabolic disease.
00:29:15.260People we died at much higher rates than other countries that had better metabolic health.
00:29:19.440This virus went after people who were immunocompromised because of metabolic disease is why people with comorbidities were dying of covid and people who were otherwise healthy really weren't and children were dying at much lower rates.
00:29:33.200And people saw that despite knowing that from month to month three of the pandemic, that this was a virus that went after people who were compromised from lifestyle related and food related diseases, metabolic disease,
00:29:43.780that zero airtime and zero information coming from our federal agencies in charge for health had anything to do with improving our metabolic health.
00:29:52.040I think it created a crack where people realize that there's a bigger problem here.
00:29:56.300So just to get back to what you were saying about RFK, you know, I think there's a moment right now where there's been some distrust that has been bred in the agencies and the health care system.
00:30:06.560Also, costs are going up for everything with inflation.
00:30:09.480And right now, our health care costs, our premiums in the United States are astronomical.
00:30:13.960The number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States is medical costs.
00:30:17.240So people are feeling it in a new, different and poignant way.
00:30:20.700And I think we're also seeing this inflection point with how health even got worse after covid to the lockdowns and other factors.
00:30:38.980We've got young adult cancer skyrocketing.
00:30:40.720We've got prediabetes and teens reaching 30 percent.
00:30:43.800We've got 52 percent of children overweight or obese.
00:30:48.220So there's a confluence of factors, I think, that are happening that are making this the moment where this is finally making it to the mainstream, which is which is really, really exciting.
00:30:58.160But this is why the concept of freedom of speech and what Elon's talking about and what RFK is talking about and the this idea of all the gaslighting that's happening around misinformation from the social media companies, X excluded and and mainstream media.
00:31:18.800This is why that issue is actually so important and why that issue needs to be thought about in lockstep with the health care crisis, because if we start silencing the people who are able to use the disruption of independent media to get these messages out, that's when we're screwed.
00:32:17.580And so we've had three days now of fact checkers all over the Internet.
00:32:21.620Citizen journalists, you know, independent journalists firing off tweet after tweet on X, you know, showing the video of Kamala Harris's positions, which she denied.
00:32:31.760Showing the FBI stats on crime are false that were cited by David Muir, things like that.
00:32:38.940And so this independent voice, this collective of the voices to make one strong counterbalance voice is correcting the record and changing the national conversation and the national knowledge and maybe even the national vote.
00:32:52.200And the same thing is now happening in health care, which is far more important.
00:32:58.460This is about whether our children live or die for how long and how well.
00:33:02.160And you you really are at the pointy head of the spear on this issue.
00:33:07.900And thank God now your message is getting out.
00:33:09.980And I know Tucker talked to you about this.
00:33:11.380And you mentioned at the top of like your credentials could not be any more stellar that Casey, our audience already knows this.
00:33:18.160But I mean, to say she's not fringy is just an insult.
00:33:21.400Even say that anybody might consider that about you.
00:33:23.640You were at the top of every single medical thing you ever touched until you grew really disillusioned with the system and walked away voluntarily.
00:33:30.760Stanford, top of your class, top resident on your way.
00:33:54.500But I mean, it's it's really just about looking at the completely unemotional facts and stepping back for one second to ask why.
00:34:06.460I think that's what Americans are doing right now.
00:34:08.280And, you know, just to list just to list a little bit about what I'm talking about here.
00:34:13.700You know, is that I you know, we obviously talked about this on Tucker, but I think it's worth just zeroing in on what I mean by American health getting destroyed because then it becomes more like why isn't every doctor stopping and truly like pausing their practice to get together to figure this out.
00:34:31.100We've got 74 for we have 74 percent of American adults with overweight or obesity, 74 percent, three quarters of Americans have overweight or obesity.
00:34:41.020We've got 40 percent of children with obesity or overweight.
00:34:46.440We've got 52 percent of American adults with prediabetes or type two diabetes.
