Inside the Health Views of Casey Means, Trump’s Surgeon General Nominee

[ad_1] N ot lengthy earlier than the 2024 election, Dr. Casey Means wrote a letter to her Good Power e-newsletter subscribers with a health-related wishlist for the following Administration.

In it had been priorities that echo these of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Well being and Human Companies: investigating toxins within the meals provide, incentivizing wholesome meals purchases with meals stamps, changing manufacturing unit farming with regenerative farming.

“Greater than something, I wish to see our future White Home rally People to be wholesome and match,” wrote Means, a doctor who President Trump nominated on Might 7 for U.S. Surgeon Common. Trump discarded his first decide, Dr. Janette Neshiewat, a day earlier than she was scheduled to seem earlier than a Senate committee.

Means, who co-wrote the 2024 guide Good Power: The Stunning Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Well being along with her brother Calley Means, holds many beliefs on well being that mirror Kennedy’s. She writes ceaselessly about how medication are overprescribed and that many fashionable illnesses are attributable to preventable life-style circumstances. She believes that kids needs to be served extra nutritious meals at school lunches, and he or she voices skepticism about seed oils. And she or he believes there are far too many chemical compounds within the U.S. meals provide.

These similarities are partly why she was nominated, President Trump mentioned in a Might 8 information convention. “Bobby actually thought she was nice, I don’t know her,” Trump mentioned, after a reporter requested in regards to the selection. Means’ pinned submit on X is a celebration of Kennedy’s swearing-in ceremony on the White Home, which she referred to as a “BEAUTIFUL AND MOMENTOUS DAY FOR AMERICA.”

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Means and her brother Calley, a startup founder, are central figures within the Make America Wholesome Once more motion, and within the months main as much as the election, they appeared collectively on Joe Rogan’s and Tucker Carlson’s podcasts. Their father, Grady Means, labored within the administration of President Gerald Ford as an assistant to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, a political centrist.

Of their 2024 guide, the siblings make a number of factors that may probably be embraced by Democrats. One is that diet and train play an enormous position in our total well being (one in every of Michelle Obama’s signature public well being campaigns, Let’s Transfer!, tried to scale back childhood weight problems via train), and that the pharmaceutical and meals industries have an excessive amount of affect over on a regular basis People.

However a few of Casey Means’ concepts are extra controversial. In her interview with Tucker Carlson, she mentioned that contraception capsules are overprescribed and that they sign a “disrespect of life.” She mentioned Ozempic has “a stranglehold on the U.S. inhabitants” and convinces individuals that there's a magic capsule that may save them from power well being points. And she or he questioned why infants in America had been getting hepatitis B vaccines after beginning, a apply that the U.S. Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention (CDC) recommends.

She additionally calls into query the protection of childhood vaccines, writing in her e-newsletter, “There's rising proof that the full burden of the present excessive and rising vaccine schedule is inflicting well being declines in weak kids."

Although many docs don't align with Means’ positions on medical points, some say that the decide will assist advance People’ well being.

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“I’m glad to see a nominee for surgeon normal who is targeted on meals and diet-related train,” says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Meals is Drugs Institute at Tufts College. “That is the highest challenge going through People’ well being.” Means criticized Mozaffarian in a previous e-newsletter for main a 2021 research that assessed the healthfulness of sure meals, denouncing it for being funded by corporations that make ultra-processed meals. (He declined to touch upon the criticism.)

Means’ perspective in regards to the significance of well being and train suits into the sector of practical drugs, which focuses on figuring out and treating the foundation reason for illnesses quite than simply treating signs. It disrupts conventional drugs’s give attention to prescribed drugs—which is an effective factor, says Dr. David Perlmutter, a neurologist and advocate for low-carb diets and practical drugs.

“What Casey brings to the highlight is this attitude that we must always actually be specializing in well being and protecting individuals wholesome,” says Perlmutter, who has identified Means for eight years. “Our well being care system now has little or no to do with well being. It has to do with treating illness.”

Perlmutter appeared on a podcast episode for Ranges, the tech firm Means co-founded in 2019 that helps customers monitor their real-time metabolic measures via the usage of steady glucose monitoring. (She is the corporate’s chief medical officer; it's unclear whether or not she would step down from that position as surgeon normal.) Means has additionally appeared on Perlmutter’s podcast. In 2021, the 2 co-authored an op-ed in MedPage Right this moment, a web site for well being professionals, criticizing the Biden Administration and federal pointers for not recommending, of their view, a low-enough most threshold for every day added sugar.

Means went to school and medical college at Stanford College. She started a medical residency within the division of otolaryngology-head & neck surgical procedure at Oregon Well being and Science College, however dropped out in her fifth 12 months after realizing, she wrote in her guide, that she wasn’t studying the foundation causes of why individuals had been getting sick.

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She was an editor for the Worldwide Journal for Illness Reversal and Prevention, a peer-reviewed publication that paperwork the science of diet and life-style, from 2019 to 2022. In that position, Means primarily edited poems, essays, and artwork work, in accordance with Kim Allan Williams, the journal’s editor in chief. “I can’t reply a lot besides exterior of her eye for artwork and literature. She was nice at that!” he wrote in an e-mail inquiring about her tenure there.

Means has additionally dabbled in poetry in her e-newsletter. A poem she wrote in April (with the assistance of AI, she notes) referred to as “The Satan’s Wellness Plan” begins: “If I had been the satan, I’d ditch the disguise—/No pitchfork, no flames, simply advertising lies.”

The poem touches on vaccinations, advertising, and drugs, together with stanzas that echo a number of speaking factors espoused by the MAHA and MAGA actions:

“I’d give boys man-boobs via poisonous meals,/And name masculine power aggressive and lewd./I’d whisper, “You’re an excessive amount of, too loud,”/And disgrace males’s hearth as one thing impolite.

I’d flood your screens with porn on demand,/Until contact means pixels, not holding a hand./I’d educate ladies that cooking is one thing to dread,/That beginning wants management and a hospital mattress.”