The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #260 - Casey Means, MD

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

Melanie Avalon:
Hi friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation I'm about to have. I have been really, really looking forward to this. So the backstory on today's conversation, you guys know, in the whole biohacking health wearable metric world, one of the things I am most obsessed with would be continuous glucose monitors. I'm often talking about them. I love wearing CGM's. They basically give you a essentially 24 hour picture of your blood sugar levels measured. Now I'm going on tangents measured through your interstitial fluid in your cells. But in any case, I have had the company levels on the show in the past, and they actually provide access to consumers to get CGM's and you don't have to go through a doctor, you just go through the company and they have this awesome app where you can really see your blood sugar levels, find patterns and trends. And it's really, really just incredible. And I can't recommend it enough. So I have had on the show in the past, the co founder of levels Casey Means. And a while ago now I'm not exactly sure when but her team reached out because they said she was coming out with a book. So I was so, so excited. The book is called good energy, the surprising connection between metabolism and limitless health. So I of course was an immediate yes when I got that email. I was like, yes, let her please come on. And then reading the book. Oh my goodness, friends, it was absolutely incredible. So I was wondering if it was basically going to be a book about continuous glucose monitors. It is not it is not just that it is a deep, deep dive into Casey's hypothesis about basically the root cause of disease today. And it really all goes back to ourselves and this concept of surprise, good energy, which we can dive deep into. But there's just so much in here. Casey talks all about that. She talks about all the lifestyle diet factors that affect it that the problems with our medical system today and how it's set up. There's there's recipes, there's stuff on sleep and stress. And there's just so much in here. Of course, there's information on CGMs as well. So I am so excited. I cannot wait to dive in Casey. Thank you so much for being here.

Casey Means:
Oh, thank you for that amazing introduction, Melanie. It's amazing, and I love it because we do have so much history through levels and being on the podcast in the past, so this feels full circle and wonderful.

Melanie Avalon:
We were talking before this about the book cover is absolutely beautiful. When I got it in the mail, I was like, Oh my goodness. You just want to stare at it with all the colors. I'm super curious about like the aesthetics and people's role in the creative design. Were you involved in that a lot, the cover, or did they kind of pick it for you?

Casey Means:
The publisher definitely takes lead on the cover and I had, you know, I had a lot of vision for the cover of, you know, maybe having some sort of stylized mitochondria or something like that. And ultimately the cover we landed with, which I am so in love with, is basically like a flow of some really beautiful colors. I love color. I'm a very colorful dresser. To me, you know, what it really represents is this unbridled flow of energy, which is really what our metabolism is all about. And it's something that when it's going well, like when we have good energy and we're doing metabolic processes properly, it is a beautiful end result, right? We do get that vibrant, happy, creative, peaceful life that we want because when our bodies are powered well, we ourselves do that incredible work to give us these beautiful lives. And I think to me, you know, it's almost, I really credit the publisher to having a bigger vision for things than really actually just granularly illustrating what the book is about because I think a lot of it is more energetic. It's really like, what is the spirit of what the cover represents? And now having looked at it, you know, every day, all day for the past year, I'm like, wow, this really evokes exactly what I was trying to say. The end result of metabolic function, which is ourselves being powered to be able to give us the most colorful, free -flowing, energetic life possible.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that so much. I literally was reflecting on the cover before this interview and I was thinking when I look at it, like the feeling it creates in me is good energy. Like that's the feeling that's created. So I love hearing all of that. Also while we're still talking about production and everything, you narrate the audiobook. What was that experience like?

Casey Means:
It was really powerful. It was about four days, and it's in a studio in LA, which is such a cool experience for a first -timer. And you're in a tiny little studio, but I think what was so meaningful to me is that the book is in my voice. The book is, it really honors my mother, who unfortunately represents what I think a lot of American patients are going through, which is someone who is dependent on the healthcare system, but ultimately let down by it, you know, someone who has managed over the course of decades but never healed and paid the ultimate price for the healthcare system's blind spots to root cause metabolic health, which is that she died far prematurely from a spectrum of conditions that, you know, ultimately, all were on the metabolic spectrum and ultimately led to her premature death far too soon. And so to be able, so much of my mother's story weaves throughout the book, and to be able to read that in this quiet room, very focused for four days, you know, thinking about her story, thinking about the healthcare system, thinking about what's going wrong with our culture over the past, you know, so many years of my life, that four days to just say it all out loud in my own voice in a way that I'm hope will turn into something that can serve other people was an extremely powerful experience for me. Because, you know, you never read the whole book in one sitting over the course of four days. And so it's like, it's more over in small chunks. So it both was meaningful, meaningful personally, but also felt like a deep connection with my mother. I had a picture of my mother with me the whole time that I was reading the audio book because it's really in her honor that I share this with the world to hopefully prevent, you know, some of the tragedies, unfortunately, playing out in so many people's lives today in America with how our lifestyle is crushing our cellular health.

Melanie Avalon:
That's so, so powerful and so did you write it with your brother?

Casey Means:
I did. My brother is my co -author, Callie Means. And yeah, we wrote this book together and the really forced to get it launched happened in the days after her death. So she died about three and a half years ago at this point. Yeah. And he, you know, he's, his history is actually, he was a healthcare and pharma lobbyist. So he was on the other side of the spectrum back in the day. And he sort of, so he had the inside the room sort of experience of how dark some of these, you know, forces are that are essentially causing, you know, our unhealthy food to be cheaper. And for our whole healthcare system to be focused on, you know, sort of more a reactive sick care approach that really pushes meds and surgery. And so he saw that, you know, throughout his early career. And then ultimately went to business school as an entrepreneur. Then when, and I, I was of course on my journey as a surgeon and really kind of having my disillusionment with the conventional healthcare system, leaving the surgical world towards really understanding the root cause of why Americans are sick. And, but my brother, it was my mom's experience at the end of her life with the healthcare system and just seeing the devastating ineptitude of our system's ability to put the pieces together on root cause health and just how it swings into action once people are lethally sick, but is sort of nowhere to be found when it comes to helping people prevent disease or keep them thriving. It was such a wake up call for him of sort of putting all the pieces together of his professional experience and mine. And we decided together that we were going to bring this book into the world to really help illustrate what is so broken about our healthcare system and our food system and our agriculture system and how they're all unfortunately guided by a big set of very, very backwards incentives that are controlling the American economy and are dependent on us being sick and dependent really. And so he came at it more from that economics business policy history that he had and then really being woken up by the direct experience of my mom being so failed by the system. And so we came together to bring this to the world and hopefully help start really some more awareness and a movement about how everything is actually so connected between our food and our healthcare and our soil and what's happening with our children, the same spectrum of disease that's underlying a lot of what our children are suffering from are the same things that are causing premature illness and old age. And so that's really what the mission was to come together, honor my mother and hopefully spread some awareness to this big blind spot in our system.

