How To Reclaim Your Energy, Supercharge Your Mitochondria, And Get Out Of The Grips Of Big Food And Big Pharma With Dr. Casey Means And Calley Means

This episode discusses the systemic issues in healthcare and food industries, focusing on metabolic health and the significant impact of lifestyle choices on chronic diseases.

1. Systemic Problems: The healthcare and food industries profit more from ongoing chronic illness than from effective disease prevention and health management.
2. Metabolic Health Focus: Improving metabolic health through lifestyle changes can combat the root causes of many chronic diseases.
3. Misguided Healthcare Motives: Economic incentives in healthcare lead to a focus on treatment rather than prevention, worsening overall health outcomes.
4. Personal Health Autonomy: Individuals must take control of their health by understanding the impact of their choices and the environment on their wellbeing.
5. Potential for Change: Despite the grim current situation, there is significant potential for individual and systemic health improvements if focus shifts toward genuine health promotion and disease prevention.

1: Introduction to Metabolic Health

Dr. Casey Means opens the discussion by describing the worsening health trends in America, linking them to systemic issues in healthcare and food industries. She argues for a paradigm shift towards preventive medicine and metabolic health. Casey Means: "We're getting sicker and heavier as a society, not because of lack of medical intervention, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of health and prevention."

2: Economic Incentives and Health

Calley Means discusses the economic underpinnings of the healthcare system, highlighting how profit motives often overshadow patient health outcomes. Calley Means: "Our healthcare system profits from the treatment of diseases, not their prevention, creating a perverse incentive to keep the population in a state of managed illness."

3: Reclaiming Health Autonomy

Dr. Casey Means emphasizes the importance of understanding the root causes of diseases, particularly focusing on metabolic health, to reclaim autonomy over personal health. Casey Means: "True health doesn't come from a prescription bottle; it comes from addressing the root metabolic issues that lead to disease."

4: The Role of Diet and Environment

The conversation shifts towards the role of diet and environmental factors in health, with a discussion on how modern dietary habits contribute to metabolic dysfunction. Casey Means: "By adjusting our diet and our interaction with the environment, we can directly influence our metabolic health and overall well-being."

1. Prioritize Whole Foods: Shift towards a diet rich in whole, unprocessed foods to improve metabolic health.
2. Increase Physical Activity: Regular exercise helps improve metabolic function and overall health.
3. Manage Stress Effectively: Adopt stress management techniques such as meditation, yoga, or deep breathing.
4. Optimize Sleep: Ensure sufficient and quality sleep to aid in recovery and metabolic balance.
5. Educate Yourself: Learn about the impact of lifestyle choices on health and make informed decisions.

This episode is brought to you by Maui Nui, Cozy Earth, and BON CHARGE.

More than sixty percent of individuals are facing chronic conditions. Our modern world has led to a society that is getting sicker and facing more chronic diseases despite advances in technology and healthcare. Metabolic dysfunction is at the root of these conditions, and the pharmaceutical industry seems to benefit from this continued chaos.

Today, on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru, Dr. Casey Means, and Calley Means discuss the crisis our society is facing. They share staggering statistics about our health and give a state of the union on healthcare, lobbyists, research, and pharmaceutical companies. They also share their experience within the industry, leading them to advocate for greater access to information and agency over our health. Learn the basic biomarkers we should all assess and simple ways to improve our mitochondrial and metabolic health, reducing our chances of developing a chronic disease.

Casey Means, MD, is a Stanford-trained physician and co-founder of Levels, a health technology company with the mission of reversing the world’s metabolic health crisis. Her book on metabolic health, Good Energy, comes out in May 2024. She trained in Head and Neck Surgery before leaving traditional medicine to devote her life to tackling the root cause of why Americans are sick.

Calley Means founded TrueMed, a company that enables Americans to buy exercise and healthy food with FSA/HSA dollars. He is also the co-author of Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.

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Dhru Purohit
Why? Increasingly, every year, when you look up, you read the headlines. We're getting sicker and sicker every single year. So I'd love to hand it over to you, Casey, first, what the f. Is going on?

Casey Means
The reality is that Rome is burning, things are getting very, very bad, and we are distracted. We are not focusing on the core issues. And a core issue that every american needs to realize is that our health is plummeting for our children, ourselves, and our parents. Like you said, we are getting sicker. We are getting heavier.

We are getting more depressed. We are getting more infertile as a species. And the more we spend on healthcare, the worse the outcomes are getting. The more studies we do on nutrition and exercise, the worse our health is getting. The more medical specialties we invent, the worse our health is getting.

We need to realize that we're pointing the arrow in absolutely the wrong direction. We're pointing the arrow towards symptom management, whack a mole, reactive medicine. We're waiting for people to get sick, and then we're jumping in with costly interventions that don't actually get at the root cause of the problem. The root cause of the problem is metabolic dysfunction. It's our cells being fundamentally broken and unable to function in the modern world that we are exposing those cells to, the modern world that we're living in.

And this is really the vision of good energy. The vision is to reimagine a different direction for our species that's focused on good energy on every level, focused on metabolic health, which is how our cells make energy to fundamentally power themselves. And I think a key point that we are here to share is scary, but it's something that everyone needs to realize, which is that every institution in America that touches our health, from hospitals to our doctor's office to pharma to even insurance companies, and certainly medical schools, make more money when we are sick, and they make less money when we are well. And right now, health care is not only the largest, but it is the fastest growing industry in the United States. It is a business, and that business is designed to grow.

And the way the business grows with the current financial model is that we need more patients in the system having more things done to them for a longer period of time. That is the stark economic reality that we all must internalize. Not to be afraid, not to hate the system, but to take our health into our own hands and realize that the system is not changing fast enough to improve our health. We have to do it for ourselves. So for me, as a physician, as you know, I trained as a head and neck surgeon, and these things became so clear in those moments in the operating room where I was standing over my patients and had a drill in my hand, had a bone saw in my hand, had a scalpel in my hand.

These are very dramatic things, doing surgery to people and really waking up and realizing that the things I was doing to them was actually not addressing the actual physiology that was causing their disease. I will never forget a patient in my fifth year of surgical residency. I was on my sinus surgery rotation. And so it was day in and day out, busting holes in the sinuses, sucking pus out of the sinuses, just this constant sort of plumbing that we were doing. And this woman was in her seventies or so, and she was back for her third revision, sinus surgery.

You know, she'd had the kitchen sink, multiple surgeries, multiple antibiotic courses. I mean, dozens of antibiotic courses. Steroids, nasal rinses, compounded nasal rinses, everything. And, you know, she's. She's on the table, and I've got the.

I've got the drill, and I'm looking down at her and I'm realizing, and this was a woman also, who had several other health conditions. Like so many Americans. She had all the american diseases. She had high blood pressure, she had high cholesterol. She was a little bit overweight.

She had prediabetes. And I'm about to drill in, and I realize the reality is I actually don't have any idea why she's actually sick. I am going to suck this pus out of her face, but I kind of know on some level that it's going to come back. I'm not really doing anything to truly heal this woman. And that was the start of essentially putting down my scalpel and leaving the surgical world forever, because I realized I, as a physician who went into medicine to help people heal and thrive, was totally unequipped to do that.

I had never actually learned what truly makes people sick. I learned how to diagnose disease, treat disease, operate on disease, prescribe drugs for disease, but I didn't really know what makes you feel sick. And that has now been a seven year journey of figuring that out and realizing that it's fundamentally very much rooted in metabolic dysfunction and an overwhelming incapacitation of ourselves to deal with the modern world that we are living in. That has changed so rapidly over the past hundred years. And what's emerging is widespread chronic illness, which is just a representation of ourselves saying, we cannot cope with the world we're living in.

And there is no drug and no surgery and no amount of healthcare dollars that's going to fix that unless we point the arrow on the real issue. So if you've been listening to my podcast, you've heard me talk about the importance of a diet rich in high quality protein and phytonutrients. In fact, I'm always looking for high quality protein that I can share from a brand that I truly trust. That's why I was thrilled when my brother in law, who's also a cardiologist, introduced me to Maui Nui venison. Their red meat provides the most protein per calorie.

Dhru Purohit
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That's cozyearth.com. Drew 40 for 40% off today. You know, casey, you had your red pill moment. That was your wake up call. And you realize, like, even though you were so well intentioned, so well meaning, you were part of a system that is literally designed, right.

Not in a sort of dark room with people sort of, although that could be part of it. It's a system that's designed to keep people sick, whether individuals realize it or not. The system is designed to keep people sick. And I think, like you, there's a lot of other doctors and individuals who are listening today who are having their own moment. That's like, I need to create a different future to break out of this mess.

But it's hard to create a different future if you don't realize that, hey, it is scary that the house is on fire, but that's a good thing, because you don't want to stay in a house that's on fire. Otherwise, you're going to burn to death. Callie, when you think about Rome being on fire right now, what comes to mind as some of the most egregious examples of the state of health that we live in right now? What's been a big wake up call for me from Casey's story, and let's be clear, we were both big defenders of the system. Casey rising up the ladder in medicine, top of her Stanford med school class, and me early on as a lobbyist, as a defender, as a consultant for the pharma industries and the healthcare industries.

Calley Means
I think the high level thing you need to understand from Casey's story, and I think the most important issue for Americans to understand is that chronic disease is absolutely, it's the greatest business invention in american history. Chronic disease are really a new invention post world War two. And what's beautiful from an economic perspective about chronic conditions is that it produces recurring revenue. That's the key thing. The first chronic condition pill ever was the birth control bill in 1960.

Before that, all medicine was acute. It was like you had an infection antibiotic, you had a gunshot wound, an appendicitis, a complicated childbirth. It was things that the medical system could cure right away, and that really led to a lot of faith and support for science. After World War two, what the system did is they took that trust engendered by really, with antibiotics and vaccines, really being credited for winning the war. They said, okay, we're going to do recurring.

And now 90% to 95% of all medical spending is on chronic conditions. It used to be, again, 0% in 1960. So we've taken the trust engendered by these miracles, which are almost all created 70 plus years ago, and asked people to trust the system on chronic. Now, what has that done? It's created, as Casey said, the largest and fastest growing industry in the country, because it's a beautiful thing.

Because with chronic conditions, people don't die right away. They have the high cholesterol, take the statin, they have the high, the high blood sugar, they take the metformin, they have the high blood pressure, they take the ace inhibitor, they have the depression, they take the SSRI. We've siloed. As Casey said, we've siloed conditions and all these things. And then when people take a pill and think that, you know, heart disease is a statin deficiency and don't need to change their diet or lifestyle, they're just going to keep getting comorbidities, which is exactly what's happening.

In 1980, I think it's under 10% of people had a chronic condition. Now it's over 60%. So as we've been prescribing more, as we've been spending more, as more people have been getting this into this system, all that's happened is chronic diseases is rising. So that's the key thing to unpack. As Peter Attia said in his book, if you actually control for acute and infectious conditions, life expectancy has been flat in the past 100 years.

It's literally all because of acute things that were going to kill you right away, things that would kill a child. Those are acute issues. What weve done is now we trust pediatricians on chronic conditions. Whats happening? You look at a childs classroom, its devastating.

Its the most important issue in the country. What a moral failure right now, that 50% of teens are overweight or obese. Thats not personal responsibility. So the egregious thing I saw as a consultant were really trying to pack apart in this book, is that these industries, again, which it's hard to even fathom the size, the healthcare industry spends five times more on lobbying and public affairs and political donations than any other industry, than any other industry, five times more than the oil industry. When these industries are so big, I do think there's some evil people.

But you've got an invisible hand, right? You've got more mortgages that are being paid from the healthcare industry than any other industry in the country. You've got more people that their dignity, their lives are put in this industry than any other industry. You know, Mark Twain said, right, if you're never going to have somebody argue against their own financial self interest. So you've created that.

The largest industry in the country. And what's happened is that you basically have every lever of the industry completely washing their hands and taking no responsibility for why people are getting sick. Only it's when the sick people come in. So if you'd actually think about the NIH isn't asking why people are getting sick. They're asking, how do we treat that and manage that?

Med schools. Casey didn't take one nutrition class at Stanford med School. 80% to 90% of doctors today graduate without one required nutrition class. It's the majority of the caseloads in pharmacology. And with the public affairs and the lobbying you're aggressively pushing to uphold this system, instead of calling for kids to stop drinking soda, the American Diabetes association is taking money from Coca Cola.

I helped push money. They accepted money. Diabetes water. The American Diabetes association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, is taking money from processed food companies. So there's, fundamentally, there's money and interests and everyone having plausible notability, not feeling evil, but they're working to obfuscate why we're getting sick and say that science, that only serious medical interventions are cutting someone open or prescribing a pill once they get sick, which keeps them on the Chronicle disease.