00:35:08.660We've got, again, one in 22 kids in California with autism.
00:35:13.000This is astronomically higher than it was 20, 30 years ago when it was one in one 50 and then one in fifteen hundred farther back.
00:35:20.420We have, again, 34 percent of young adults with a mental health or emotional health issue.
00:35:25.800Young adult cancers are up seventy nine percent.
00:35:30.000We are on track to have two million new cases of cancer in the United States this year.
00:35:34.620Highest, highest absolute number ever recorded in human history.
00:35:40.080Autoimmune diseases are skyrocketing, especially in women of middle age, by some reports going up three to 12 percent per year.
00:35:47.900Infertility is going up one percent per year.
00:35:51.240Sperm counts are going down one percent per year at a sustained rate since the 1970s.
00:35:56.500Seventy seven percent of American young adults are not fit to serve in the military because of these chronic health issues.
00:36:05.420We've got 18 percent of teens with fatty liver disease.
00:36:07.880Again, pediatricians would have never seen this 50 years ago.
00:36:11.280And as I mentioned, life expectancy is actually going down in the wealthiest country in the world.
00:36:17.120So. Ignore credentials, ignore Stanford, ignore all of it.
00:36:21.480Look at those facts, all of which are referenced on my website for all the people who want to know.
00:36:30.340Our health is getting destroyed and at the best institutions in America, the hospitals, the medical schools, we're not talking about why we're talking about how to medicate these conditions.
00:36:42.280We're talking about how to operate more on these conditions.
00:36:44.840We're talking about how to increase access to the health care system that is not improving these.
00:36:50.720The fact that this was not a topic on the debate stage is an abomination of our media.
00:36:57.180Why is this not the first order thing being talked about that we are that children have close to 50 percent of children in America have a chronic disease?
00:37:08.460What is going on? We should be outraged.
00:37:12.200We are spending more on this problem in a way that is not fixing the problem than almost any other line item in the American budget.
00:37:22.160Taxpayers are paying for it and it's not being talked about.
00:37:26.240So everyone really needs to realize that this is this is not a fringe issue.
00:37:31.660It is not something that, you know, it's just an accident that we're ignoring.
00:37:35.200We are actively ignoring this at every level of our government agencies and media and that that needs to stop immediately.
00:37:44.840OK, so the first thing we're going to take up, I'll take a quick break, but we're going to talk about three of the demons, sugar, ultra processed foods and foods that you think are healthy, but which are covered in pesticides.
00:37:58.840You get your big leafy lettuce salad and you dive right in without worrying about whether it's organic or not.
00:38:04.580And you may be doing far more harm than good.
00:38:07.840We're going to pick it up with a specific food discussion and then we'll move on to some of the other toxins that are around us and ways to clean our bodies and our lives right after this.
00:38:16.800Casey stays with us for the full show.
00:38:18.480Again, the book is Good Energy by Casey Means, MD.
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00:39:13.680Okay, so Casey, I did the tease before the break.
00:39:21.320That's a very short form summary of what you're recommending on the health front.
00:39:25.180But put in your own words in terms of the massive overhauls to eating that are required.
00:39:30.460At the highest level, we need to move away from ultra processed foods and start eating real foods.
00:39:35.340It's unprocessed foods that are grown in good soil, ideally local and not covered in the toxic invisible pesticides that are literally covering 99% of the foods we're eating in the United States.
00:39:49.000So it's a move away from this factory made food back to natural food.
00:39:53.660I mean, when we get more specific in there, we want to be eating foods that actually support our cellular and our metabolic health so that allow ourselves to have the molecules they need to function properly.
00:40:04.220Because right now, all the chronic diseases that I talked about, they are all rooted in the exact same thing, which is dysfunctional cellular biology, largely rooted in this issue of metabolic dysfunction that can be very much improved by giving cells the nutrients they need from food to function properly.
00:40:21.040So in the book, I talk about really five things that we should try to look for in food and include in almost every meal.