Melanie Avalon:
Wow. You guys really make a perfect team. And we didn't even dive yet into your background, which is, you know, all throughout the book with being a physician and your experience there. So you have, you know, an incredible background with the actual medical system. Just to comment really quickly on the pancreatic cancer. It was really surreal timing reading your book because like when I opened it to the first page and saw the dedication to your mother and the note about pancreatic cancer, it was actually when my aunt had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. So she was going through that she probably I think she actually passed away while I was reading your book. So it was like really, really appropriate timing and similar to your mom's experience. She also chose to do, you know, care at home, not do the chemo continue with the chemo and everything in the hospital. I just think it's so, so important to spread awareness about how, you know, things don't have to necessarily be this way. I think one of the most powerful things actually that I because we're, you know, we're talking a lot about the medical system right now. And I don't want to paint it all doom and gloom about about everything. I think one of the most powerful things I read was you were saying basically, and this had never occurred to me that basically the medical system because it's very, very successful with, you know, acute cases of medical issues like surgeries and, and, you know, life saving medicine and things like that. And you were saying that basically they take the trust of that, and then they transfer it to chronic conditions where all of those systems don't exactly work. And I just thought that was, you know, a really brilliant concept. What are your thoughts on, this is an interesting note to the medical systems and the authority power hierarchy at play that you talk about a lot.

Casey Means:
Like you said, this is not all about doom and gloom with the healthcare system. We really are speaking very specifically about these chronic lifestyle conditions that have cropped up over the past 100 years and that are now the leading cause of disability and death in our population from children to adults to elderly. So these largely preventable conditions that are long -term, i .e. chronic, rooted in diet and lifestyle, have become the thing that are... 85, 90% of our healthcare dollars are going to. These things have sprung up in relationship to a changing modern industrial convenience culture world that is basically crushing our cellular health. And where the healthcare system in America is so incredible, like you said, is these acute issues. These are issues that would immediately kill you that are not caused by diet and lifestyle. They're caused by, unfortunately, random things that happen that are unfortunate and need swift, often extreme medical interventions. So this is a life -threatening infection. This is a very complicated childbirth. This is a trauma, a car accident, something like that. That is where we can intervene and save a life. And that's incredible. That's miraculous. And these types of acute interventions, infectious disease control and just general hygiene have extended lifespan a lot over the past 150 years. But what has cropped up with our convenience culture, modern industrial urbanized living is a whole different biology of disease, totally different. It's diseases that emerge slowly over time. And what we've done is we said, okay, well, if a medicine works for an extreme infection, and that can save a life, well, we should give a medicine for these symptoms and diseases that are cropping up over here now. But the issue is, is that it wasn't a medication deficiency that caused the heart disease or the diabetes or the obesity or the Alzheimer's dementia. It's cumulative damage to our bodies over the course of years from this new world that we're living in. And it's so illogical really to think, oh, that a pill would ameliorate the impact of several factors of our environment that's over time hurting ourselves. But then the sort of dark part is that from a business perspective, chronic conditions being medicalized rather than treated with more of a gentle dietary and lifestyle approach, it's incredibly profitable. Because our system, the financial reality of our healthcare system right now, and interesting note, the healthcare system is the largest industry in the United States. It's the largest industry in the United States. It's also the fastest growing industry in the United States. It's a big, big, big business that employs tens of millions of people. It's a business which, like all other businesses, is designed to grow. How does it grow with the current financial model? It grows by more people in the system having more things done to them, being seen by more doctors over a longer period of time. Because it's basically a fee -for -service model where everyone gets paid if more things are happening to more patients. So volume and intervention is profitable. Well, unfortunately, chronic disease then becomes a cash cow. Because if you can kind of get people into the system and just sort of manage them for years and decades, highly profitable. If someone totally changes their diet and lifestyle, heals their condition, creates different conditions for their cells in which they can thrive, that's essentially a lost customer. So you know so many doctors just like I do, and healthcare practitioners, they're all great people. Everyone I know who's gone into medicine is a good person who wants to help. But we have a system that has bad incentives that unfortunately is currently really benefiting off of chronic disease management rather than true healing. And just like if you had a sick fish in a totally dirty, polluted, gray water tank, you would not medicate that fish for its entire life. You would put that fish in different water. You'd clean the water. And that's the opposite of how we're approaching healthcare right now. So that's sort of the acute chronic issue. How does this relate then to patient agency? Because that is the reality of the healthcare system right now, we need to all go into it and interact with it with eyes wide open and with a sense of deep empowerment and understand where the blind spots are so that we can make choices in our own lives to lead to the best life that we can possibly have. Because there's wonderful things that you can get from the healthcare system and from a doctor and support. But when it comes to foundationally healing these symptoms and conditions that are rooted in diet and lifestyle, which is the majority of things people are suffering from and dying from in the US today, we need to take ownership for that piece of the puzzle that is changing the conditions around our bodies and what goes into our bodies because the healthcare system just isn't focused on it. And as a doctor, I would say we're not even trained to understand things like nutrition or exercise physiology or sleep hygiene. I mean, really not at all. So we need to not be waiting for the healthcare system to hand us the answer and just take real ownership over that aspect of our lives. And the beautiful part about this moment in history is that there are, because we can access the healthcare system, we can actually get from it what we need to understand our core foundational cellular health. For instance, asking our doctor for specific lab tests, using direct -to -consumer lab companies to get the labs we want to get, using things like biowarables, like continuous glucose monitors so you can understand your metabolic health, using other wearables so you can understand your respiratory rate, your resting heart rate, your sleep structure, your activity level, all these things that are key factors about our health. And then just essentially have a much deeper picture of our health than we've ever had before human history. But we just need to know how to basically understand the system we're working with, understand its incentives and blind spots, understand what matters, what we need to know to understand our foundational health, and then be the advocates for ourselves to get that information, track that information, and understand what it means so we can make better choices. That's the shift that has to happen with the average American patient, is not being blindly dependent on the healthcare system to guide their path, but to engage with it with that sense of agency that can actually let us have, I think, the happiest and healthiest lives in human history. But again, eyes open, taking more ownership, understanding what matters and how to improve it.

Melanie Avalon:
I love it so much and for listeners, you know, they might be making practically the steps to take. How do I actually do that? One of the things I really, really love about your book is you go through all of these actual markers that we should be looking at to monitor our health and, you know, what the conventional ranges are, what the ideal ranges are. So you literally have like a map, like a guide map to what you should be testing, either be it with your conventional doctor or if you need to go through, you know, some sort of online system where you can get those labs, but it's just, it's really, really practical and helpful. So there are, there are steps to follow for people to do this. And just another quick comment, something crazy about the whole paradigm with the medical system is it's really, you talk about this in the book, it's really ironic that like with prescriptions and pills and things, like we have a definition of medicine, I actually, actually wrote it down. So you're talking about how medicine ignores, I wrote this down from your book, medicine ignores food as an intervention, even though food is literally made of thousands of phytochemicals with molecular information, which is basically the definition of medicine. So it's so ironic that it's like there's all this potential there in the system, but it's just focused on the wrong, like the wrong places. Okay, not to go on a tangent, try not to go on a tangent, but I'm super curious. What do you think about something like, like ozepic or, you know, GLP1 agonists where people might take a pill, and it creates this seemingly lifestyle shift where they're eating less and losing weight, you know, and getting healthier, what are your thoughts on that as like a springboard into health or if it's an ongoing basis?