Tremulous. And I think something Casey and I are very passionate about as a new father myself, it's, there's a business imperative. Let's take emotion out of this. Let's take conspiracy thinking out of this. There's an economic fact, an unemotional economic fact, that a sick child's the most profitable thing in the country.

A sick child, a child that's addicted, a child that's in fear, is going to be on a very profitable chronic disease treadmill for a longer period of time. We're going to keep them alive, but they're going to suffer. They're going to be more depressed, they're going to be more obese, they're going to have a less optimal life. But that is where the incentives of our largest industries are geared towards. They want that to happen from a raw, unemotional economic standpoint.

And that's really what we're trying to unpack. The good news is that chronic diseases are under our control. The lie that's been told is that chronic disease management happens in the doctor's office. It's a nefarious, multi trillion dollar lie. Chronic disease is under our control.

Every other animal in the wild is able to manage chronic disease. There's not epidemic rates of diabetes and obesity among giraffes and lions. In the wild, every animal is born with an innate sense of actually how to regulate their metabolism, of how to be in the sun, of how to move correctly, of how to eat correctly. Intuitively, this system has convinced us otherwise. We're the only animals, and animals we've domesticated that, you know, or shoving ultra processed food down our throats, sitting inside all day, is making our kids, you know, sit in a chair for 8 hours, and not with sunlight, not moving and sedentary like that, like we're.

We're doing this to ourselves. So actually pulling back from that system, that that's the hopeful message, is that is it's actually truly mistrusting the system, having a greater degree of empowerment and lack of trust for the system when it comes to chronic conditions. You know, one of the other lies, um, Casey, that you guys write about in the book is this lie that this is such a complicated problem that we're not going to fix it in our lifetime. All we can hope for is incremental changes, and then one day, maybe nanobots or some sort of gene therapy or whatever advancements that people are waiting for is going to finally come in and save the day. Tell us why that line of thinking is completely false, but also holds us back from getting better.

Casey Means
Yeah, this is a point that Callie and I really, really wanna get out into the world, which is that the solution to this monumental problem that we're dealing with in the United States of chronic illness across the entire lifespan is actually incredibly simple. The reality is that we have 40 trillion cells in our body. And when the needs of the cells are being met and they are not being overburdened with more than they can handle and or toxins, we have health. It's a matching problem. You match the needs of the cells to the inputs.

The inputs come from food, from sun, from temperature. You get health. And when you deprive the cells of what they need and overburden them, we get disease. And it's really quite, quite simple. Um, I think that what's, what people really need to realize, because I get this all the time on social media, I don't know what.

I don't know what to eat. I just. I. It's too confusing. Everyone's saying something different, and what people need to internalize is that the confusion is the product.

The confusion is the desired outcome. The sense of overwhelming complexity is exactly what we are programmed to believe. Us believing that it's complex, hard, and confusing is literally the goal. And this is why, like I mentioned, the more studies that we do, the more experts we have speaking about this, the more confused we're getting and the sicker we're getting. And like Callie said, there's no animal in the wild that's dealing with widespread obesity and chronic disease.

So maybe we need to just look a little bit at this whole paradigm that we have so blindly bought into of, quote, unquote, trusting the science and, quote unquote evidence based medicine and this cult of evidence that we have just, like, subscribed to without really thinking, like, what's. What's going on here? If you think about it, what could be more valuable for the system than asking people to have a religious fervor around published research and evidence and. And make them implicitly be so divorced from their intuition and their common sense and their internal divine knowing of what they need for themselves and their families. If you can truly convince people that that is worthless and that all the answers need to be through consensus outside of you, what does that do to people?

It cripples them. It handicaps them. And that's. I think that is what we are seeing right now, is people are literally afraid to trust themselves on things as basic and intuitive as what to eat. When you sit down at a table, you truly sit down with a plate of food in front of you.

I believe that every single person can identify what is going to serve their health and what isn't. But because of this evidence industrial complex that has so, so compromised through the influence of funding from the processed food industry, from the pharmaceutical industry, unfortunately, we've totally relinquished our power, our incredible power and knowledge as humans to know what's right for us. And I think a big part of reversing this is actually people getting back in touch with the deep inner knowing and wisdom that in our busy, distracted, despiritualized digital world, we are literally running around with our heads cut off, not hearing the relentless signals coming from the body of what to do and how to live. You know, when you step outside in the morning when you wake up and go look at the sun and go look at the trees and breathe the fresh air and hear the birds chirping, you know that's good for your health. When you sit down at a beautiful farmer's market meal that's been prepared with love, with your family, you know that's good, okay.

When you take a walk after you've been sitting for 3 hours at your desk, staring at computer and look in the distance and look at the ocean and look at the mountains, you know that's good. It feels good. We need to trust this body awareness. And I really believe, I mean, we sound doom and gloom, but like I am so, so optimistic. We are living in a time where we can actually live the longest and happiest lives in human history.

That's a reality right now. Every person listening has access to tools and technology that they can literally order on the Internet right now to know more about their own body than pretty much any of their doctors has ever known about them. Forever. Right now you can have a wearable, you can have a biosensor like a continuous glucose monitor, and actually see how the choices you're making are affecting your health in real time. So we have access, this is, this is new.

In the past three years, literally, that we can have access and ownership to that information and know how to interpret it. On top of that, we have access to every single. With the Internet, with Pubmed, we have access to every paper, every published on biomedical sciences, on nutritional biochemistry ever published. And we get to download those, look at the conflicts of interest, decide for ourselves what we think. We also have access to every major tradition, health tradition in the world, and what their knowledge is.

Ayurvedic medicine, chinese medicine, indigenous medicine. We have access to all of that. And through the beauty of the resurgence of functional medicine, we understand that symptoms are a gift. And symptoms are a way of our bodies talking to us and telling us that the needs of the cells are not getting met. We can choose to slow down to hear our bodies, to create the space and put up the boundaries in our life, to be able to actually hear the relentless signals from the body about what it needs.

So through body awareness, through listening to our symptoms, through the tools, technology, wearables, direct to consumer lab testing, through the amazing access to global traditional wisdom that we have about health and the incredible access we do have to biomedical sciences, we have the opportunity to have absolutely vibrant, thriving lives. But it is not going to happen if we just abdicate the idea that we actually, as individuals, have the power to control our health destiny and if we essentially give away all of that to something external than us. So I think a big message for us is there is a fear, and I think a sense of fear at our own power as humans to control our destiny. We've en masse chosen to give that away, in a sense, to this false God of the healthcare system. But the healthcare system has abjectly failed on protecting us from developing chronic diseases en masse.

And it's time for us to shift that perspective and learn to trust ourselves again. Well, on that note, I mean, I don't know if you guys. I mean, I think you probably did see it. I'll clip it here for, you know, those that are watching on YouTube, and we'll link it in the show notes or on audio. There was a viral Washington Post article that came out just like about a month ago, and it said the title was, doing your own research is a perfect way to end up wrong.

Calley Means
Yeah. And not only is are people being told that, you know, doing your own research is. Is dangerous, but there is an assault, there's a war. You know, the powers that be, the media, legacy media that's out there, they're hardcore coming after people who are going down the journey of saying, listen, I don't feel good. Nobody's telling me why.

Dhru Purohit
I'm not getting any answers. The only place that I know how to turn to is Google and podcast and x and other places. Callie, you want to talk about that? It's very simple. The pharmaceutical industry is the largest funder of academic research.

Calley Means
They're the largest funder of the media, they're the largest funder of medical organizations, they're the largest funder of politicians. So every ecosystem of what you just said, from the studies themselves to the media, that's dictating the message. Their bills are paid by pharma. And that's very. That's very much by design.

We have to start questioning sacred cows, most people, me, until very recently. It's like a peer reviewed Harvard research study. Well, that's unimpeachable. I would have agreed with this statement. A double.

What's the gold standard in research? A double blind, placebo controlled trial. We almost like even very smart people, even people we talk to. These things are still accepted. Let's break this down.

I can tell you definitively from working with very unimpressive people at a public relations office in Washington, DC. The chief funder and the chief decision making of what's funding research at Stanford, Harvard, Tufts Nutrition School on down is public relations executives. We have a list of professors. It's funded by pharma, right? The NIH is not funding foundational research.

More than 80% of the professors that NIH grants went to had a direct conflict of interest with the pharmaceutical company that's making cures for the same disease. Not cures, but management. As we've talked about eleven times, more money is spent by food companies to fund basic nutritional research than the NIH, which the NIH itself is corrupted. So why is the food industry spending hundreds of millions of dollars on nutrition research? Why were there, as Casey alluded, to, 50,000 nutrition research studies created in the last two years on PubMed?

These are public relations documents. A Harvard study is a public relations document for either pharma or processed food. Almost certainly it's not core foundational research. You have to ask who's studying with it. And even the conflict of interest rules are voluntary.

The unreported, the former dean of Yale medical school was paid literally millions of dollars per year in often undisclosed, not even research grants, but consulting payments. This is happening everywhere. This is happening everywhere. On the peer reviewed research, on the double blind, placebo controlled study. Just real quick, let's unpack that.

What does that mean? In order to be a placebo controlled, you can't know what you're taking. You have to either take a sugar pill or a real pill. You can't do a placebo controlled study on exercise. You can't have somebody know whether they're exercising or not exercising.

You can't do a placebo controlled study on eating a non processed food diet. Right. Literally. The design of double blind, placebo controlled studies make the answer drugs. You can only do a double blind, placebo controlled study on drugs.

The FDA, which is 75% funded by pharma as well, not taxpayers. Pharma, says that's the gold standard and what we need to see. So it actually makes, by necessity, the answer is a drug only intervention, which then dictates the $4.5 trillion of funding which is enforced by all the medical schools and all the academics who are paid by pharma. So it's very simple, right? You follow the money, it will probably get into the zip, but I'll just.

I'll just give you kind of an example, and I think you can just trace each step on the case study. We have a metabolic health crisis, which is feeling an obesity crisis. I go to the playground with my son, and every single kid I see has ultra processed food in their hand and is overweight, clearly metabolic, dysfunctional. It's an epidemic. We are poisoning children.

Okay, so what do we say is needed? We have Novo Nordics, a danish company, which is now the largest or one of the largest funders of the American Academy of Pediatrics, uh, funding them, saying that six year olds need ozempic as the first line defense. They are funding, um, other medical groups saying, uh, literally that it's a genetic condition and not tied to food, that we can't look at food, that we need to first order impact of giving kids, starting at six, injectable anorexia, which is what this drug is. Um, we have the media carrying this story unquestioned, with professors that are directly paid by Novo Nordics, saying obesity is genetics, saying obesity is a brain disease. Throwing to throw willpower out the window saying that.

And this is clear, this is what the guidance is. A frontline defense. Not. Not after dietary interventions fail. A frontline defense that's being carried unquestionably on the media.

The New York Times is writing op ed after op ed, saying this is right. And anyone that questions it is attacked as being anti science, because the entire peer reviewed and academic community being propagated by the media is saying that it is absolutely incorrect not to aggressively intervene with liquid anorexia, with injectable anorexia to these obese kids. So you have this ecosystem, right? Not to mention the fact that they're giving donations, Nova, nor specifically to the majority of us, members of Congress. So that's the environment you have, um.

Where, um. Where we just need to wake up. I mean. I mean, like. Like, I.

Hopefully those stories and the specifics of how you're, uh, trying to be weaponized, of how they're trying to weaponize the opinions of your kids, of how they're really trying to get in that pediatrician's office to shame that parent. Right? It's where the rubber hits the road. You've got to have the courage, um, when it comes to chronic conditions to understand these facts and stand up for yourself. Well, just because you brought it up on the topic of Zemp, something that you recently went viral for on x, is that these same drugs that are being pushed over here and anybody who questions it is being labeled as anti science and anti progressive.

Dhru Purohit
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Calley Means
It's actually not marginal how different the US is from other countries. When you look at the obesity rate, the rates of metabolic dysfunction. It's a step function increase in the United States. So Europe, I hate to give them credit, but they are not trying to poison their kids. In France, the daycare food policies are bipartisan, and one of the most important things in the country, they have a four course meal with organic food that's not covered in glyphosate and a cheese course at the end.

Dhru Purohit
Seriously.

Calley Means
It'S mandated by law. It's non poisoned food, organic, grass fed cheese at the end. And they take that really seriously to not poison their population. And then if you are struggling with obesity, the frontline defense isn't to inject you with a lifetime drug that has huge problematic impacts. So, in Denmark, the largest company in Europe, they just passed Louis Vuitton, is projected to make the vast majority of their profits in the United States, because this european company is one of the top five lobbying spenders now in America, paying off the majority members of Congress and really taking advantage of our rigged health care system to make this the standard of care, because there's five times more lobbyists of a farmer than every single congressman.