00:40:31.820And I call them the five elements of good energy eating.
00:40:34.660And this is making sure that in most of our meals, we have a fiber source.
00:40:50.840There are a lot of components of food that we want to get.
00:40:52.620But if you are focusing on getting those five things in most meals and knowing a few foods in each of those categories that you like and stocking your kitchen with them, you can put together a meal that is going to have a really good chance of supporting your cellular biology.
00:41:06.540So for me, what I do is I just have my mental checklist of foods that are rich in fiber that I can keep in my house.
00:41:13.960So this would be like black beans and chickpeas and legumes and hemp seeds.
00:41:19.540If I'm thinking about omega-3s, I'm going to always have some wild-caught salmon in my fridge, maybe some canned sardines, canned mackerel, things like that.
00:41:31.140For healthy protein, I've got a freezer full of game meats and grass-fed meats that I can just defrost and easily make a meal with.
00:41:39.060And then for probiotics, I've got my sauerkraut and my kimchi and my beet kvass and my Greek yogurt and things like that.
00:41:45.460So if you just have a mental checklist of a few things from each category that you enjoy, eating for health becomes as simple as kind of piecing together a meal that has these components.
00:41:57.980So that's just sort of really high level.
00:42:00.580When we think about grocery store shopping, you know, I'm not going to say that every packaged food in the grocery store is a problem because everything exists on a continuum of processing.
00:42:10.560You know, one of my favorite foods is like flax crackers, flackers, something like that.
00:42:14.360And that's just literally organic flax seeds, apple cider vinegar, and spices.
00:42:19.680It was made in a factory, but it's really a simple, whole organic food in that bag.
00:42:24.880Compare that to something like a Twinkie or a Pop-Tart where there is a list of 40 ingredients, things that, you know, you've never heard of before.
00:42:35.820I mean, you see on these packaged foods things like polysorbate 80 and maltodextrin and red 40.
00:42:41.800We don't know where those things come from.
00:42:44.240Those are things that we should avoid.
00:42:45.620So just really being clear about, you know, what is going into my body.
00:42:49.660And I think at the highest level, this just comes down to backing up and building a new relationship with food and really not just really understanding it for what it actually is,
00:43:02.700which is this miraculous substance that comes from the ground, by the ground interacting with sunlight through plants and through photosynthesis,
00:43:13.480and that we get to take into our body to really determine our mental health, our physical health, our longevity, our mood, our thoughts.
00:43:23.280I mean, food is making really everything.
00:43:25.060And so we should both be, I think, in awe of what food can do for us.
00:43:29.940We should really respect that it is just this incredible process that happens on Earth as really a gift for us to be able to use to reach our highest purpose.
00:43:40.820And we should invest a lot more time and money in our lives and our families in prioritizing the highest quality food we can because high quality food will lead to a high quality life.
00:43:51.320And Americans spend a fraction of a percentage of their total income on food as compared to European families who are much healthier than us.
00:43:58.980And so it's just I think a lot of it, a mindset shift towards remembering what food is and that there's an alchemy reaction between ourselves and food that really determines our health outcomes.
00:44:09.580And having more respect for the whole process and having more respect for our bodies, you know, realizing that our bodies are truly miracles.
00:44:20.840And one of the ways that we can honor this incredible experience of being able to have this life and be here in this on this beautiful planet for, you know, no discernible reason.
00:44:31.640Like, it's just such a such a gift and a joy that we get to be here.
00:44:34.320One of the ways we can honor that miracle and this opportunity of life is to eat, you know, unpoisoned, unprocessed, fresh food from farmers that we know.
00:44:45.960And so I just tell people, like, if there's an opportunity to get your family out to the farmer's market once a week, talk to farmers, look people in the eye who are growing the food because that food is going to become your body.
00:45:05.880I mean, I think it's just it's we need to just wake up from the slumber that has been indoctrinated to us that that that, you know, these these foods that are so devoid of life.