Casey Means:
I think it's a complex issue because when you think about an individual patient who may be so unfortunately at the mercy of the culture that we live in and has gotten really far down a deep health struggle hole, and this medication, like you said, can help springboard them to more sort of a jump start. For the individual patient, that possibly can be really helpful, and especially if it's paired with using that motivation and increased level of health to transform their environment, to actually fundamentally lead to holistic cellular health. Where it's a problem is that it is being promoted as the public health solution for obesity and for type 2 diabetes, which it is not, because both obesity and type 2 diabetes are not the problem, they are a symptom of the problem. They are a symptom of the problem, which is cellular dysfunction and specifically metabolic dysfunction, a problem with how our body makes, transforms, utilizes energy, the most foundational process in the body that is broken in 93 .2% of Americans. Diabetes is a branch of that tree, obesity is a branch of that tree, Alzheimer's dementia is a branch of that tree, infertility, PCOS is a branch of that tree, erectile dysfunction, depression, anxiety, gout, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, migraines, I could go on and on and on and on, heart disease, stroke, in many cases cancer, like all of the conditions I'm mentioning and dozens more, we know are either directly caused by or accelerated by metabolic dysfunction. Metabolic dysfunction is caused by an environmental mismatch between what our cells need and what they're getting from the environment. Either the cells not getting enough of what they need to function properly or being overwhelmed by too many stressors and toxins that crushes their functionality and fundamentally leads to this inability to properly power themselves and therefore be functional cells and of course we get dysfunctional bodies, which is symptoms of disease. So the idea that a medication, a shot that needs to be taken weekly for life typically is the answer to an environmental mismatch crushing the core functionality of our cells is ludicrous, right? That's just, it's not, it doesn't, this is the definition of what I was talking about earlier where you have a sick fish in a dirty tank and you drug the fish for life and the fish perks up a little bit but they're still in a dirty tank. That fish is still not going to be maximally thriving, we have to clean the tank and cleaning the tank means for the average person it means addressing diet, sleep, movement patterns, emotional health and stress, our relationship with toxic products, our relationship with light, our relationship with temperature and the medications that we have in our medicine cabinet. Looking at those eight things holistically, understanding where is the norms of modern culture in each of those domains actually hurting ourselves and where do we actually have to clean up some of those things. And so there is an all out war I would say right now from the makers of these medications like Novo Nordisk to get us to do things like call obesity a genetic disease because then if it's sort of, if we can pin it in people's heads as the problem that is something that is really immutable and not something that is the actually the symptom of a deeper problem that is caused by environment, then we can get these medications covered by Medicare and Medicaid and paid for by taxpayers, which if they were given to every person eligible to them in the United States, which is 74% of Americans, which represents the amount of Americans with overweight and obesity, this would represent about a $2 trillion a year expenditure on one medication that would potentially make people melt some fat, but does nothing to change the multimodal disastrous effect of our environment on ourselves. And so when you think about, this is a medication that's about $1 ,600 per month, close to, you know, 12 to $20 ,000 per year per patient for life. What you could potentially do with that, those healthcare dollars to actually generate health is so unbelievably monumental. If we had $2 trillion a year to spend on combating obesity, there are so many other things we could do to support foundational health. And so I think it's very dark what's happening with basically industry changing the narrative disease, gaslighting on some of the causes, and then saying that a shot for life starting in kids as young as 12 is the answer. So that's kind of my thought. Yes, of course, the individual patient might be useful. It's not the public health solution. If we don't fix the environment, things are not going to go well for our species. you

Melanie Avalon:
That's crazy. I just want to focus a moment again on that statistic. So 74% of people in the US are overweight or obese adults. Yeah, that's so, so crazy. And speaking to the environment. So, you know, you talk in the book about a lot of different environmental problems today. I was so impressed slash fascinated by the sitting epiphany that you had when you were at Stanford. I was wondering if you could just tell listeners a little bit about that story. I was like, whoa, like the studies you did and then approaching them and asking to basically change everything. And they're like, no, we can't do that.

Casey Means:
Well, I've always been holistically focused and passionate about the power of food and exercise for health. That's just something that I've been interested in ever since I was 14 actually, because I grew up very, very overweight and chose to really invest in health when I was about 14 and lost all that weight. So that entrenched in me this idea that like, wow, you can change some simple things in your life and everything can change. My life totally changed when I was able to, at 14, lose a lot of weight and get a lot of my health back. So flash forward 10 years later, I'm in medical school and I'm at Stanford Medical School. And you have like a hundred of these bright, motivated, aspiring doctors basically sitting in a lecture hall in the dark underground, like eight to 10 hours a day, and only popping out to like go to the bathroom or eat at the little food stand there that served just terrible food, you know, bready pizza, pasta, covered soda, all that stuff. So I'm sitting here thinking like, what in God's name is going on? Like here you have people who are supposed to be leaders in health, who in the prime of their life, mid 20s, late 20s, are basically languishing in a dark underground subterranean windowless room sitting. So I was sort of like, there's simple things we could do here. I mean, obviously I brought my own lunch every day and I like cooked my own food and didn't eat the cafeteria food, but I was also like, I need to stand up. I cannot sit for eight to 10 hours a day. So I would basically stand in the back of the room and try and like take my notes. But finally I asked this administration, could we get some standing desks or even like little like those little like carts that nurses and doctors use in the hospital, just something to set my computer on so I can stand for 15 minutes here and there. And they basically were like, no, you know, the building had just been built. It had strict fire codes and you couldn't have any of this stuff. So I'm like, well, is there anything we could do to make it so that students can be more active in classrooms? I'm like, why don't you do this? Why don't you go survey students and get some data to support whether students would actually want standing desks and use standing desks in classrooms? And I said, oh, cool, challenge accepted. I'll go do that. So I spent two years. I got grant funding. I got trained in qualitative research methods. I did a randomized intervention in the in the classrooms. I had it was like IRB certified. It was like a full blown study, like institutional review board, like ethics approved, like all this stuff had a faculty sponsor. did it, tested it, and the data was so overwhelming that students not only felt like they focused better, learned better, worked better with standing options, they wanted it, the adoption was really high. So I, of course, like the little undergrad, or I was a med student at the time, hustler that I was, presented in a research poster at the research symposium, set up a meeting to present this to the administration, shared all the data, and everyone just was like, yeah, we're not gonna do this, this is just not happening. So I was like, wait, what? And I think, of course it was disappointing just personally because I wanted it, but secondarily, I think what it showed me was like, this is going to be a very hard ship to turn because there's just, everyone, everything's about incentives, everything's about bottom line, everything's about, you know, what are we, what are the things that each person is trying to strive for? And like, student wellness is really not one of the bottom line items, you know, or it's, so it just really, to me, made me realize this is gonna be a bigger, bigger issue. People are not inherently on board with this idea that we need to change the environment to make people healthier. And you see this walk across the hallway from the medical school to the hospital, and it's the same thing. The food they're being served is terrible. There are literally coke machines studying the lobby at Stanford Hospital. And even just the sheer idea that there is one coke machine at one of the, quote unquote, best hospitals in the country, which is basically diabetes water, that is shameful. And so, you know, you just have to, none of this, I love Stanford, I'm involved with Stanford, I, there's a lot of great things happening there, but we are blind and we are letting ourselves be gaslit. Like this, we need to all just be saying, like, this is ridiculous. No, like we need to serve healthy food in hospitals. We need to get the soda machines out of the hospitals. You know, we need doctors. Doctors are dying of the exact same lifestyle diseases at the same rates as the average population. We don't know how to prevent these diseases, even though they are preventable. So we obviously need a big wake up call and that's the hope of this book is to be one.

Melanie Avalon:
I just remember when I was reading this story, I was like, it was really epic to read. And I was like, this is going to have a great ending. And then it was like, nope, but it's still going. You're still here. And just speaking briefly to the Coca -Cola and the companies and everything, then on the flip side, I think the craziness about what they do is they'll put all the focus on funding health through activity and energy. They skew the focus from the problem with the food to make it all about exercise. So it's so ironic. Because here we are talking about the importance of not sitting all the time and moving. So then they use that, like the food companies use that as a focus to divert from the problems with the food. You just can't win.