Most congressmen, when they leave, are expected to be a pharma lobbyist. You know, it's this basic corruption, but it creates this dynamic in the US where it's like, you would never design the system this way, right? You would never in a million years, when you see kids being poisoned and 50% of teens obese or overweight, you never say, well, let's just accept that as a fate of complete, even though it's just literally happened in the past generation, and it's very reversible, you just don't incentivize and encourage poisonous food, which is much cheaper to do than $15,000 per year per patient for ozempic. Like, you never say, let's just inject anybody. And that's another key point.

This drug, because of our completely dysfunctional healthcare system, that's why healthcare is the fastest growing and largest, is because prices don't come down when volume goes up. So the system is rigged, that when we say ozips going to cost $15,000 per patient, some uneducated people are like, well, that price will come down. No, drug places aren't legally allowed to be changed. When volume goes up, it will be ten to $15,000 per patient. Medicare, Medicaid, the largest, are not allowed to negotiate the sticker price is what it is.

Novo Nordics, literally in their home country and in Scandinavia, they charge more than ten times less for ozempic. It is ten times less. It is under dollar 100 per month. Actually, by law, theyre not able to build their. Their.

Their citizens with their drug prices, and not able. And they have, like, sane policies on that. So that's all you need to know. Right. They have rigged this system.

Um, and there's this all out assault with the institutions of trust, you know, funding the research, funding the members of Congress, funding the media, literally. The NAACP is a registered lobbyist for Novo Nordics. They have a thing on the website saying that it's racist, literally racist not to approve congressional government funding for Ozempic. That is a talking point that the NAACP is using. Who's paid by Novo Nordics.

Crazy. Yeah. So I honestly give them credit over in Denmark. I mean. I mean, they are masterfully rigging the US system, but it's a bizarro world stuff.

And as we talk about in the book, you take that $15,000 per obese person per year. What if you brought that to regenerative farming? What if you brought that to, uh, getting out of this disastrous industrial farming system that necessitates all the glyphosate? What if you got that to putting kids on a path of curiosity, as Casey's talking about? We don't have all the answers, but what we know is that it is so rewarding to be on a path of curiosity with bio wearables, with a.

With a. With a journey of metabolic health, with questioning things and making your own decisions on what your metabolic habits are. And we could incentivize that as a country. This sounds pie in the sky, but it's very doable. We could do it tomorrow.

Dhru Purohit
We've incentivized sick sickness without people realizing it, and we got more of that. We can incentivize health, and we could tell the truth about health, and that could literally make all the difference. And to go back to your story, Casey, and just one other point that I thought, Callie, when you were sharing that, is that we have literally turned the american population, in particular, and increasingly now, exporting into the rest of the world. We're actually like one big factory farm for pharma. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. We are a big factory farm. We're being fed processed foods. We're being milked for our financial resources.

People are bankrupt, inflation, everything. We're all little pieces in a factory farm that are just being milked for our resources. And there's a few people that are outside of the farm that are sort of shouting, and they're calling us crazy. They're calling us crazy saying that. It doesn't have to be this way.

There has to be a different system. And, Callie, you mentioned curiosity. Casey, it started for you in your journey, and you write about it in the book. It started with you literally being on the operating table, as you mentioned, and saying, what the hell is causing this in the first place? What did you come up with as you started to go down that rabbit hole?

Casey Means
Well, I trained as an. I had a neck surgeon, an ear, nose, and throat doctor, and I was just. I sort of. The wake up call was around the fact that I was just sort of looking. I truly, after that time in the operating room where I was like, I can't cut until I figure this out.

I started by just kind of looking at everything I was treating and trying to understand, like, what do I know about these conditions? Can I definitively say I know why this is caused in the body? We literally just hand wave over that in medical school. And I was like, huh, I'm treating sinusitis, laryngitis, thyroiditis, otitis paratitis, cellulitis, trachea uveitis. It's like, these are literally all conditions of inflammation.

Itis is the suffolk in suffix. In medicine, that means chronic inflammation. And I sort of was like, oh, my gosh. Well, this is a start. I'm actually an inflammation doctor, and I didn't even realize it.

And the second piece there was, huh. Inflammation is the immune cells of the body sensing a threat and rising up to fight that threat. That's what the immune system does. It's our internal army to attack something that it deems as dangerous and threatening. And so, in a sense, chronic inflammation, which is inflammation that goes on for a long period of time, different than, of course, acute inflammation, where, like, okay, some bacteria gets into the body, your immune system revs up, it takes care of the bacteria, and then it.

It settles down, goes back to the lymph nodes, goes back to the bone marrow. Chronic inflammation means that that three threat is persisting, and the immune system feels like it has to be on all the time fighting this war. And then what I realized I did not understand was, what is that threat? And if chronic inflammation is fundamentally the body being afraid of something, being fearful of something, what is it that collectively, as a country, our bodies are all so afraid of? And that's really was the start of the journey.

And the next sequence of that then goes, okay, well, if you look at the world we're living in, which has changed drastically over the past hundred years, we have 70% of the food on our shelves is made in a factory so far removed from the earth, from nature. It's this Franken food like product that's obviously going to be incredibly scary to the body. The body doesn't know what the hell to do with the, you know, with. With glyphosate and with maltodextrin and with these red number 40. I mean, of course that's going to be a threat.

And then you've got the fact that we're sleeping 2 hours less per night than we did 100 years ago. That's obviously going to put the body on alarm. Like, whoa, that's kind of weird. What's going on there? The fact that we're literally spending 93.5% of our day indoors in four walls of a box that we basically imprisoned ourselves inside of for the sake of, like, comfort.

We do not go outside and see the sunshine, which are. Our cells are literally expecting photon energy to help dictate our hormonal, genetic, and cell signaling pathways, and it's just basically not seeing it. 80,000 synthetic toxins in the food, water, air, personal care products that have been brought to market by industry, not tested for safety over the past 50 years. There's many, many, many threats in the environment that obviously are causing our bodies to be afraid and mount this chronic inflammation. But the journey led actually a little bit farther, which is, what are all of those.

What are all of those environmental signals actually funneling through? And there's a deeper layer. When you really dig into the research, all those environmental changes aren't necessarily in their own right, causing the fear. It's what they're doing to the mitochondria, to the energy producing factories of our cells that's really causing the fear, because each of them, in their own way, actually does something to destroy the function of the mitochondria. So we're getting now to the very center of the cell, the part of the cell that creates our life force, that creates the cellular energy that powers every chemical ratchet in our body, that bubbles up into our lives.

And so the real unlock for me and what we felt just was imperative to share with the world. In this book, good energy is that all these toxic elements of our modern world are all funneling through the same thing, mitochondrial dysfunction, and essentially blocking the ability of the human body to convert food energy to cellular energy, to convert the environment into a life force currency that powers our lives. What could be more fear inducing for a cell than not having power, not being able to do its work? If you don't have power. The trillions of chemical reactions that are happening in a cell every second aren't going to happen properly.

An underpowered cell is going to be ultimately the scariest thing for the human body. It's going to send out alarm signals. That's going to recruit the chronicle inflammation. That's going to recruit the immune system. All those immune cells are going to spew out cytokines and immune chemicals that's going to create all this collateral damage.

And so in the face of a problem that is happening inside the cell, the immune system is totally impotent. It's totally inept at being able to fix it. Because those immune cells cannot come outside your body and tell you, do not eat that donut. They cannot come outside your body and say, you need to go outside and get some sunlight in the morning. They cannot turn your screen at 09:00 p.m.

To turn down the blue light. They cannot get you to go out and socialize with loved ones and community. They can't get you to sit down at the dinner table and have a nice, relaxed meal with your family. They can't go to the farmer's market for you. They actually can't do anything that's going to solve the problem.

So what we need to do, I think, is just really come at the healthcare crisis with a sense of deep compassion for ourselves. We have 40 trillion cells right now which are expressing deep pain at the world that we have put them in. And I like to think of the cells like my 40 trillion cells of my body and the 100 trillion cells of my microbiome, like me as the self, like the whole Casey. I'm like the mother to all those cells. They are just helpless.

And just like, they're like little babies, they don't, they can't spin, they can't talk to me in words. So what they're doing is they're expressing their needs, not being met or being overburdened and overwhelmed with symptoms. That's literally what's happening in all of us. That is the expression of chronic disease. And so just like with a baby, if a baby's going to cry right, when it, when it can't get its needs, and you're going to run through your checklist, you're going to say, is it too hot or too cold?

Do they need a nap? Do they need to sleep? Do they need a diaper change? Do they need milk? Very simple.

And for ourselves, because of our basic science research, our molecular biology research, we know what the checklist is for the cells, too. Are they getting real, whole, nutritious food filled with the nutritional cofactors they need to function properly? Things like zinc and magnesium and manganese and b vitamins and omega three s? Are they getting the basics of the nutritional building blocks they need to function properly from food? So is the food good?

Are we getting enough sleep? Are we moving our bodies enough? Are we managing our stress? Are we actually emotionally and psychologically managing the psychological aspect of stress? Are there too many toxins in the environment?

What's our relationship with light like? Are we getting the right amount of sunlight during the day and not too much artificial light at night? And what's the temperature environment that we're in? Are we in just this sort of unnatural, totally thermoneutral existence? Are we letting our body experience changes in temperature, which is a really positive energetic signal for the body?

Run through the checklist, take stock of where you're at and whether you're meeting the needs of the cell. And it's literally as simple as that. And so I think, fundamentally, the core point here is that the root of our healthcare crisis is very much centered on the belly of the cell, on the mitochondria, and the way that all these aspects of modernity are funneling through mitochondrial dysfunction to fundamentally cripple our internal life force and to block our miraculous ability to convert energy, potential energy, from the environment in the form of food, to human energy in the form of ATP, that can power our lives. And so the metabolic crisis is so much more than just, you know, chronic disease and, you know, symptoms. And it's truly, I think, fundamentally a spiritual crisis that's a representative of the dimming of our species and our life force.

And this is why we're seeing it, unfortunately, manifest in some of the most devastating consequences of metabolic dysfunction, like infertility. We literally can't reproduce Alzheimer's, dementia, we literally can't think these things. We think of them as these separate silos in the conventional system. But obviously, in this world, we know they're all rooted in metabolic dysfunction and they're really a dimming of our. Of our potential and our life force.

And that's really the message we want to share. Yeah, you know, I think it's such an important point is that your mitochondria, your cells, they can't talk, but they are talking to you, if we're willing to listen, in the form of these symptoms, if you're dealing with depression, right, if you're dealing with, you know, panic attacks, if you are overweight and your body composition is totally out of whack. Right? Sure. Your mitochondria can't say, hey, we need to take a break from this processed food.

Dhru Purohit
But it could pile on the weight. It could increase the amount of visceral fat in your body. And all these things that have been normalized, because we look up and we see, well, this is normal. Well, it's been normalized because, unfortunately, everybody has been inducted into this factory farm. Yeah.

So everybody, the vast majority of people are sick and unhealthy, but because it's everybody, we now call that normal. And for you to question it and for you to want something different, you're abnormal in a way, or you're following and pulling on some threat of some conspiracy that's out there in one way. I mean, the pandemic was so much devastation. So many people lost their lives, so much heartache. Kids education completely.

You know, kids being sent backwards years in their education. The one silver lining is, in a major way that I had never really seen before. A bunch of people started asking questions, and they looked up and said, huh? They told me this thing that was supposed to fix the situation, and it was initially 100% effective in doing it, and then it was 98%, and then it was 95%, and then it was 83%, and then it was, oh, you just need a booster. And then it was 70%.

And then everybody realized that, oh, maybe we're not being told the full story here. And a whole bunch of people, for the first time ever, even many researchers that are doing well meaning research that have been on this podcast, started saying, I don't think we're being told the true and full story. Callie, we're going to jump in. No, you just rest. I'm just nodding my head.

Calley Means
I don't agree with everything you're saying, but I'm getting fired up because COVID was. I think we have to just acknowledge what it was, which was the COVID response, was the greatest public policy mistake of our lifetimes, as you alluded to. I think the ramifications for keeping kids out of school, for closing the schools and keeping the bars open, for closing the gyms, when this was really a metabolic disease, for putting all of our hope and just the microphone of every public health official on a pharmaceutical solution, when this really was a foodborne illness, in my opinion, COVID was a metabolic condition. It's pretty resounding the evidence that if you were metabolically healthy, you had an almost 0% chance of dying of COVID no matter what age you were, and all evidence was put into the pharmaceutical solution. I think there is a real big societal shift after this public policy disaster and frankly, example of corruption and pharmaceutical corruption.

How the industry is still battering us overhead to trust the science and still batting us over to the head to fall in line to just take what our pediatrician says without thinking. A lot of people are waking up from that. I also think there's a really important disconnect here between traditional media and independent media. So on the traditional media, which is funded by pharma, and you can't even wrap your head around it's more than 50% of mainstream media tv is funded by pharmaceutical, uh, the industry. So you have still, you know, no real curiosity about the biggest story in the country, which is the fact that, you know, 33% of young adults have prediabetes, um, how 25% of teens have fatty liver disease, how, you know, the obesity statistics, how literally we're destroying our human capital, um, and losing the ability to, to a large degree, to reproduce, as Casey said.