00:45:16.720You know, you think about there's some really interesting actually studies on this where if you take food straight out of your garden or food that was picked by a farmer that day and so it's farm fresh and you eat it, it's filled with things like vitamin C and antioxidants and polyphenols and all these things that are going to support our health.
00:45:34.880But the average piece of food travels 1500 miles now from the soil to our plate.
00:45:39.440And every day that food is out of the soil, it is one more day that it has been dead.
00:45:47.100And as something is more dead, so more disconnected from the life source, which is the soil and the water and the sunlight that kept it alive, there's going to be a degradation of nutrients.
00:46:00.100Think about what happens to your Christmas tree over the 10 days standing there dying.
00:46:04.280So we are eating not only in the grocery store, food that's in the grocery store may have been out of the soil for two, three, four weeks.
00:46:12.580It's traveled in a refrigerated van, you know, or a truck hundreds, if not thousands of miles or flown from Chile or Mexico to your plate, just dying, losing nutrients.
00:46:23.480How do we expect to be vital and to have longevity?
00:46:27.700If the food we are eating is more dead than it has ever been in history, then you take that fresh food.
00:46:34.280And you put it in a factory and you process it and you strip it of all of its helpful nutrients.
00:46:40.360And then you put chemical preservatives in it to make it essentially be shelf stable.
00:46:45.240What do we think that's going to do to our biology when we are eating something that is so devoid of life?
00:46:51.580So these types of reframes I mentioned, just because we are so disconnected from nature.
00:46:57.300150 years ago, 97% of Americans grew some of their own food.
00:47:03.940So we are just so disconnected from this miracle.
00:47:06.740And I think part of the reckoning and the awakening to reverse the chronic disease epidemic and also get back on top of, I think, this darkness that a lot of us feel in culture and society today.
00:47:17.680This just sense of emptiness and darkness that's kind of taking over.
00:47:21.200I think part of it is going to actually just be getting closer in touch with our food and with the soil and with this beautiful, miraculous dance that happens between the environment and our bodies every day to create the lives that we want and investing more in that.
00:47:34.560We're, we'll take a break in two minutes.
00:47:37.500So this is, I'm going to start a discussion that we won't possibly finish before the break, but this is where organic comes in, right?
00:47:45.000Because I had friends 15 years ago and they actually ghost wrote a book on what an organic foods.
00:47:54.240And their conclusion was the only thing that you really need to make sure is organic when you do your grocery shopping is strawberries.
00:48:00.940Other than that, it's not really worth it.
00:48:02.760This is not good information and you're sounding a very different alarm.
00:48:07.960So is the, would you say that if it's a fruit or a vegetable, you know, if it comes out of the earth, either from, you know, the actual earth or from a tree, et cetera, it has to be organic.
00:48:18.160The organ, I know we have to go to break, but I think my short answer would be, it is absolutely beneficial for it to be organic.
00:48:25.520And we need to be implementing the precautionary principle when we think about organic or non-organic food.
00:48:31.860Which is that even though the data may be muddied in large part because the industries that make these pesticides like Bayer Monsanto have a huge interest in making us confused about whether they're safe.
00:48:45.540We know that a lot of these pesticides are linked to cancer, autoimmune disease, behavioral issues, endocrine disruption and hormone disruption.
00:48:55.180And so for me, thinking about the fact that 6 billion pounds of synthetic pesticides are sprayed in our food system every year and chronic disease rates are skyrocketing and there's mechanistic evidence of why.
00:49:09.580I certainly feel that it is important to choose foods that don't have that, that, that, that, that, those toxic substances on them.
00:49:19.080Yeah. And then when you get those foods home, those organic foods, do you have some special washing technique for them?
00:49:26.580You know, I personally, I just do a quick rinse of my food, but that's because I'm actually now buying food from all farmers that I know.
00:49:37.580So when I go to the farmer's market, you know, I am getting it from the Apricot Lane farm stand.