Casey Means:
Yeah, but I do think there are trends. I think that people are waking up. I think they really are and they're demanding different things. I think you've probably seen this too, but like over the past 10 years, the explosion of people interested in functional medicine. If you look at all the top podcasts in health and wellness, it's all people talking about holistic health, precision medicine, functional medicine, how to really be fundamentally healthy. I think it's the entrenched systems that are slow to move, but people are, I think, in a frenzy outside of the system trying to figure out how to be healthy. I'm very hopeful.

Melanie Avalon:
I am, I am too. So that awesome. So okay, so going back to the the energy concept, the good energy. So you do present in the book, and you talked a little bit about this already, what's happening there. But you do present this idea of, you know, good energy and bad energy. And this is a nebulous question. But is it actually like, is it a different type of energy? Like, is it literally good energy and bad energy? Or is it is energy always good? It's just up against battles that make it manifest as quote, bad energy in thinking about

Casey Means:
how to convey the concept of metabolic health to everyone. I want it to be a concept that people understand from age five onwards. It's good energy to me represents fundamentally metabolic health. And so it's not that there's a type of good energy or a type of bad energy in the cell. It's the idea that the most foundational level of all health in all systems, in all organs of the body, is cells that are powered well. That is metabolism. Metabolism is a conversion of potential energy outside of us, which is food that we put into our bodies as potential energy that then needs to be transformed into usable energy. That's through metabolism, largely in the mitochondria. And then once that usable energy is made, that is a currency that pays for all of the trillions and trillions and trillions of chemical reactions that are happening in every cell at every moment of the day, 24 hours a day, that bubbles up into our conscious experience of life and our health and our organ function. And so I think where we go wrong is where people maybe silo metabolism is like a part of health. It's not a part of health. It is the foundation of all health. There is no hormone health without metabolic health. There is no brain health without metabolic health. There's no heart health without metabolic health. Any cell in the body, if it's underpowered, it's not able to function properly. And wherever that is showing up, if it's in the heart, if it's in the brain, if it's in the blood vessel of the penis, it's going to look like a different issue. But the core foundation is still the same dysfunction. And so good energy represents what do we do to basically understand and improve whether our body is well -powered, whether metabolic processes are on track. And if we know that they are, if we can confirm to ourselves through both symptoms and biomarkers that we are doing metabolic processes well, that is going to set us up for a much easier life in every way. It's going to slash our risk for every chronic disease that's killing Americans and most of the main nagging symptoms that are facing Americans today, like the non -lethal symptoms that just annoy us, like the headaches and the arthritis and the acne and the wrinkles and that type of thing. So good energy is a concept to help people understand the foundation of all health that we're striving for, that through basic biomarkers, we can understand and through simple changes in our lifestyle, if targeted properly towards metabolism, can rapidly improve to improve our foundational health.

Melanie Avalon:
I think something that makes it more concrete, because I think people hear energy sounds so nebulous in a way. It doesn't seem like, yes, I have energy or I don't have energy, but it doesn't feel real. You had a stat in the book about the amount of literal energy that we produce, like ATP. It was like 88 pounds, I think, a day.

Casey Means:
It was, yeah. So this is a concept that is kind of hard, I think, for people to understand because it's like, how could I possibly make 88 pounds of something in my body per day? But if you think about it, if you're making something and using something almost instantly, you would never know that it was kind of there. It's like as if there was like a fire and you're like, or sorry, let's say you have a pile of coal and one person on one side of the pile throwing coal onto the pile and there's another person on the other side equally pulling off that amount of coal. That pile would never actually grow. It would just stay low, right? But because someone's taking it away as quickly as someone's putting it, so you'd never feel the 88 pounds even though it's being made and burned and recycled basically. So there's just ATP constantly. ATP, the main currency of energy in our body is being made, destroyed, recycled, made, used, recycled constantly to the extent where it's about 88 cumulative pounds per day. And we know that in a lot of health conditions, we basically don't have enough ATP. The cells don't have enough gas to do their work and so that can look like almost any disease based on where it's happening in the body. And this issue with metabolic dysfunction is happening based on recent literature in about over 90% of Americans. It's crazy. And one of the other ways we know this is happening is because our temperature is declining as a species. So making ATP and making energy is basically the mitochondria as they're doing their work. They're kind of like a furnace. They make heat. And so if your mitochondria are all healthy and churning and we're constantly needing and making and using ATP, that generates heat in the body. But our species is cooling and our temperature seems to be cooling a little bit every decade for the past hundred years. And so that's a bad sign that our furnaces are basically broken, not working. And so there's a lot of different little clues basically showing us that this fundamental process of making that ATP and then using it is not going well. And so to me that represents a really sort of almost more macro level thing. Well, of course this is leading to most of our chronic illnesses, but it's also just kind of means that like our life force is being dimmed. Like the thing that animates our lives and makes us not a puddle of atoms on the ground, like the thing that keeps us together as a cohesive living being is metabolism. And we are basically screwing that up with our environmental destruction and the way that our, you know, our food and our lifestyle. And therefore the thing that keeps us animated is actually showing us that it's decreased. So as a population, as a species that has big challenges that we're facing, how are we going to do that? If we're weaker, you know, if we're essentially weaker, we don't have enough power and this is showing up as disease, but it's much bigger than that. This is, this is a representation of us having dimmed light force, which means life force, which means we're not going to be able as a species to do our best work and reach our highest purpose. And that's not good. We need to fix that.

Melanie Avalon:
Do you have thoughts on, because it was really crazy timing when I read the part in your book that you just mentioned about the decreased body temperature, because almost at like the exact same, probably in the same day, I told you before this that I recently recorded with Dr. Michael Greger. And I just read his section on body temperature and it was the complete opposite. Like he was saying how reduced temperature correlated to longevity. And maybe one of the ways the plant -based diet works is by decreasing body temperature. So not to go on a tangent again. I'm really haunted by this question of temperature and longevity, and especially how it relates to metabolism and then maybe, I'm not gonna answer the question. Do you have thoughts on that? Like this seeming paradox between temperature, longevity, and metabolism?

Casey Means:
Yeah, I mean, what the data is showing us is that body temperature seems to have dropped by about close to 1 .1 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 100 or so years. And this is thought to be due to a lower metabolic rate. And interestingly, one of the ways that we can actually potentially get the temperature in our bodies, you know, sort of more at the physiologic level that we would expect is by actually adding in temperature fluctuations in our environment, like cold and hot. But decreased metabolic activity is underpinning a lot of our illnesses. So yeah, I'd be curious to hear his theory on that. But yeah, it's interesting that the data suggests that as our temperatures are lowering, our metabolic rates are going down, it's directly contributing to chronic disease. So I'm not Yeah, I'd be curious to hear more about his take.

Melanie Avalon:
I was telling you since I lost my interview with him and I'll be rerecording. I don't think we got to it the first time, so I'm going to, I think I'm going to ask him the second time around. So yeah, but okay. So coming back to this whole metabolic health condition that we're in today, so I do find it really interesting that the medical system has acknowledged, I guess, the issue with this idea of metabolic syndrome, you know, and they have these five markers that you can look at, that you go through in the book. Before we, and if we go into those, I'm really curious, are those the five markers you would pick if you had to define metabolic syndrome?