So that's the largest story in the country, completely no curiosity on the mainstream news, but is the number one story on all independent outlets, the most listened to, of course, program in the country, Joe Rogan. That's what he's talking about. He's talking about metabolic health, um, in many different words. Uh, but that is like, the core, I would say, theme of the top podcast on down. Like, this is where people and Americans are gravitating to.

This is why RFK is the most popular independent candidate of the past hundred years of, you know, whatever you think of him, he's really resounding. He's the most popular politician among women in independence. It's why Joe Biden, the current president, at three way rates, is getting 28%. And President Trump, whatever you think of him, is absolutely tapping into an anti establishment mindset of, like, we need to get beyond this B's and institutions lying to us. There is a real waking up in this country that is trying to be covered up by the mainstream news.

Um, I think this is very disruptive, uh, but potentially a good thing. And as Casey said, I think the core aspect of metabolic health is that it is simple pillars to that. Stool, um, right, it's sleep, exercise, chronic stress, um, environmental toxins, um, things like that, right. It's the core basic things our grandma talked about. Um, I think the key thing to realize is that, you know, I wouldn't trade living in this age, this modern age, but the environment we live in, those pillars of metabolic health.

There's trillions of dollars of money in hijacking them, right? There's trillions of dollars of money in keeping a kid constantly in chronic stress with their phones and with just hijacking their dopamines and getting them to buy things. Sleep has actually gone down 2 hours in the past 100 years. There's actually a war on our circadian rhythm, you know, to keep the lights on, to keep us engaged, you know, obviously, ultra processed food consumption has gone, you know, in the past 100 or so years from zero to well over 60% of our diet. So it's just like, there's just like systematically trillions of dollars.

So I wouldn't trade, like, going back 100 years ago, but like, we've got to, like, realize that and realize innovation, um, innovation isn't more pills. Innovation isn't like, like meat that's created in a lab. Innovation isn't like, you know, you know, more. More even necessary technology to, like, help hack the fact that we're being poisoned. Innovation has to be using our tools and using AI and using all these benefits of modernity to get back to basics, like to help with regenerative farming, which is actually higher output per acre, but it's just a lot of labor.

You know, maybe there could be robotic technology for that, you know, using AI and technology to actually help us understand our bodies. Not hack our bodies, but understand our bites. We've got to see that as the innovation to get back to basics on metabolic habits. Yeah, you know, there's this mug that I've seen in the doctor's office. I've seen in a few doctor's offices that are out there.

Dhru Purohit
It's basically says, you can look it up on Google. We'll put an image on YouTube. Don't confuse your Google search with my medical degree. Have you guys seen this? Yes.

Have you seen this eye roll? And I've seen a few physicians that are, you know, that. That, that obviously have red pilled themselves and started asking questions and asking some of the basics. Note not too different than your own story. Post that image and say, if your doctor has this in their doctor's office, run and go find another doctor.

That's not to demean. Yeah, I don't have a medical degree. Right. There's obviously a lot of value that came with that. And just like anything, anything, there's going to be limitations to what has been learned through your training, and there's going to be things that you're good at, and there's going to be things that you're not good at.

And Casey, you've been chowing through the rooftops and letting people know that you barely went through any education on specifically nutrition. On nutrition. Like, you don't realize, even at a school like Stanford, they're not teaching doctors about this. So when you started asking questions, you had this patient, Lucy, you're doing all the multiple sinus procedures on her. And finally ask yourself, what the hell is causing this in the first place?

When it came to the idea around good energy versus bad energy, what were some of the first changes you made in your own life when it came to the fundamental topic of what food to put in your mouth? For me, it was very much a personal journey when I was a surgical resident. And now I look back and I'm so grateful for this, but I got very, very sick as a surgical resident. I went from medical school, where I had actually so much control over my life. A lot of the classes were online, and I could cook and all this stuff.

Casey Means
And then I'm 26, I get my md, and I go to surgical residency. And when you enter residency, it's called residency for a reason. You're living there, you are there all the time. That's how it was designed. And I was on call two to three nights per week, not sleeping.

I was eating all cafeteria food. I was certainly not exercising, because I was working these 1618 hours or 36 hours days overnight, chronic, relentless stress of airway emergencies, doing emergent tracheotomies in the middle of the night. So overnight, my whole environment shifted. It's like a microcosm of what's kind of happening in the modern world. Like, very little control of my life, basically outsourcing all of my health to cafeteria food and this and that.

And so chronic stress, not sleeping, processed food, not exercising, stale air, artificial light all the time. What happened? In about three to four months of that environment, I went from being a perfectly healthy 26 year old girl to having terrible irritable bowel syndrome. Could not make a solid stool. Like, just, like, not going to go into too much detail about that, but it was like two years of just pure diarrhea, chronic neck pain, so bad that I had to duct tape.

I had to literally duct tape heat packs to my skin and then put the surgical gown on top of it so I could have the heat underneath the sterile gowns. I developed depression and anxiety. I developed more belly fat, and then I just got horrible jawline acne at 26. Just very upsetting. And in a sense, I didn't really put it together until actually, the neck pain got so bad that I had to take a month off of residency.

I had to actually leave for a month. That was the thing. That was a tipping point, because I literally couldn't look down at the patient on the operating table. And I left and I went back to my sort of control over my life, and I went back to my basics. I cooked all my food, I did yoga, I took runs.

I slept. All the symptoms went away in that month. Everything. Everything went away. The depression, the IB's, the acne, the chronic pain, everything.

And so it was really like a wake up call for me in a personal way that, like, it is so wild that it's. It truly can be as simple as these lifestyle things. And yet I'm not spending speaking to any patients ever about any of these things. I don't really even know how I would counsel a patient about nutrition. I don't really know much.

I've never learned anything really about sleep and the science of sleep. I don't know that much about what exercise is good, but those are really the answers. So for me, it was very much a personal journey. And then I went down the functional medicine route. Once I left the surgical world, I got additional training with Institute for Functional Medicine.

I started reading all the incredible, fearless health leaders who were writing about this, you know, outside of the system. Mark Hyman, Sarah Gottfried, David Perlmutter, Terry Walls, you know, all these incredible, fearless leaders, and had to educate myself. But certainly what I've learned about what truly makes people well and unlocks human thriving was nothing that I learned at Stanford medical School. School. And it was everything I had to learn after leaving and really waking up at Stanford medical School.

I learned how to do pattern recognition. I learned how to look at numbers and words and put them together in a pattern, label a diagnosis, go to my guidelines, figure out how the powers that be told me to treat that diagnosis, which was generally through pills or surgery. How to write a chart, note, how to bill, and how to schedule a follow up appointment. That's what I learned how to do with great expertise, but to actually unlock human thriving that was found outside the system through a lot of independent research and trial and error. And then why I become so passionate about bio wearables.

Like, even though I am fundamentally a very natural, focused person person, I really believe that it's all about going back to the basics. The reason I really believe in the tools and technology to support people in that journey is for two reasons. One is because the cards are so stacked against us right now. Like Callie's talked about, there are so many trillions of dollars there to basically make every aspect of our environment inherently toxic, that having as much on your side to kind of understand and, and vet the environment, I think, is very valuable. Like, if the whole environment were non toxic and incentivized things that were healthy and made those cheaper, maybe we wouldn't need all these tools.

But because that's not the case and the cards are monumentally stacked against us, I think that having a little bit in our, in our arsenal of tools like the wearables and direct consumer lab testing and the modern tools and technology is very helpful. The second reason I think it's so valuable is because it helps us re engender trust in ourselves and our own body and put the power back into ourselves to really, really get it. I think everyone's had that experience where you go to the doctor and you kind of feel like, and your labs kind of all have green check marks by them. So the doctor says, like, you're fine. Like, there's nothing wrong here, but you know, you know, you don't feel right.

And so having some tools outside the system that can help you really understand your own body, I think, is so, so, so valuable. And actually it's necessary now, because unless you have a very special, unique doctor, the doctors are likely not going to know how to interpret your lab results in a way that is truly fundamentally actionable, or to interpret your lab results in a way that actually helps you understand the underlying physiology going on inside your body. The way that we are trained at these top medical institutions in the world, the top medical schools, to look at labs, is that they are knobs that we can turn, you know, with medications. If the LDL is high, we do a statin, we bring it down. If the glucose is high, we prescribe the metformin, we bring it down.

What we don't learn how to do is look at the lab tests together and read the tea leaves of what those labs are saying in relation to each other about the underlying physiology within the cell. We don't learn that. And so, you know, what we talk about in the book is that there is a trifecta of bad energy. There is a trifecta of physiologic processes that are going inside in almost every american's body that are leading to pretty much every symptom disease. And the root of almost all the suffering we're facing in the country today, which is the trifecta of bad energy is chronic inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and oxidative stress.

And these sound like big words, but a point that Kelly and I try to make in the book is that, like, since these are literally the three physiologic causes of most all your problems, like, you do just need to learn what they mean, and they're really actually not that complicated.

And then with the lab testing, I didn't learn about all three of those things in medical school. I never heard the word oxidative stress. And yet, if you actually go on hub med and search oxidative stress and any symptom or disease, you're going to find hundreds of papers talking about the link between those things. But because it's a root cause physiology, it's not what our system incentivizes us to learn. So the beauty of understanding lab tests and personal empowerment with these biosensors and more advanced lab testing that you can get outside the system is that we can actually understand in granular detail the level of oxygen stress, chronic inflammation, and mitochondrial dysfunction inside our cells.

But we have to know how to read the tea leaves. And the message that I have for people, which might sound a little scary cause you might not have a medical degree, is that I think everyone can understand that it's not actually that hard. And we, of course, outline it in excruciating detail in the book, how to use these lab tests to understand your own physiology. But, um, yeah, I think in the. Book, you list, like, 13 of them, right?

Dhru Purohit
Can you give us a few of them? Just like, top of mind that people would be less likely to know of, but should be more familiar, because as you mentioned, most people are just going to their doctor's office and they have a short appointment, right, 15 minutes if they're lucky. And they're getting a pat on the back saying, hey, look, everything is normal, but you need to eat a little bit better and lose some weight, go on your way. But inherently, they don't feel good. Yeah, they feel that something's off and they're not being told, hey, you don't have diabetes yet, and, hey, you gained a bunch of weight, but this is normal.

This is a product of aging. So what are a couple of these lab tests people should be paying attention to? Yeah, absolutely. Happy to run through some of the key ones that people might. Might not be familiar with.

Casey Means
So just starting with that framework of the trifecta of bad energy, again, we've got chronic inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, and like a very, just 10 seconds on sort of how those things relate, all these environmental things we talk about funnel through to essentially damage the mitochondria. That's mitochondrial dysfunction. Our micronutrient deplete diet doesn't have the mitochondrial cofactors that we need to essentially do basic mitochondrial processes. That leads to mitochondrial dysfunction. Not getting enough morning sunlight changes some of the metabolic pathways that also impact the mitochondria.

That leads to mitochondrial dysfunction. So the environmental factors funnel through mitochondrial dysfunction. A mitochondria is an engine that, when it is not working properly, doesn't have what it needs. It's going to generate more damaging reactive molecules, because it's basically like an engine that's sputtering exhaust, et cetera. That's oxidative stress.

That's these reactive molecules in the cell that are dysfunctional are going to bind to things. They're going to cause more damage inside the cell. They have an unpaired electron, tries to neutralize itself, goes around, binds to proteins, binds to your DNA, binds to fat, cause those things become dysfunctional. Now you've got a dysfunctional cell that's underpowered, and it's got these little flames of oxidative stress. Of course, the immune systems be like, what the f?

We need to come help. This cell is struggling. It's like a house on fire. Chronic inflammation. So that's the cycle.

Chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, they all actually feed into each other in bi directional ways. For instance, when the chronic inflammation increases, the cytokines that the inflammatory cells release actually block insulin signaling, which then contributes to more mitochondrial dysfunction. So that's the shit show that's happening in essentially at least 93% of american bodies. We know that 93% of american bodies have metabolic dysfunction that's happening inside our cells. We all need to understand that is the root of our problems.

It's simple to fix. So, how do you know if this is happening? Well, there's five basic ways that we can kind of all have a sense if we have this metabolic dysfunction that are essentially free because they're on our annual physical, and we could probably open up our health records from our physical for last year and find all of them. And that is triglycerides, fasting glucose, hdl cholesterol, waist circumference, and blood pressure. So, if you are not on medication for any chronic diseases, any that relate to metabolism, so, if your biomarkers are fasting glucose, less than 100.