Casey Means:
Yeah. So, you know, I think the way I think about it is really like there's basic biomarkers, there's sort of medium level biomarkers. And then there's like this, the kitchen sink, you can do the sky's the limit in terms of, you know, in terms of understanding our metabolic health. But I think every single person needs to understand the basic ones, which are those five in the book, at least every three to four months for the rest of their lives and be able to rattle off the answer as they would like their phone number. Like you just need to know what these mean, what they are, because if they're all in the optimal range, or if they were not in the optimal range and are moving towards the optimal range, this is a very good sign that the strategies that you're engaging in with diet and lifestyle are working well, are doing what they're supposed to. So it's a way that you can kind of prove to yourself that you're staying on track. And then when you get hits in life, like a very stressful time, or menopause, perimenopause, you know, pregnancy, postpartum, whatever it is, you can track to see how it's how it's hitting your metabolism, and get back on track or change your strategy. And so the ones that are kind of in the in the very like sort of basic, generally free at a physical, your doctor won't fight you about them would be triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, fasting glucose, blood pressure and waist circumference. And then two others that I'd add to the basic list, because sometimes in the research on defining metabolic syndrome, they are mentioned is hemoglobin A1c. And then in the study by the that was published in the Journal of American College of cardiology, that was the one that said that 93 .2% of Americans are not metabolically healthy, they actually also added in a total cholesterol to HDL ratio. So you'd have to basically add in a hemoglobin A1c and a total cholesterol to get all of those. So that's sort of the basics. And just for what people in terms of the studies of defining metabolic syndrome, they to be sort of oddly metabolically healthy, it means that all of the following are true. Fasting glucose less than 100 hemoglobin A1c less than 5 .7%. Total cholesterol to HDL ratio less than 3 .5 to 1. Blood pressure less than 120 over 80. Waist circumference less than 88 centimeters in women and 122 centimeters in men. Triglycerides less than 150. And if all of those are true, and you're not on medication for those things, like not on a blood sugar medication or a blood pressure medication, like that is considered that 6 .8% of awfully metabolically healthy. And the great news about all of these biomarkers is they can actually change very rapidly in the course of one to two months with some focused dietary and lifestyle strategies that basically build metabolic capacity and let you get these markers into more normal range. To answer your question, is this sort of like the best of what I would have people do? Well, first of all, I would say that we actually want tighter ranges than a lot of these for truly, truly optimal metabolic health. For instance, like hemoglobin A1c less than 5 .7% is what is considered normal, but really more like 5 to 5 .2 would be a better range, like a lower percentage, similar with fasting glucose. I'd like to see it more between like 70 and 85 most of the time, not just less than 100. So that's one piece is that I think even more optimal ranges can tell us even more. And then there's a couple other biomarkers that are more in my medium category, but if people had access to any lab tests they wanted, I would say these are absolutely critical for fully understanding metabolic health. And that would be a fasting insulin test. I definitely want to see an HSCRP, which is an inflammatory marker. So insulin levels, inflammation levels. And then I really like to see liver function tests too, because the liver is where so much of our metabolic processes are happening. So AST, ALT, GGT, those kind of all together would be my basics and all very modifiable, and then would add on more to get to more of the medium level. And then of course, when you're going to like the extreme level, you're looking at like DEXA scans, hormone testing, micronutrient testing, VO2 max testing, like lots more stuff. But that's kind of, I think much more at the margins compared to people just like knowing the five to 10 basic biomarkers and getting them tracked regularly throughout the rest of their life every few months.

Melanie Avalon:
I loved that part of the book so much, especially, I love seeing just the actual conventional ranges versus the ideal ranges that we should be going for. It reminds me of every time I do go to the conventional doctor and then if I go to a doctor where they give me the actual printout lab slip to bring to Quest or LabCorp or wherever, maybe I always wanna, looking at all the boxes of all the things that I could be testing, I'm like, will they notice if I just check some of these boxes? I can't even tell you, every single time I'm like, is this the time I check a box and see what happens? But I don't. I love this.

Casey Means:
you're admitting that. That's that's amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon:
fun times. So a question though, because you just mentioned, you know, testing these regularly and how fast we can see changes. One of the potential issues or loopholes or things to consider that I would love your thoughts on is the role of how these do change transiently throughout the day. So, you know, blood glucose, I mean, listeners just have to listen to any of the episodes on CGMs or just have their own experience to realize just how much our blood sugar is changing throughout the day, often due to diet and stress, fasting, lifestyle, exercise, all these things. I know I read a study on, the study really was eye opening for me. I read a study on, they looked at, oh, you know what it was? It was I had on Azure grant, she did a lot of the research behind Aura Rings research for their fertility aspects of what they integrate into their app. And one of her studies that wasn't really a day, and they did like basically continuous cholesterol testing on people. And they found that every single person's markers changed dramatically throughout the day. And every single person for one of the markers at one point during the day went into like a non -ideal range. So that's like, okay, so those are changing a lot. You know, blood pressure we know is affected a lot by situation and environment. I guess waist circumference is the one that is pretty constant. But yeah, so what do we do with that? So like, so if we go into the doctor, get our labs, we get back these numbers. How do we interpret that knowing how much they change daily, possibly?

Casey Means:
Well, yeah, I mean, I think that the way that that tends to be controlled is that these are generally done as fasting labs. So they don't want you to eat anything or drink anything with calories for at least eight hours before the test that we're kind of getting like whatever the like low point of it is. But it is wild because like glucose changes so much throughout the day. And, you know, I think that for me, like if I get a poor night's sleep, my glucose will be higher. If I'm stressed, my glucose will be higher. If I have coffee, my glucose might be higher, even if it's like with no milk, even if I've like maybe and then if I have slowly walked to the doctor's office, you know, to get the blood work done, my glucose would probably go down. But if I'm running to the office because I'm late, my glucose might go up. And so it's actually quite hard to interpret, which is why, of course, I'm such a big fan of continuous monitoring, because you can really start to see like the trends and just have such a more nuanced picture of it. But I think that I would looking at the tests that I just talked about, like hemoglobin A1c is one that's going to be not able to be changed day to day. And then as you said, waste circumference, fasting glucose, I would recommend that people get that tested if they have had a good night's sleep and ideally do it the test in the morning, obviously fasted and try and be in a calm situation, like just create the conditions where you're going to get the best like triglyceride glucose, like that really represents what your baseline is. I've actually cancelled lab draws before because I didn't get a good night's sleep the night before. Oh, wow. Yeah, I will. I'm not going to get a fasting insulin, which costs money. I have to pay for that out of pocket if the conditions weren't quite right the night before, because it's just not going to represent what my actual baseline is. And now I've tested my insulin enough times, maybe I don't know, eight to 10 times that I'm pretty clear on what my like normal and I do it, I try to do it under similar conditions each time, you know, my ideal amount of sleep and this and that. And it's always within two to three points. So I'm like, okay, that's probably my, that's like my baseline. That's what I am. It's not, I'm pretty confident. So this is why getting more data points and understand the physiology a little bit more is important because otherwise you could be thrown for a loop. I can easily like I can get myself into the prediabetic range if I am not on my game with all my sort of like health habits and that I don't let myself go there anymore. But I remember when I was pricking my blood, my finger like seven, eight years ago, before having a CGM, I'd see a fasting glucose of like 102, which is prediabetic. When in reality, my last blood work might have said that my fasting glucose was 80. So it's like what happened in the past three months? Well, what happened was I'd been pulling all nighters, you know, in residency, and I was under a ton of stress and I hadn't been exercising and I maybe only walked 2000 steps the day before and I'd eaten a really late meal and a bunch of alcohol or whatever. Again, this is like old me, you know, but it's like, it's crazy to see how dynamic your body is. And I think it's actually so important to recognize that. And this is why more regular monitoring is valuable, because you can close the loop between all these little choices you're making every day and what's happening to your body. And then you can easily make the extent, extend that logic to be like, wow, if I racked up all these sort of suboptimal health behaviors and the resultant transiently not as good lab markers over the course of weeks and then months and then years, like this is how disease develops versus if I can see it happening and quickly revert back to my best habits and my best biomarkers, you can stop that process from happening. But when you get blood work done once a year or once every two years, you don't get that level of feedback, you know? And so everything just feels like it's kind of, you're on some sort of, it just, it's just much harder to make, I think, interventions if you're not seeing the dynamicism of our bodies through more regular biomarker testing. And I would say, this is for people listening who might have a conventional doctor, not a functional medicine doctor or whatnot, they might get pushed back. Their doctor's like, oh no, no, no, we only need to order this once a day, once a year. I would just demand that, say, I will pay for this out of pocket, I will come into the lab, but can you please put an order in every three months for these labs so that I can... go in and just go to the lab and get them drawn. And if they won't do that, the good thing is there are actually direct -to -consumer lab testing companies like Function Health, which allow you to do these tests without having to go through your doctor and just walk into the lab and get them done, and then you get the results directly sent to you. And that costs about $500 a year, which you can use HSA and FSA funding for, but I think it's absolutely worth it.