Triglycerides less than 150. Hdl cholesterol greater than 40 for men or 50 for women. Waist circumference less than 35 inches for women or 40 inches for men. And blood pressure, less than 130 over 85. Not on medication for glucose or.

Or, um, you know, blood pressure, then what our guidelines would say is that you have more optimal metabolic health. So those are the five biomarkers that can give you kind of a just of whether you're metabolically healthy. And if that is the case, most likely those three processes are pretty simmered down inside your cells. The research has shown us that less than 6.8% of Americans are in the normal ranges for those five biomarkers not on medication. That's crazy.

6.8%. I'm proud to be one of them. I think everyone can be one of them. And what's actually crazy, and I don't want to be discouraging, but, like, those ranges that I gave that are set forth about, essentially the criteria for metabolic syndrome are far too lenient. Like I said, fasting glucose, less than 100 is what they would call normal.

But what we actually know from great research is that a fasting glucose of 70 to 85 is actually what's optimal. So if you actually took the optimal ranges for all of those, like triglycerides, again, it's less than 150 is considered normal. But actually, the research shows that above 100 risk for diseases goes up quite a bit. So if they were actually tighter optimal ranges, I bet less than 1% of Americans would be optimally metabolically healthy. So that's five core biomarkers.

Everyone should rewatch that episode, get their labs out, figure out if they're in that 6.8%, then when we actually look at those three hallmarks. So let's talk about chronic inflammation. A lab test that everyone should be getting is HsCRP, um, high sensitivity C reactive protein. It's a protein made by the liver. It generally rises when there is chronic inflammation in the body.

It's a non specific inflammatory marker. Everyone should know that. It gives you a sense of inflammation, one of the three hallmarks of bad energy. Standard reference ranges would say that less than one is optimal and that it's only above three that you should start worrying. What we present in the book, based on a deep analysis of the literature, is that actually less than 0.3 is what we should be striving for, and all cause mortality.

Metabolic issues go up above 0.3, specifically 0.36. So, again, you might go into your doctor, have a crp of 2.9, and your doctor's like, oh, you're good, you're not good. You want to get that as low as humanly possible. Remember, if you have chronic inflammation, your body is living in biochemical fear. Just be clear on it.

Two, oxidative stress. There are almost no good. First of all, your doctor probably doesn't know what oxidative stress is. I literally never heard this term in medical school. It's the underlying cause of almost every chronic disease in our country and premature aging.

Oxidative stress, there is not a direct test that can measure it, but there is actually really interesting, a liver function test called GGT, which can be elevated in the setting of oxidative stress, in part because in response to oxidative stress, the body has to basically push out more antioxidants to try and manage that oxidative stress. And so GGT can go up with that. So that's a test that you actually do have to. It's, it's. It's a test that any lab can do.

It's not going to be ordered standard, but that's a test I would really recommend people ask for, which is, um, GGT. And I'd have to go back to look at the exact optimal ranges, but I think it was less than 16. We gotta get the book. I think it was less than 16. So that's one that's like kind of a more rare test that can specifically tell you about oxidative stress.

And then there's also oxidized ldl, which is a test on. I don't actually talk about it in the book, but it's in the advanced lipid testing realm. So if people get, like, they ask their doctor for advanced lipid testing, which tells you about more like the fractionated parts of your cholesterol pain channel, they're becoming more common now. Like a Boston heart type. Yeah, exactly.

Boston heart, NMR, lipid testing. It'll sometimes tell you about oxidized ldl, which can tell you a little about oxidation status as well. And then for mitochondrial dysfunction, the third hallmark of bad energy. I think really two of the best things you can possibly just know about are pretty basic. It's fasting insulin and triglycerides.

And the reason is because if the mitochondria is dysfunctional, and the mitochondria fundamentally is taking the downstream breakdown products of glucose and converting it to ATP, so raw substrate for energy, converting it to human energy, we can use. If that mitochondria is broken, obviously it's not going to want to process as much glucose. It can't. So the way it's going to respond to that, it's going to tell the cell, hey, I can't take any more glucose because I'm broken. We need to stop the entry of glucose into the cell.

That is insulin resistance. That is, the body creating insulin resistance to block the inflow of a substrate can no longer process. So by seeing an elevated fasting glucose in the bloodstream, it's a sign, and I would call that anything above 85, certainly above 100, that is a sign that your cells are so mitochondrially dysfunctional that they put up a block to have more glucose come into the cell because it cannot deal with it. So what does it do with that extra glucose? It converts it into printing triglycerides.

So it just 3d prints plycoslides because it cannot convert that glucose to, uh, energy. So, as another test that can be really helpful there on the mitochondrial dysfunction is actually just looking at a fasting insulin cause. As the body puts up that. That block to glucose coming in, which is insulin resistance, the body's gonna try and pump out more insulin to drive glucose into the cell to overcome that block. So you're gonna have fasting insulin rise, fasting glucose rise, and triglycerides ride.

Those are usually gonna rise in concert with each other because of what I just said in terms of where things are getting shunted. But it's fundamentally all being shunted around because that mitochondria can't do the work. It's overwhelmed, it's broken by all these environmental factors. So HSCRP, GGT, fasting glucose, insulin, triglycerides, those are some of them, but there's several more in the book I talk about. But those three can give you a little snapshot of what's happening in the bad energy trifecta.

All of us desperately need to understand where we fall on that spectrum, because when we start to chip away at it and turn in the other direction, so many of the problems in our life will just literally melt away. So it's so important, and I think that to really connect the dots for people, from weight gain to diabetes, pre diabetes, and even things that we still need more research on but know a lot about, like I recently had on Doctor Suzanne go on the podcast, who's one of the world's top experts in autism, and the autism rates and how they're increasing every year is nuts. It's. It's. It's mind boggling.

Dhru Purohit
Now, part of that sure, increased diagnosis, even she acknowledges it. But another major part of that, and this was her theory that she ended up showing through her studies, is that 80% of kids on the autism spectrum have mitochondrial dysfunction. That is nuts. Is that 100% of the reason that they're there? No, but it's definitely a major contributing factor to how their body is not able to properly communicate in the way that it was designed to.

Our species is literally under threat if we don't do anything, if this continues the way that it is, between all the different ways that our body is saying ouch and the world is saying ouch, we have a very grim and. And gray future ahead of us. But it doesn't have to be that way, which is the whole message of the book. Yeah. And I just say one thing and.

Calley Means
Then turn over you. Like, one of the reasons we are, like, not. We're not anti anti doctors. We're not even anti pharma. I think that there are miracles, like Callie have said, that have happened in our innovative medical system.

Casey Means
But to feed off what you just said, there is no universe in which a medication is going to heal the damage that this environment has done to our cells. That is irrational. It is illogical. It is insane to think that a pill that you are taking is going to ameliorate the effects of a multi channel war on our cells in every pillar of our environment. Food, sleep, stress, movement, toxins, light, temperature.

So that's really the thing that we want people to internalize, is like, there is a place for medication, there is a place for doctors. Mostly acute issues. And when it comes to chronic conditions, which are caused by our environment and the interaction between our environment and our genetics, it is genuinely irrational to think that a pill can fix that, because it's not caused by a pill deficiency, it's caused by the environment. This is why Ozempic will not work to reduce the obesity epidemic. Because the obesity epidemic is caused by dysfunctional mitochondria not being able to process glucose and turning it into fat that's being stored all over our bodies.

And ozempic does not heal our mitochondria. So it's just. It's. It can be a tool for some people. Uh, it is not the solution to this problem.

Dhru Purohit
Well, it could help a lot of people lose weight, but just because you lost weight doesn't mean you're actually healthy. So you could have a lot of people who look leaner, maybe still under muscled, which is another big issue. But you still are at risk of a ton of chronic diseases, and your mitochondria is still broken. And I would just add one more thing. If you really want to lose your lunch, go watch the JP Morgan analysts talk about the obesity market and ozempic they know, and we should watch them because they're dealing with trillions of dollars in investments.

Casey Means
They know that as Ozempic increases use, the obesity epidemic is they're not anticipating it to go down because that's not the way business works. You wouldn't be pushing an innovation that's going to make you lose customers. And if you look at their forecasts for, they put out videos forecasts for 2023 and 2024, you see their analysts saying that while many things in the market are struggling, two things that are not going to struggle because they are going to continue to be expanding markets, is obesity and Alzheimer's. So literally, they're like licking their lips at the prospect of these disease rates increasing. And that's kind of all you need to know to understand whether the solutions that they are promoting, the solutions are actually going to cause a decrease in the conditions that they propose to treat.

I mean, it's pretty much like all out there, but we need to just like, open our eyes. And Callie makes this point frequently, which is that as we have increased the prescribing patterns for every major drug for chronic disease management, from statins to metformin to SSRI's, as we increase the amount of people getting prescriptions for those drugs every year, the condition rates are going up. So really, that's not meant to, again, be conspiracy theorists. It's meant to help people wake up to the fact that these chronic illnesses are not a drug deficiency. They're caused by environment.

And so there's no drug that's going to be able to change the environment. That's something that you have to do. I think this is discussion you guys are having on the blood test and understand the blood test is absolutely a front line of this war, because if you look at the core pillars that we test and the core pillars of metabolic health, there's a, there's a drug for each of them, right waist size, ozempic. Now, cholesterol, statins and other medications, high blood pressure, ace inhibitor. Um, so, so you metformin, obviously, for, for blood sugar.

Calley Means
So you actually like the, literally, as Casey said, what the doctors are doing with your blood tests are. They're just looking for an algorithm that if you're one point above, you know, uh, the glucose level, metformin, if you're one point above the cholesterol level, statins, thats what theyre looking for. It was a big wake up call for me a couple years ago. I was lucky to have Casey as a counselor. We really tried to put this knowledge in the book.

But I went, got my blood test, they said it was fine. And I showed to Casey and she showed me research about how a lot of my levels on the cholesterol front and on the blood sugar front were really, really warning signs. And she gave me some research and I texted it and the app back to my doctor and the doc. Im like, theres a lot of research that would say Im actually indicating significant metabolic dysfunction here. Is that true?

And she responded. She said, absolutely, that's true, but you're not treatable yet. You need to be two points higher to be treatable. And I think you haven't fallen off. The cliff, but you're handing, she used.

The word treatable for your dear life. But you haven't fallen off the cliff yet. Right. So then this gets to a situation where I think it gets to this cynicism that's bred into the medical profession about the american people. It gets into this situation that Casey is saying she was trained at med school from almost day one, that Americans just want to take their pills, you know, they're not going to listen to dietary advice.

This kind of really, this, this idea propagated the medical system that's kind of nihilistic, that we're kind of just all wanting to kill ourselves and are only going to pop our pills and not. Well, let's step back for a second. If the doctor in that meeting said, you are going to have a, if you're prediabetic, you're going to have a three times higher rate of being depressed, you're going to have a three times higher rate of killing yourself, uh, because your brain produces energy as well. And this is a sign of literally poor energy production, um, that you're going to have, you know, a 90% chance of higher other comorbidities. Once this happens, um, you're going to have, you know, sperm counts plummeting, you're probably going to have trouble recreating.

Like if they actually just go down, you know, leading, really explaining that you're going on a path of lower life expectancy, higher comorbidities, a suboptimal life warning, raising that evidence based alarm bells and saying that if you need to come back and be testing this every three months and you need to get these things down into a reasonable level, what would happen if that was the standard of care, what would happen instead of pushing $4.5 trillion, once we get those biomarkers towards, you know, chronic disease infrastructure, that there's actually incentives of people with high biomarkers to exercise that there's actually incentives of them to get eating non ultra processed food if we're actually incentivizing them. So I just think we need to unpack that a little bit. There is almost an assumption that we're making that the american people are suicidal and basically just want to be sick. I think it's that there's a cynicism in the medical system that's very convenient. And there's trillions of dollars of incentives for us to be sick.

Right. And that, and that most american people actually do listen to their doctors and do want to be healthy and would follow the advice of that's where the incentives led. I also just think it gets this question as I'm hearing this conversation that we think a lot about. It's like, why is this obviously like evolutionary suboptimal thing happening where we're all just kind of lab rats? As you said, we're all just kind of like force feeding ourselves ultra processed food, getting sick.

And it's clearly we kind of all know what's happening. I think that's the one. It's the incentives of the medical system. Americans follow incentives. We're stacked up, literally trillions of dollars of incentives to eat, subsidize ultra processed food.

Medicine doesn't kick in until we get sick to manage the disease. That's a problem. Incentives, we can change that. The second, just as I'm hearing you guys talk, is I think we have, like, why are people acting so suboptimally? I think we actually have an addiction crisis.

I think we actually have parents, like parents who are feeding their kids all the processed crap and kind of almost apologizing for it. It's like, why is this happening? Why are parents systematically at a genocidal level, to some degree poisoning children? I think it's because we're all addicted. Like, we're all like, the majority of parents are obese.