Melanie Avalon:
And also in your book, you have an actual letter that people can use to give their doctor to request these labs. I thought that was like a really helpful resource. I'm like, oh, this is really great. And also random tangent. But I wanted, one time I got really, really excited. I didn't realize that there are, I knew there were obviously glucometers and I've been using CGM's, but I didn't realize you could order HBA1C finger prick machines.

Casey Means:
I haven't seen a machine that does A1Z.

Melanie Avalon:
It's like a glucometer. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. It's like, it's like strips. It's just like blood sugar. But it's HbA1c. I got so excited. That's right.

Casey Means:
really interesting. I know you can do that through a blood spot test. The lab ZRT has a blood spot test that I believe will tell you hemoglobin A1c. You can do that at home or companies like Everly Well or things like that where you can actually do it at home, but I didn't know you could do a glucometer. That's what you're talking about where you basically prick your finger and do it right at home. That's really neat.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, I have it in my cabinet. It's really exciting. Yeah. And actually I will refer listeners rather than ask you the questions right now because I know we talked at length when I had you on last time about the nuances of HbA1c. We also talked about fructose amine and all of that in comparison to blood sugar, so blood glucose. So if listeners would want to learn more about that, I'll put a link in the show notes to our last interview because there's a lot of information there. Just curiosity, if you could like with levels, either the same monitor or a new brand, like if you could monitor something else 24 seven like blood sugar, what would you want it to monitor?

Casey Means:
Ooh, I would definitely want to see insulin. I'd want to see CRP, like inflammation. In the book, I talk about the trifecta of bad energy, which is essentially the processes happening in the body that underlie this metabolic dysfunction, which are three things, mitochondrial dysfunction, chronic inflammation, and oxidative stress. So for me, I'd want to know about those processes happening inside my body. And so for inflammation, I might want to have CRP or some type of cytokine marker. I'd love to see cortisol too, because that's going to generate chronic inflammation, anoxic stress, and mitochondrial dysfunction. So seeing what's happening with my stress levels, I would certainly be very interested in having a female hormone monitor, so something that could measure level, like basically tell you where exactly what's happening in your cycle, in terms of estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, LH, FSH, things like that. I think that'd be really interesting to better understand how hard you should be training and what's happening. That can tell you about how your insulin sensitivity is and things like that. So yeah, so sort of like some of that spectrum of metabolic monitoring, I think, would be really valuable.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm so curious to see what I feel like everything is so rapidly progressing. It'll, it'll just be crazy to see, you know, and then even the next decade where we'll be with, with monitoring everything. Okay. Super not related to anything. We just talked about question, but I just, I'm so I want to talk about this. You finally explained something in the book that it's something I talk about all the time, feel very strongly about, and I didn't understand the mechanistic, like the mechanisms of why this was actually the case and what was happening, so I got so excited to read your book and understand this finally, which was the role of omega three, six fatty acids in our diet. I was wondering if you could just tell listeners a little bit about the actual process and the mitochondria or whatever part of the cell it is where basically this, the image I have is very, um, what's the word when you add like human characteristics is something not human.

Casey Means:
Oh, answer for more fights. Yeah, I have

Melanie Avalon:
There's like a little image of like part of the cell like grabbing something and like not knowing it's going to be an omega -3 or omega -6 and the effects of that. So yeah, what is the role, I mean it ties into the broader question of diet and health, but what is the role of omega -3 sixes and what's actually happening in the cells?

Casey Means:
Yeah. So this is such an interesting one. So, you know, there's, there's these different types of fats we can get from our diet and we need omega -6s, omega -3s, omega -9s, saturated fats, all these different types of fats, because they're all involved in our function of ourselves. But right now, we're eating a very high concentration of omega -6s in our diet because of industrial seed oils. And so there's this very much like a distorted ratio of omega -6 fats, which is just referring to the structure of the fat and omega -3 fats. And these are both involved in several processes in the body. One of them is that they're incorporated into the cell membrane because all of our 40 plus trillion cells are just little bags. And then the bag is basically like a fatty membrane made of fatty acids. And so the foods, of course, the fats we eat are what create our cell membranes. And our cell membranes are constantly turning over. And so we need to constantly be supplying the body with the right ratio of fat so that we can have the most functional membranes because structure determines function. And so why this matters in part is because the ratio of these different types of fats in the cell membrane can actually just change like the membrane integrity of the cell for one, like how fluid that lipid fatty bilayer is and how well it functions. The second has to do with inflammation, because essentially the immune cells in the body, when they are activated, they use the cell membrane to actually snip fats from it to use to manufacture inflammatory chemicals. And these are called specialized pro -resolving mediators. And basically, these SPMs are manufactured products from fats that immune cells snip from cell membranes. Well, if the cell membrane has way too many omega -6 fats, the chemicals that they will manufacture from that omega -6 is actually a pro -inflammatory signal. If it snips an omega -3 fat, it will be a resolving signal, like the inflammatory response can relax and settle down. And so these cells don't have eyes. They basically are just snipping blindly. And so if you are eating in a way that creates a more reasonable ratio of fats in the cell membrane, you are more likely to have an inflammatory response that resolves and doesn't lead to chronic inflammation, which is damaging. So the way I think about it, similarly what you're saying is the sort of like anthropomorphized version is like when I'm eating that salmon and that mackerel and those sardines and the anchovies and the chia seeds and the hemp seeds and the basil seeds and the flax seeds and all these things and the algae, all these things that have omega -3 fats, I'm literally thinking about creating cell membranes that have more of those omega -3 fats so that when my immune cells get revved up, which they will at different points in my life, they can grab an omega -3 from the cell membrane to create a specialized pro -resolving mediator that calms that war inside my body. And that to me is so empowering as I create my meals.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that so much. I just cannot even express. And my experience when I was reading it, I was, like you said, anthropomorphous, that word, doing that. And I was thinking, like my experience of reading it, I was, because I read what you said about how it grabs part of the membrane or the fat. And then I was thinking, well, does it see what it's grabbing? And then the next sentence was like, it's just blindly grabbing. I was like, oh my goodness, this is just, this is crazy. And so it's really powerful because it gives a picture of why these food choices literally are having a cellular effect on us. It's really awe -inspiring, which speaking of awe, something I really liked in your book was you have a lot in the book about the role of our mindset surrounding food and this concept of awe when it comes to food. I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on that. And also, is the phrase that you use, oh, mindful eating, I think is the phrase you use. So I'm wondering how it overlaps with the more popular concept of intuitive eating, because I think people might think those are the same things, but I'm not sure if they are in your world. So yes, awe, mindfulness, what's happening there?