Majority of parents are addicted to food. It's almost like psychological, that they're trying to, like, it's like a drug. It's like a typical addict behavior. It's like they're trying to normally normalize their own decisions, normalize their own situations. Like, I think, like, we have weaponized food.

Like, we have systematically made food addictive and made food very poisonous. And I think we have to unwind this almost like an addiction crisis issue. Like, I was recently speaking to daycare. I was in a daycare, and kids are just hopped up on candy, candy everywhere. And the daycare executives there said that they just have to do that, because kids are so addicted, there will be a revolt if they don't give them the food.

So just, like, unwinding the addiction element to this, of just like that. Everyone's kind of hooked already, and we kind of have to unwind that, which is gonna be very painful, and it's gonna lead to a lot of kids freaking out. If we cut their altar proofs. And a lot of parents basically admitting they were doing the wrong thing, that's actually gonna be difficult. And then.

And then changing the incentives. Um, but. But we've got to get to that situation where the principles Casey's talked about, which I used to think sounded complicated, but it's really not. It's just like, you can see inside. Your body for free.

By law, we get those blood tests for free, and there's a path a doctor can bring people on to really understand that you're going to live a more suboptimal life. The vast majority of people in the country, and there's things that they can do, and. And it's just like, that's a world that's possible very quickly. Um, and we have to realize that. And, you know, just to go back to something you were saying, is that there's a truth that a lot of people don't understand about these drugs that you mentioned.

Dhru Purohit
You know, and there's a reason why you hear that. Uh, you know, medical doctors, again, well intentioned, don't talk about triglycerides as much. You know, Robert Lustig, who you guys are friends with, doctor Robert Lustig, been on this podcast. Well, there's no drug for triglycerides, so you don't hear about it. There's a drug for cholesterol.

There's statins, but triglycerides to hdl ratio, which is super important. Nobody talks about it. There's no drug for that. Um, one of my favorite books in the last couple years was by medical doctor, researcher, and Harvard professor the sickening by doctor John Abrams. John Abrams is an incredible individual.

He was the whistleblower that spoke up earliest about the hidden damage that vioxx. Right. Yeah. Was happening, and how ultimately, we later discovered that 50,000 people. 50,000 people died early because they were on this FDA approved drug, because the pharmaceutical industry hid the data.

They hid the data. People don't realize this, but pharmaceutical companies, their studies are not truly peer reviewed. Even when they are, the peer reviewers look at a sanitized report by the pharmaceutical companies, and it does not include raw data. This even happened with the COVID vaccines. Right.

This is how you ended up in a situation where all the pharma companies are saying, 100% effective, 99% effective, 90% effective, 80%. Okay, maybe this isn't as effective as we thought, because no researchers had access to the raw data. The British Medical Journal was one of the first journals that actually acknowledged this and said, do the COVID vaccines work? We may not ever know the truth. This was in the early days when they hadn't even released to the full public yet.

They were still in clinical trial because we don't have access to the raw data. They consider the raw data proprietary and that they could use that to develop other further drugs or derivatives. So you have a situation where even when these drugs are studied, and then most doctors, based on all the surveys that are out there, get so much of their continuing education from drug companies, and these medical journals are in cahoots. It's a problem. Some of them know that it's a problem.

There was an effort to try to change it, and John Abrams writes about it in his book. And then, unfortunately, it was right around the time there was a bunch of editors that got together and said, we need to change this. The papers need to have more control and need to demand access to the raw data so we can actually see do these drugs work in the way that they're being shared? And that got published in early 2001. And then a few months later, September 11 happened and the world was turned over completely, and our entire focus was on terrorism and all that.

And that kind of conversation got put to the backwash. But one of the fascinating and most mind blowing things that Doctor Abramson talked about in the book is that when first and foremost, people don't have access to the raw data, including the peer reviewers, so we don't know fully if we have to rely on the drug companies. Secondly, when the drugs come out, we never look at, okay, sure, you're showing us that they work compared to, let's say, placebo, but what are they compared to? Lifestyle. And in the couple and a few studies where the NIH has gotten involved and funded, in the case of, there was one big one that he writes about in the book, which was the Diabetes Prevention Council, they mandated that Metformin was looked at not just against placebo, but there's metformin and placebo.

There's this middle group, which is metformin and lifestyle interventions. And there was a third group, which is just lifestyle interventions. And the setup of this, before I share what ended up happening, and I think the audience knows where I'm going with this is that most doctors don't think that lifestyle will work because they're never shown any evidence to show them that it would work. In this diabetes prevention Council, we have a link to a newsletter below that I wrote all on this topic and shared about some of the information that I got from his book. They found that the most successful group in getting their a one c down in reversing many of these lifestyle factors that lead to diabetes.

The most successful group was the group that had coaching and lifestyle interventions. They made much more progress than the combination of the two or just being on the drug alone. So when people think that pills are the only solution, they're left in that position to go back to something that Callie was saying. Because we are not mandating that we look at the alternatives. We're not mandating that the NIH fund and I think that less than 2% of their funding goes towards anything that's sort of lifestyle related.

We're not mandating that we look at the these solutions in the context of lifestyle, because the truth is, people want to feel better. And when they're told the truth about their situation and that they can actually do something about it by a physician or researcher who's optimistic, they get excited and they want to take steps in that direction. Something that the book starts. Chapter one, something that's really powerful to me, is Casey. At the end of medical school, she alluded to choosing between 42 specialties.

Calley Means
I think this tells you, all you need to know is that we silo things so much with these drugs. They're being tested on one biomarker, and we're doing a science experiment where we're releasing the tens of thousands of different interventions on people that have totally rigged studies. For instance, ozempic not testing muscle mass. Right. Um, uh, statins testing one biomarker, but not the overall metabolic health.

And we're just. We're just. We're just having these studies completely designed by the companies. You're exactly right. The FDA does not require the full study and the FDA panel.

It's not often bureaucrats. It's actually literally outside experts who do not have conflict of interest laws of being paid by the exact pharma companies that they are approving. Literally. One of the things I've talked about back in my career, early career, when the opioid crisis was explored, is we helped steer donations to professors who were on the NIH opioid panel to steer lax opioid guidelines. I believe it was 80% of the panel had a direct conflict of interest with opioid makers.

So we take that and we still give those studies such credence. But again, what we've had is the siloing. It's 42 medical specialties. Diabetes doctor, not even speaking to the cardiologist, not even speaking to the head and neck surgeon, not even speaking to the person dealing with depression. So that overall system is what we need to change.

And in my advocacy work, marginal changes to healthcare aren't going to cut it. Like slight changes to Medicare part D, as people talk about and usually get with the health policy debate. Health care will not change until we realize that that siloing allows the drug companies, allows interests that want us sick to kind of complicate the debate and not ask holistically what is changing our child's diet and going from ten required shots to 70 and pumping our kids with pills. All of these things might have a study on the micro level, what are all of these changes we're making dramatically to children at one time? What holistically does that do to their medical?

Dhru Purohit
So is it massive experiment? It's an experiment. It's a byproduct. And this experiment has deadly consequences. I want to have you chime in, Casey, and I want to talk a little about your own family's personal experience.

What happens when you don't pay attention to the early signs of this? And literally, people are dying every single day and are dying earlier than they need to because the system is not incentivized for them to get to the root. But it seemed like you had something to say, so I wanted to give you the opportunity to do that, and then we can come back to that. I love this conversation. One of the things that makes me laugh a little bit in the evidence based medicine conversation that so few people, I think, recognize, is if you think about the medications we're prescribing as physicians, the average american adult is getting over 14 prescriptions per year for pharmaceutical medications.

Casey Means
And each doctor, in their little siloed tower, in their little specialty, feels like they're making a great evidence based decision by prescribing that medication for whatever symptom that patient has. But what no one seems to recognize is that none of those drugs have ever been studied together in combination. And so, simply by putting people on a polypharmacy strategy of multiple medications, we are inherently not practicing evidence based medicine. So every single doctor who is prescribing a pill to a patient who is already on another medication is not practicing evidence based medicine. And I think to me, that's a little bit of a wake up call to doctors because they align themselves, again with this, like, cult of evidence.

And yet every single day, every single doctor is inherently not practicing evidence based medicine. By prescribed a medication to a patient who's on another medication, literally. John Abrams opens his book. He says, there's an inconvenient truth that so few people know. Not even your own doctor understands that when they think they're reading a peer reviewed research paper on a particular pharmaceutical intervention, they don't realize that the people that peer reviewed it are looking at a summary of the data from the pharmaceutical company.

Dhru Purohit
They're writing their assessment based on that summary. When billions of dollars are at stake, stock prices, bonuses, when your child's college education or your second vacation home or any of these things, you know, get funded or get not funded, how can you not have perverse incentives that have the companies stretch or present a cleaned up version of the truth? And how do we know it's happening? It's not a conspiracy. Some of the top and biggest judgments against companies have been these pharmaceutical companies.

Calley Means
The top. By definition, they're the largest criminal enterprises in the country. The largest, I think, as an industry. Merck, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, all multibillion dollar criminal penalties in the past five years. It's actually, again, we're not on a complete anti pharma tirade, but let's follow the science and let's have a little bit of skepticism.

These are literal criminal enterprises who have a astounding incentive to get more medications approved, more medications on the schedule, more medications, you know? Cause once you get approved, you're science, and you have the media refereeing for you. Um, so leads you to have a skepticism for that and also just ask for every condition, what is the most scientifically valid route? And it's often not letting people poison themselves and then drugging them. Like, that's just not the correct, um, answer.

Dhru Purohit
You know, I mentioned your own family's experience with this. And Casey, you've been on the podcast before, and a big part of your inspiration for both of you as authors in this book, has been your mom's journey. Talk to us about that journey. Share that story with us, because I think that it's important to humanize, personalize, because so many people that are listening today, we have family members that are dealing with diabetes, heart disease, cancer. What happens when even well educated families that have resources, that have means other things are lied to about the root causes that contribute to the explosion of chronic disease.

Casey Means
Yeah. Well, this book is dedicated to our mother, Gayle means, and I think her story is really representative, like you said, of what so, so many Americans are going through today. And I think a lot of people will probably recognize themselves in this story. So my mom, incredible woman, really a beacon of good energy. She, when she was 40, got pregnant and had me, and I was born an almost twelve pound baby.

And she gained about 70 pounds during pregnancy. And of course, the doctors at the hospital are congratulating her for this big, healthy baby. And then she goes on into her forties. She has a lot of trouble losing the baby weight in her forties, and that was always a struggle for her. She gets into her fifties, and she has a really tough menopause.

Hot flashes, the vasomotor symptoms. It's really a challenge. And I remember that vividly, like, her sleeping in the guest room because she was just sweating so much and waking my dad up. Then she gets into her late fifties, and her blood pressure starts going up, and her doctor says, oh, super normal at this age. This is kind of part of getting older.

Gives her an ace inhibitor, gets into her early sixties, and her cholesterol starts going up, and it's like, oh, well, of course you're getting older. Here's a statin. Statins get prescribed 221 million times per year in America. And then she gets into her late sixties, and her blood sugar starts going up in the pre diabetic range. And her doctor literally tells her, oh, it's a pre disease.

We'll put you on metformin, we'll take care of this. And metformin prescribed 90 million times per year. And then she's 72, and she's taking her nightly hike with my dad in northern California, and she feels, like, a really intense pain in her stomach, and she has to sit down on the hike. And she texts me, and she's like, God, my stomach hurts so bad. And it lasts for a few days.

So she goes to the doctor and says, like, I just haven't had a pain in my stomach like I've never had before. And the doctor orders a CT scan and some blood work. And later that day, she gets a text message to her phone that tells her the results of the CT scan, which is that she has stage four widely metastatic pancreatic cancer. And she calls Callie and I and says, oh, my God, like, I'm not gonna be able to meet your children. Like, I am so sorry.

And we rushed to her side. We both came into northern California and 13 days later, she was dead. And at that time, when she died, she was being treated for all of these different conditions by arguably what people would consider the best doctors in the world. She was being seen at Mayo Clinic for executive physicals and at Stanford for her primary care. And these doctors looked us in the eye and told us, we are so sorry this happened.

It's so unlucky. And the real message that I want to share with people is that there is literally nothing unlucky about what happened. It was completely predictable. Starting back in her forties, when she had a large baby, that's literally fetal macrosomia, it is a direct symbol of having underlying metabolic issues. What grows a baby?

High insulin levels. Okay? Then losing the baby weight, not being able to lose the baby weight, another sign of high insulin levels. Then the high cholesterol, then the high blood pressure, then the high blood sugar, the increasing waistline, and then, of course, the cancer, which we know is directly related to and driven by high blood sugar, high insulin levels, through a metabolic good energy lens. Her entire life story was totally predictable and absolutely not unlucky.