Casey Means:
One of the ways that I find a lot of motivation to make the choices that can be costly and take more time to prepare, source high quality whole foods and cook them is actually by rooting the whole food journey in a place of awe because there is so much to be in awe of when it comes to food. I think the first thing is that we are a body made of atoms and those atoms become molecules, which then become cells and whatnot, and then all bubbles up. But fundamentally, we're made of these molecular building blocks. That's what we are. And most of those molecules come from food. And it's not like it happens just once. It's not like we're born into this world with a body that is just a bunch of molecules that stays the same throughout our lifetime. We actually have about hundreds of billions of cells die and become reborn every day. And every one of those cell divisions and cell death and replication requires new atoms, essentially, to create that next version of ourself. And that comes from food. And we eat somewhere in the 40 to 70 metric tons of food in a lifetime, a monumental amount of food, which is basically molecular information that is the printer ink for us to 3D print tomorrow's version of our body. And it's so dynamic. And the other thing that is just so astonishing is that this food that is becoming our body, which is becoming our structure, which then, of course, bubbles up into our thoughts and our emotions and our everything, our whole conscious experience, that food, we're so disconnected from our food because so much, 70% of our food is just ultra -processed packaged industrialized Frankenfood now. But when you really think about what food is, food is either plants or animals. And the plants, they create the calories and the molecules that we then take into our body to build ourselves and to create the functional reality in our body by literally taking up sunlight that has traveled through space, 92 million miles through space from the sun. The plants take up those photons and store the sun's energy in the carbon -carbon bonds of starches that they create, and then we eat that, or an animal eats that, and then we eat the animal. So fundamentally, when we're talking about metabolism, we're talking about taking in food from the environment and liberating the sun's energy inside ourselves to power our thoughts, feelings, lives, every single motion that we take in our entire life. And that is just such a miraculous, beautiful process. And so much of that gets lost in the conversation about food when we're talking about calories and energy and a balanced meal and this and that. We need to get back in touch with seeing food as part of our source and respecting it for what it is, which is our body of tomorrow, our thoughts of tomorrow, our neurotransmitters of tomorrow. It's also the food for our microbiome, which then makes our neurotransmitters, which determine our mood and what we think and how we feel. And then also, the foods that we're eating contain tens of thousands of molecules that don't become our structure but are actually the instruction manual for how our cells function. So we can use food as a tool to create the outcomes in our life that we want. If we want less inflammation, we can down -regulate the NF kappa B pathway by eating curcumin. If we want more functional cells, we can eat isothiocyanates from cruciferous vegetables like cauliflower and broccoli and bok choy. And we can up -regulate the NRF2 genetic pathway and improve our antioxidant defenses. We have this toolbox of magic to change our genetic expression. And we're like flying blind in our culture because we have chosen as a culture to sterilize and diminish the power of this awe -inspiring substance that directly determines the quality and function of our lives. And I think that getting back to like knowing enough about food to knowing how magical, to understanding how magical it is, changes our relationship with it. Because a lot of the food stuff, people think it's like it's work, it's cost, it's sacrifice. But when we really understand what it is and what it can do for us, that that cost benefit relationship changes to like, Oh my God, of course I would invest in this. It's it's it is the foundation of everything. So that's why it's so important for me for people to understand some of the basics of the molecular biology of food, because then the choices become so much easier. Like we have Dr. William Lee is so wonderful. He says, you know, we have we have three or four times we eat each day and those all need to be shots on goal. We need to hit those right because like then life will just get so much easier. And most of the meals we're eating in our world today from like fetal development to old age are missed baskets. Like they're we are not shooting on goal. And so of course we're sick as hell. And of course we feel like shit. And of course we're tired. And of course we have depression because we are we have totally lost the awe in our life giving substance of food. And on top of that, we've allowed an industrial agriculture industry to crop up since World War Two that is using synthetic industrial pesticides and fertilizers and industrial tilling practices that have murdered the micro diversity of our soil. And so our food is actually so much less nutrient rich than it used to be. And we need to unwind that very quickly. Unfortunately, the regenerative agriculture movement is doing that. I know you've had people on your podcast talking about that. But we understand that we actually are the food we eat literally, we would care so much more about taking care of our soil because we are essentially one with it. If we if we had better eyes that could see what's actually happening on the molecular level, this constant interplay between soil, our bodies, everything in this big unified cycle of dynamic interconnection, we would we would not be making the decisions that we're making today to destroy our planet and to disrespect food.

Melanie Avalon:
I love it so much. And the reason I brought up the part about the intuitive eating as well is because I think when people hear that whole concept, they might think it's intuitive eating. An issue I have with that whole concept, and I'd be curious your thoughts, but for me, it's like, I don't know that you can intuitively eat if you're eating, you know, processed foods that are set up to make you intuitively want to actually eat them. Because if you eat these processed food products with sugar and refined seed oils and this addictive potential to them, actually the intuitive thing is to eat them. Because the signals that they're telling you is to keep eating them. So it's like this really interesting interplay between, I feel like the way to have true intuition with food that will benefit you healthfully is by eating whole food choices. And you talked about that in the book, like the role of cravings and how that relates to whole foods versus processed foods. But yeah, I don't know if there was a question there. Just any thoughts on the intuitive food eating movement?

Casey Means:
Yeah, I mean, I'm not super familiar with like what the philosophy, like, you know, precisely of the intuitive movement eating is. I think that I do a lot. I do talk a lot about trusting our own bodies and trusting our intuition. But I think when we get into the conversation about ultra processed foods, I think it's again, it's like we need to be eyes open consumers. These are industrially manufactured, brand new inventions that are a science experiment that has failed, like they shouldn't be put in the human mouth. They are causing devastating illness from fetal life to the elderly. They're making us lose our minds, literally dementia, depression, anxiety. They're making kids not able to, you know, function normally, behavioral issues, depression, anxiety, and kids is through the roof. It's we know it's tied. The data is very clear. It's tied to ultra processed foods. Ultra processed foods are designed by scientists to make us addicted, to make us want an insatiable amount of them. And the result has worked. We are literally eating ourselves to death. So when it comes to intuitive eating, there's no place for ultra processed foods because they're not they're meant to hijack your intuition. They're literally meant to. So when I talk about mindful eating, I'm talking about two things. I'm talking about being mindful of what food really is and what it's doing for us and making choices from that state of clarity and not PR marketing materials from ultra processed food companies that want us to have a distorted relationship with what food is. I think that the second piece is that we need to reevaluate the way we're eating. So the how of eating, which is things like the speed of eating and our meal time behaviors. So we've chosen in the past, you know, 50 years to basically eat most of our meals, prioritizing convenience over anything else. So how quick can we get it? How quick can we eat it? I could can I eat it in the car? You know, how much can I get back to like the hustle distraction industrial complex? And even if we are sitting down to eat, we're usually like on our phone or computer. So to me, I'm thinking about mindful eating of changing the whole just distorted modern dynamic with food where we actually get into a biologic state where we can actually digest the food properly, which means sitting down with people we trust in a parasympathetic nervous system state in a state of gratitude, eating slowly, which all of which have a direct impact on the way we digest the food and the way we metabolize the food. And we need to be eating most of our meals in that setting. We need to be changing the fabric of our daily lives so that we can sit and eat each of our meals in a calm, unhurried way. And it's like, don't shoot the messenger. That's that's what we need to do for bio for our biology to work properly. I know that that's harder to do in practice, but we can make small shifts to make that happen more. And when you do that, when you choose to like sit and have a conversation and eat slowly and make meals a ritual, which it is, it's a ritual of converting the outside world into our inner world. It's a beautiful, miraculous thing. And we should honor it as such. And when you do that, I think what it will do if you are someone who has some sense of deep craving for processed foods and things like that, even that process of changing the how of eating, I think will also change a bit about how you feel about what you're eating. And so my recommendation for everyone is to eliminate all ultra processed foods, starting today forever. I'm sure a lot of your listenership is probably already on board with that, but they don't have any real benefit for us at all. And they're crowding out food that we could be eating that could be supporting our health. And then to eat mindfully, which means to slow down, eat in community, get into a relaxed, parasympathetic, nervous state, which means just kind of calm, not hurried. That could be as simple as taking five deep breaths before you start eating and smelling your food. It doesn't have to take a super long time. And I think that can be really life changing.

Melanie Avalon:
Because for me, I practice intermittent fasting, and I personally do a later eating window. And the reason I like that is because it's like I eat when my day is done. So like I have like all my work done and I'm always just able, it's like, it literally is like a ritual every night, you know, where I get to sit down and like have this moment. And I don't think I appreciate enough. One of the reasons that that window works so well for me is because of that, that very reason. And speaking of things that work for me, people are probably really curious in your book, you know, do you prescribe a certain dietary approach? And what I love about your book is you just have these overarching principles that, you know, you just touched on one right now with cutting up processed foods that literally everybody can apply regardless of what quote diet you're following. And then you have paradigms that really everybody can exist within that involve whole foods. And I mean, would you say that you're like dietary agnostic when it comes to the actual diet that somebody is gonna follow, like the foods that they're eating?

Casey Means:
I am. I definitely in terms of like overarching strategies like paleo, vegan, carnivore, Mediterranean, like I'm agnostic to those. What I'm not agnostic to is that we need to meet the needs of ourselves. And there's a lot of things that we know that ourselves need and we actually can understand whether our cells are getting what they need through a few things. Like we can understand our symptoms and we can slow down enough to hear what our bodies are saying like, are we bloated? Are we puffy? Are we tired? Are we anxious? Are we, do we have chronic symptoms and disease? If those things are happening, then something's not working for yourselves and you that we need to investigate what that is. Like we should be feeling really great most of the time and not have lingering symptoms or feeling poorly after we eat. So if there's a delta between where you're at now and that, then that's worth investigating. That's sort of sign number one. The second piece is our biomarkers. If our biomarkers are in an optimal range, if we're tracking them regularly, if we don't have any chronic symptoms or diagnoses, like then that diet is probably working well for you. Like I, if you show me, if you tell me I have zero symptoms, I feel limitless and joyful. I feel very stable and my biomarkers are all in the optimal range. I'm like, I, who am I to say that that's not the right diet for you? And so I think, and the fascinating thing is that there are people on vegan diets and on carnivore diets that meet those criteria. And it's because the body is pretty miraculous. And when you feed it whole, unprocessed, sustainably grown organic food of many different types of macronutrient profiles or animal versus plant -based or whatever, combinations of sort of types of foods, if those things are true, very high quality whole foods. And, you know, and I think, and it's consistent and the cells are functioning properly because of a lot of the other lifestyle things are dialed in, you know, the mitochondria are also not being aggressively damaged by sedentary behavior or not sleeping or chronic low grade stress or environmental toxins. The system can work very well. And I give a lot of examples in the book of kind of redundancies that can happen in the body where why a carnivore or vegan diet can work. For instance, like vitamin C, like if you're carnivore, you can, the body needs vitamin C. It's a potent antioxidant that protects the body against oxidative stress and many other functions. A carnivore can get it from eating liver and a vegan can get it from eating red peppers and, you know, oranges and other citrus fruits, similar with like butyrate. Butyrate is a ketone body that can be very beneficial for biology. And a carnivore person is going to make butyrate because they go into ketosis and they're, they're generating butyrate. And in a vegan who might be eating 80 grams of fiber a day, their microbiome is going to make butyrate for them by converting that by fermenting that fiber into butyrate. So both are going to have circulating butyrate through totally different mechanisms. The commonality is that they're eating real food. So I think if you are tracking your symptoms, tracking your biomarkers, really tuned in with your body, you can be pretty confident whether your diet is working for you.

Melanie Avalon:
You literally took the words out of my mouth. I was gonna comment on that was one of my favorite parts of the book where you went through the butyrate and the vitamin C and the and the DHA and all of that. I just thought it was a really, really brilliant example of how these different diets can work for different people. Oh my goodness, so many things. So I honestly mean this if I just wish I wish everybody could just read your book like the US population, because it just provides this overwhelmingly eye opening view of what is actually happening and why we have these problems today. And there's so much agency in this book about how to actually fix it. And we didn't really even touch on this. But in the, you know, later half of the book, you talk about actually implementing all of this, it's like this long list of like different good energy habits that people can do, you know, how to actually integrate this into your lifestyle and see change. And I just think it's so, so, like I said, eye opening overwhelmingly helpful and can really change people's lives. So so thank you for writing this book and doing what you're doing.

Casey Means:
Thank you so much, and thank you for using your platform to spread so much good information in the world. It's just incredible. I so appreciate your support and you reading the book and this wonderful conversation.

Melanie Avalon:
How can people best get the book, follow your work, all the things?

Casey Means:
So the book is everywhere. Books are sold. And I, you know, it's on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop .org, small bookstores. But yeah, just so, so appreciate people getting it writing reviews. I hope it changes your life. I'm at CaseyMeans .com. And that's sort of the hub for all my stuff. Social media accounts are all linked out there and my newsletter. I have a biweekly newsletter called Good Energy Living that is wonderful. And so those are the main ways to find me. Yeah. Would love for people to get the book and let me know how it impacts your life.

Melanie Avalon:
Perfect. So we'll put all of that in the show notes and listeners can also get a discount on a level CGM with the coupon code Melanie Avalon. So I'll throw that in there as well. The last question, it's really fast, but it's just because I realize more and more each day how important mindset is. So what is something that you're grateful for?

Casey Means:
Oh my gosh, so many things. I am grateful because I am sitting with the door open right now in my office looking at a blue sky and a bunch of flowers and birdies chirping and my partner watering our plants. And I just to be able to see the outdoors during my work day and have the door open brings me joy every single day. I'm super grateful for that.

Speaker 3
I love it. That's amazing. That's something else in the book, the role of nature.

Melanie Avalon:
Well, thank you, Casey. This was so incredible. I look forward to everything that you do in the future. Hopefully you can come back on the show and hopefully we can meet in real life sometime. Yeah, for sure.

Casey Means:
Thank you so much, Melanie. Have a great day. You too.