And if the system had been designed to see disease that way and see the root cause physiology connecting all these different conditions, it could have absolutely intervened earlier and helped get her mitochondria back on track and avoided this very untimely death. But because of the way the system's designed the siloing, the incentives, the lack, the complete and utter lack of incentive or education to think about root cause physiology, she, like almost every other american, was left to ignore these early warning signs of the clear signal of ouch coming from her cells, which ultimately came in the largest warning sign of all, which was a lethal, terminal cancer. And so our mission with this book is to really help people understand that these early signals from the body, these non lethal sort of annoyances, often happening earlier in our lives, the PCos, infertility, the erectile dysfunction, the gout, the belly fat, the being overweight, the depression, the anxiety, you know, the rising liver function tests, all of these things are these subtle whispers from our cells that they're not getting what they need. Something's not right. And most likely the bad energy trifecta is starting to rear its head so that we can see those signals for what they are and realize that they may come as much, much louder warning signs later in life.

The overt diagnoses, the high blood pressure, the high cholesterol, the diabetes, the heart disease, and then ultimately, the things that are going to kill us, the Alzheimer's, dementia, the stroke, the heart attack, the chronic liver disease, the kidney failure. And so understanding this good energy spectrum, the bad energy spectrum, and orienting ourselves towards that, hopefully pushing our doctors to orient more towards that I truly believe can be totally life saving. And we of course, obviously don't want people to have to go through that type of experience that my mother and our family and her poor father and so many other people are dealing with. Almost everyone I know has some story like that, and I think we need a real reframe in what's going on. Every family out there is dealing with it.

Dhru Purohit
You look at the stats, right? 50% of us, you live long enough, 50% of us will be touched by cancer, unfortunately. And the way you outline the story in the book, and the way that you've kept your mother's legacy alive, both of you, in the advocacy, the sounding alarm, because there's so many people that don't have the resources, there's so many people that are out there that they're never listening to podcasts. They're just simply trying to provide, you know, work, provide food for their family. And they're trusting on the people that have a voice, they're trusting on the medical system, they're trusting on politicians, whether they realize it or not, to try to at least create an environment that leads to health.

Instead, it seems that we've done the exact opposite. If we literally wanted to manufacture disease, we've done a great job. We've created the perfect environment, which has led to an incredible amount of suffering, including your mom's journey. Many of the people who are listening, their own family members as well, too. And it doesn't have to be that way.

It doesn't have to be that way. It's not complicated. Sure. Is it going to be tough? Absolutely.

But it's not complicated. And it's going to require all of us sounding alarm, becoming aware and deciding that we want a different future. Right. But in that process, we're going to be up against a little bit of noise. That's the nature of stuff.

And within even the health community, one of the biggest things that a lot of people feel is, look, glucose, this item, that item, it's all about the calories. And if we just got people to not overeat, we'd be in a situation where you can thrive on McDonald's, you can thrive on these ultra processed foods, they're not going to go away. And we're creating all sorts of challenges for people when we tell them to pay attention to all this other stuff and callie, a big part of your message recently has been, good luck. Good luck trying not to overeat when you are indoctrinated into the world of ultra processed foods. Yeah, I call in the peer reviewed data fetishists who say, oh, well, the 91% diet and ultra processed food is fine.

Calley Means
That can be healthy. If you do your 2000 calorie trips at McDonald's, that's healthy. Um, they're kind of useful idiots for the ultra processed food industry. And I think, here's the key thing, and I think. I think the key thing missing from this debate is in the 1980s, Philip Morris was the fifth largest company in the world.

Cigarettes, cigarette company, and the surgeon general, decades too late, kind of started speaking out about smoking. It was very societally important. Everyone was addicted. A similar dynamics we talked about late. They talked out that that industry declined.

The cigarette companies started buying food companies, and they started transferring all their scientists over to the food companies. So food companies, starting in the nineties, started employing tens of thousands of scientists. They're actually one of the largest employers of phds of any industry. So you have a literally army of scientists starting in the early 1990s, literally weaponizing food. And by rigging the regulations with the food pyramid, our diet started exploding more towards ultra processed food.

The food pyramid was underpinned by research from Harvard, funded by the Sugar Research Council. They didn't even try to hide the names back then. Completely corrupt research saying sugar doesn't cause obesity, and a calorie is a calorie type stuff. So the key thing of this debate about, like, like this whole debate that people try to get into this minutia, you know, of looking at the data, it ignores the fact that we've let the system become corrupted by literally weaponized food. Literally food.

Where you have addiction experts and dopamine experts making the food, like, literally designed to make us eat more of it. Um, so that's why calorie consumption has gone up. Calorie consumption has gone up because we've shifted our diet to ultra processed food, which is literally weaponized with a smart, smartest scientists in the world to make us eat more. So the key lesson goes back to the same thing. We need to reduce ultra processed food.

That should be the foundation of health and nutrition policy in this country. Literally. If we. I'm not, I'm not being facetious here. If we literally cut the billions of dollars we spend on researching chronic disease pharmaceutical solutions to zero, and literally fired every single nutrition scientist in the country to tomorrow, and cut the nutrition research budget to $0 and had one guideline which is to limit ultra processed food, which is to take the 65% of our diet right now and get that down to 15, 20%.

Like Japan, where they live seven to eight years longer than Americans. It would transform society. I believe that chronic disease research that the found that most, uh, actually academic research that happens around chronic diseases at us universities and nutrition research, it's a net negative on society. It literally can be that one simple principle, because ultra processed food absolutely is covered in thousands of, uh, toxins and ingredients and things like glyphosate that destroy our microbiome and hurt ourselves and hurt our bodies in ways we don't even fully understand. In ways in 100 years when, if we're still around and look back, it's going to be a scandal what we're doing to ourselves and the, and the manufacturers manufactured garbage in this food.

But even if it's perfect, right, it's weaponized to have us eat more. That's the foundation of everything. That's what we talk about in the book. And I just think, I just want to end on that or like, like push that point again. Um, this is not hard.

You know, as you said, I'm been, it's been very rewarding to be pulled into some advocacy work. I think there's a real opportunity, um, for executive orders and policy change. And it's not that complicated. Stop subsidizing ultra processed food. Stop recommending it.

The USDA recommends it. The USDA says that a two year old should eat 10% of their diet up to that amount and added sugar of their calories. 10%. The USD is recommending added sugar to two year olds. We're subsidizing it.

We've talked about the agriculture subsidies, but we, you know, 90 plus percent of agriculture subsidies goes to components of ultra processed food. So we're literally like doing things to prop this up. And those can be, those can be chipped away extremely quickly. We can tomorrow say that NIH grants can't go to researchers with conflicts of interest, that have a vested interest in more of our sick care system and are being paid by pharma companies studying the exact drug for the treatment of the research that they're doing, funded by the. That could be tomorrow, there could be an executive order on that.

So that's our key thing. It is simple. Cut ultra processed food. It's weaponized to make us eat more. I would just add on to that.

Casey Means
There was an amazing study by Kevin hall at the NIH. You're probably familiar with that was looking at what processed food versus unprocessed food does to the amount of calories that we consume. And he basically put people into essentially like prison in the NIH. And basically they could not leave. And for two weeks they were given an ultra processed food diet, which actually they showed picture of it in the studies.

And it was like, pretty. Just looked like a normal american diet. It was like a turkey sandwich on white bread and orange juice and some cookies on the side. And a lot of people would look at that and be like, oh yeah, that's just like a normal diet. But it was technically based on the Nova classifications, an ultra processed food diet.

And then they took all those people, put them on that for two weeks, and then for two weeks they put them all on a whole foods diet. So, um, or minimally processed diet. So maybe it would be whole grain bread, milk, water, um, freshly roasted turkey, as opposed to deli meat turkey. And what they saw was just so simple. In the two weeks that the people were eating the ultra processed food diet, they ate 500 more calories per day and nothing would.

They weren't controlled at all on what they ate. They just were able to eat whatever they want. They ate 500 calories more per day and they gained, um, 2.2 kg during that week. And then they lost it during the week. They were eating whole foods.

So their bodies, when they were eating the real food, just knew how to self regulate. And this is a point that we make in the book. We present six principles about how to eat that really are applicable to every type of dietary strategy, from vegan to carnivore. And one of the messages, one of the strategies is that hunger and cravings are a sign of you giving your body mixed messages. You essentially confusing your body.

Insatiable hunger. Insatiable cravings is just a clear sign from your cells that you are not giving them what they need to think they can stop eating. So if you are being driven to eat more and insatiable calories, it's because your cells are not getting the actual thing that they need. And this is where whole foods is just like really the answer. And I'd like to just share sort of like three aspects of this that I think.

Bring it home, please. One is that satiety. While it's a complicated science with multiple hormones, it's actually pretty simple. The cells in our gut are nutrient sensing cells, and when they sense the nutrients they need, they release satiety hormones and it stops us from eating. It's literally that simple.

If you're eating ultra processed garbage. The nutrient sensing cells of the gut, like the ones that produce endogenous glp one, they will produce that hormone and you will not be driven to eat. So the craving and the desire for more is just really the body saying that it's not getting what it needs to know to secrete the hormone to tell you to stop eating whole foods is the answer for that. When you eat unprocessed real food, that comes ideally from very good soil, because the soil is what's going to inject the food with the maximal nutrients, you're going to signal to the body to produce the hormones that just get you to totally evaporate the hunger. Which is why a lot of people in the health space can be so annoying.

Like, I don't even crave that. I don't even want that. I love this food. It's because they literally don't want it because their body's producing, squirting out the hormones that make you not want it. That's the satiety hormones.

So that's why real food on one element is the answer. The second reason is because when we eat real unprocessed food, it is going to digest slower and it's going to cause lower glucose spikes in the bloodstream. And we know that big glucose spikes, which are primarily caused by eating the ultra fine grains and the ultra fine sugars, huge spike in the bloodstream, they are often followed by a crash that's called postprandial hypoglycemia. There was a study in nature medicine in the past two years that basically showed that postprandial crash, which will be larger and more significant if the spike before it was extremely high. That crash predicts how much cravings for carbohydrates we're going to have in the next 24 hours, and how many calories we're going to consume.

And it makes sense if you are crashing your blood sugar because your body's overcompensating for a huge spike. It's going to be like a fear signal for the body. Oh, my God, my blood sugar is plummeting. We got to bring it back up. I'm going to drive you.

I'm going to just, you know, get in your brain and hijack you to go seek out high carbohydrate food to bring the blood sugar back up to a normal level because it's afraid. So the way to circumvent that is to eat real food filled with fiber, filled with protein, filled with healthy fats, that doesn't spike your glucose, keep the spike more stable, so the crash is less so you don't get hijacked to dry and seek out more high sugar food. And the third piece is the impact of the microbiome. Like Callie mentioned, when we, we eat unprocessed food, where there is the whole form of the fiber and there are, you know, the proteins and just the whole food complex in harmony, it feeds the microbiome. We know the microbiome likes two different types of food.

They like fiber and they like polyphenols. Polyphenols are plant chemicals, there's thousands of them, and they're going to be found in the colorful organic fruits and vegetables that you find at the farmer's market. If we feed the microbiome fiber and polyphenols, they will produce literal chemicals that help us not be as hungry. So it's just, you know, you've got these forces at play. You've got the men in the suits, at the men and women in the suits at the JP Morgan conference, you've got the people doing all the most advanced biotech research about food and CRISPR, and this.

And it all seems so complicated. It's actually not that complicated. It's literally as simple as buying the highest quality whole food you can. Learning how to prepare it. Eat fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, meat, fish, eggs, legumes, beans, as many spices as possible.

Learn how to prepare them. Your body will know it's getting what it's need, what it needs. It will totally circumvent the cravings and you will not overeat like every other animal species on the entire planet, except. For dogs and cats, because they eat ultra processed food and they get all the same diseases. Cancer, diabetes, depression.

Dhru Purohit
Depression. There are dogs with continuous glucose monitors walking around. Now, this is ridiculous. It's cause we're feeding them our ultra processed crap and so they're eating themselves to death. Yeah, it's mind boggling.

And it could seem complicated, just like anything when you grew up in that system. It's hard to see it. It's hard to see it. Just like you were talking about that study that Kevin hall did. Most people would look at that food, the ultra processed food, white bread, deli meat.

Highly processed deli meat, right? There's some better versions of deli meat that are out there, but highly processed deli meat, some cheese, right? Whatever else they put along with it, they look at that and say, that's not too bad, because when they think ultra processed foods, they're imagining, I don't know, like a banana split from Doritos. Doritos, sure, that might be an extreme example, but ultra processed food is exactly. It is exactly that.

That's the thing that's there. It's like the example I use is like, you go down here in LA, down to Hollywood Boulevard, or you go to Times Square and you stop the average person, you say, do you eat healthy? And most people are going to say, yeah, yeah, I'm healthy. Because their definition of healthy is, you know, they know somebody that drinks a liter of Coca Cola every day and they're only having a can, or they know somebody who drinks, who smokes a pack of cigarettes a week and they only have, you know, three cigarettes a week. So they feel, because it's been so normalized, that they're doing a much better job than the most egregious.

And yes, that might be true, but that still doesn't mean that that lifestyle is producing health. The lifestyle that you describe, which you go into much more detail in the book. There's a whole. My favorite section of the book is there's an entire step by step plan that you walk people through that they can follow. That is literally how many day journey is it?

28 day journey that they can use to completely transform their life. So if anybody's looking for the actual, like, baby, like, hold my hand. I'm new to this. Give me the baby steps, which is food is part of it, but it's these other factors that you mentioned in the environment, sunlight, right. Fresh air, movement, etcetera, that's all part of this program.

This is literally the handholding, the baby steps to walk you through the process. Anybody can do it. The only question is and why. I'm so thankful that we use so much of this interview to talk about the problem is that if you do not understand the problem, you will not be motivated enough to seek the solution. If you do not understand how bad it is and what is in store for you and how much money and how much effort and how much suffering is concentrated in the last few weeks, months, years of people's lives.

It does not have to be that way. There's a different future that's there. Uh, guys, this episode was fantastic. I'm going to turn it over to both of you as we're winding down here for just any final thoughts, messages that you want to leave the audience with, anything that you felt that we didn't talk about, that you want to make sure that the audience gets even though it can feel like doom and gloom, which, again, if the house is on fire, I want to know. Scare me.

Tell me the house is on fire. So either I could put the fire out or get the hell out of it, or call the fire department or whatever other analogy that's out there. So I'll turn it over to you, Callie, and then we'll go to Casey. The job of the food and pharma industries is to confuse you. You have to understand that they want you confused.

Calley Means
Even this discussion. There's many folks that are in the health ecosystem, but even in this, the podcast circuit, and in the health sphere, there's incentives to make things complicated. There's incentives to argue over different protocols for eating or different protocols for exercise. Like, what we talk about in this book is that it really is simple. There's not a lot of people who are losing their way by exercising 180 minutes a week, you know, but not doing the right zone two verse hit, you know, uh, difference.

You know, we have bashing people for, like, the wrong health, uh, fitness protocols. That's not the problem. The problem is just getting started, right? We have this war on the different dietary protocols, but there's not many people that are eating only 10% of our diet, ultra processed food, that are really, I think, losing their way. Right.

You just have to start with the simple principles. And the key is that then leads to an individual journey of curiosity. We're all on it. Many, most listeners are on it. It's a very rewarding thing.

It's a very rewarding thing, I think, actually, very spiritual issue. To take a little bit more autonomy and do a little bit more critical thinking for the core principles you're exerting for yourself and your kids, potentially unlearning a lot of things we've been taught over the years. And the job of us public policy should be to foster that individualized path of curiosity, not bashing Americans over their head. To listen to the science. When we're becoming fatter, sicker, more depressed, more infertile, that's what's happening.

We're going off of a cliff and being told to trust the driver with a car. So that's just number one. You are trying to be confused, and it's so bad, there's actually less risk than we think to question our pediatrician when it comes to preventing chronic conditions for our children. How can it get much worse? It's really, really bad right now to take our metabolic habits into our own hands again.

I just want to end this with this and be very clear. Clear. If you have an acute issue that's going to kill you. Go to the doctor 100% if you have a complicated childbirth, if you're going like an imminent threat of death, the medical system is a miracle. But we have to see this as an empowering message that there needs to be a bottoms up revolution that continues of taking our chronic disease management into our own hands, of questioning the doctor when they try to put you on the statin, on the metformin and get you on that protocol.

Question your pediatrician when they try to jam Ozempic in your twelve year old's arm, which is going to happen to millions and millions and millions of kids very soon, right? We've got to have the courage to stand up when it comes to managing chronic conditions. And there are simple principles, which I think, due to Casey's genius, it's the best conventional of those principles in this book. Um, but, but go on that path of curiosity. Question the system on chronic disease.

Casey Means
I think, for me, what I want to leave the listeners with is that the future of health, the future of humanity, the future of, I think the planet is very hopeful. It's very bright. We have actually all the answers to turn things around and to have the most beautiful future possible. And I think the key foundational element of how that's going to happen is by moving away from silos and moving towards connection. And I think there's four main ways that we have to move towards connection to really turn the ship of what's happening in our world right now.

First, we need to recognize the connection between pretty much every symptom and disease that we are facing today. That connection is metabolic dysfunction, it's mitochondrial dysfunction. And we need to learn how to support, nurture, and have compassion for ourselves in mitochondria and help them heal. The second is that we need to realize the connection between us and everything else in the cosmos. We are a the human body, the Taoist said, you know, the human body, life is, it's a process, not an entity.

We think of ourselves as these things that are separate from everything. But in reality, we are swirling hives of energy and matter that are constantly turning over and rebuilding themselves throughout our whole lifetime, constantly dying and being reborn on the cellular and molecular level, and constantly exchanging matter and energy with the air, the soil, the bacteria, the sun, and it's beautiful. So really recognizing that we are actually in dynamic interconnection with everything in a huge interdependent ecosystem, and we are not separate from any of it and respecting everything around us all planetary health is actually respecting ourselves the third piece of connection is realizing the critical importance for our core cellular biology and hormonal regulation of being with other people in person that we trust and love. So actually getting off the screens, getting out of the four walls of our homes, connecting and loving, trusting relationships in person, we unfortunately got a little brainwashed in COVID to think that it was acceptable to be by ourselves and to socially isolate. And we've now seen the results of that experiment.

It's very dark, it's very bad. So many mental health issues skyrocketed. Domestic violence, depression, suicide. And we need to come back together, we need to eat together, we need to see our people, we need to build community in person, like we're doing right here today. And the fourth, and maybe the most important piece of connection is understanding the eternal cycle of life and death in a constant, constant cycle that really will go on for eternity.

We are, like I said, we are a process, not an entity. And I think when we have a deeper spiritual curiosity about our true nature as humans, as really, I would say, get in touch with the spiritual side of our lives and realize that this paradigm of life and then death, that the western system has really beat into us, and the whole system of healthcare being predicated on avoidance of death, is actually hurting us. Because by weaponizing our fear of this binary death, the system is getting you to do anything, buy anything, anything to relieve your existential pain. And I think when we actually turn to sort of more traditional wisdom, indigenous wisdom, eastern wisdom, the great thinkers, the poets, the Lao Tzu, the Mary Oliver, the Rumi, the Seneca, the Marcus Aurelius, everyone that has stood the dust of time has examined this relationship, this connection and eternal flow of life and death. Just like winter turns into spring, we have to have these cycles for the world to go on, and we're a part of that, and that's beautiful, and it's nothing to be afraid of.

And when you are existentially fearful of death, the system can control you. So we need to truly examine that and understand our true, eternal, limitless nature and take comfort in that power. So I think the future is going to be a connection instead of silos on every level, and we can all take steps to bring that world into fruition. Powerful. The book is out.

Dhru Purohit
Obviously we have a link in the show notes. Good energy. We have a screenshot here on YouTube for the people that are watching. Link in the show notes for audio. Also a website set up for it as well.

Casey Means
Yeah. Caseymeans.com Goodenergy Callie means on the socials trumad.com. Amazing. My company. Yeah.

Levelshealth.com for my company. Can we give a little plug can. We give a little plug to both companies? Because I think the work you guys are doing and fully transparency, always give transparency. I'm an investor in both of the companies that you guys founded.

Dhru Purohit
Huge fan of those companies and you guys individually. So of course, first and foremost, the book, it's available where all books are sold. Good energy. You can find that link in the show notes. Anything fun that's happening around the book or pre order or anything like that, they can stay tuned on your website.

Casey Means
Stay tuned. Follow your brother sister tirade here. Yes. On the warpath. Okay.

Dhru Purohit
Okay. Let's give a shout out to the businesses you guys have found. Because those are my highest hope is this. People listen to not just this episode, but this podcast, other podcasts, they, they, they wake up and they get, first and foremost, themselves healthy. Right?

That's the first step. When you get yourself healthy and you wake up from the system, the next thing that everybody wants to do, you guys have all done it. I've done it as well. You want to get your family healthy to the best degree you can. You want to make better choices to spread that on.

Then people start to ask questions. They say, what can I do for my community or the larger community that's out there? And some individuals get excited and say, let me be that change and let me go start something. Because technology has to be part of the thing that makes it easier for people to be healthy, to have better data, to make better choices, to be able to use their money, to actually spend it on health. And both of you have worked on and have launched businesses that are out there.

So, Callie, I'll start with you. Yeah, just true med. Just a quick plug for it and where people can go if they want to participate in it. Yeah. Trumed, we asked, what if we could drive HSAFSA medical dollars to athletic greens, daily harvest, CrossFit, Ketone IQ, HVM, which I always have, these iconic health and wellness companies that are fighting to do the right things.

Calley Means
You can buy those products with medical dollars, and you need a note from a doctor to explain how those products can help prevent or reverse a condition. We make that process very seamless, and it takes the high level of what we're talking about. And it is one way to fix those incentive issues. You can save 30, 40% if you're trying to prevent a chronic condition that these items help with on these issues. It helps bend the cost curve and fix the broken incentives, working with, um, hundreds of great brands and like the ones I mentioned and, uh, trumed.com.

And we're just trying to make it super easy to steer medical dollars to true, uh, medicine. Yeah, people have no idea, but there's billions of dollars that are just sitting. In these 150 billion. 150 billion just sitting in these HSA FSA accounts that are literally doing nothing. Maybe sometimes people can use it on acupuncture.

Dhru Purohit
If they find an acupuncturist, they can take it. Contact lenses or this, but you can actually use it for real health and to help yourself get healthy. Amazing. We'll have the link in the show notes Casey. Yes.

Casey Means
So I'm a co founder of Levels Health, and the mission of levels health is to reverse the metabolic disease epidemic. Lofty goal, but we believe this is possible by people truly understanding how the food and lifestyle choices they're making are affecting their health in real time. And we can do this today, now with a biosensor called a continuous glucose monitor. There is a technology that exists that you can put on your arm that can tell you in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, exactly what's happening to your blood sugar after every bite of food you take, after the exercise you do after a good or poor night's sleep. And give you that instant feedback to understand whether the choices you're making are supporting your metabolic health or not.

Because glucose is such a key readout and biomarker of metabolism, and so levels enables access to people who want to understand their own bodies better with continuous glucose monitor technology and software that helps you interpret all those different variables and really make sense of it. We also have other products, like at home lab testing, that it can allow you to get all your key biomarkers done to understand your own metabolic health with deep interpretations from medical experts in the field, like Rob Lustig, mark Hyman, um, and really take ownership of those lab testing through simple blood tests, and we make that very, very affordable. And you don't need to beg your doctor for those tests. And you can do it several times per year if you'd like. So, lab testing, access to biosensors, and just one of the richest cannons of top notch metabolic health information and education on our website@levelshealth.com, blog, and our YouTube channel, which is levelshealth.

Dhru Purohit
Yeah, you guys do such an incredible job. It's been a game changer for my own family. I have one of my best friends sitting in the audience today to watch the podcast me here. Shout out to my buddy. Me here.

He's used it. I've used it. My dad, it was huge. For my dad. It was huge.

When you see the food that you're eating on a daily basis and how it's connected to that sense of that sort of afternoon slump, especially. That was a huge eye opener for my dad, who generally thought, like, he eats very healthy, and he does. It's just that he might have been having certain foods out of order at the wrong time and too much quantity, and he didn't have to, like, radically change it. He just shifted the quantity a little bit, shifted the order a little bit, and personalized his diet. And now he feels like he's thriving and has a ton of energy throughout the day.

So, final thoughts that I want to share here. As somebody who works with his own family, both my sisters, who are amazing, shout out to Hershel and Kaya. I am just so inspired by the two of you. I let you know all the time. I've texted you on multiple occasions saying, like, this brother and sister duo, this tag team that you guys have and how you've taken true suffering, knowing the story of your mom and you having shared it today and everything that your family's gone into, and you've said that we cannot let it end here.

We cannot let this be the end of her legacy. There's a message that's there. There is an important conversation that needs to happen so that other families don't have to go through this or potentially don't have to go through this. And this book. Good energy is truly the broadcast of this incredible energy that the two of you have.

And I just want to say that I look up to both of you individually, but I also look up to both of you together as siblings who are truly changing healthcare as we see it. Thank you both for being on the podcast today. Thank you, Drew.

Hi, everyone. Drew here, two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me.

And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with a friend. Share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called try this. Every Friday.

Yes, every Friday. 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy to digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is by the way, free, and get my weekly step by step protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called try this, or just go to druprowit.com that's dash rupurohit.com and click on the tab that says try this.