Casey Means, MD
Appearances
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And I would just say also, if you do step back and look at everything holistically, one of the biggest problems with the healthcare industry right now is that it's so siloed. We have over 100 different medical and surgical subspecialties. And the business model of American healthcare right now is volume. It's how many people can you see. And so that's what you get paid for.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
You don't get paid for outcomes. You get paid for volume. And so- That has incentivized a structure of health care where it's most profitable to actually be seen by as many specialists as humanly possible. And that's what the average American is dealing with.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
They go to the primary care doctor with a list of issues and they get eight, 10 referrals and they spend their life going through revolving doors of these different health care. offices and not actually really feeling better and they feel disappointed. And that's why I think people are frustrated.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So we've got all these doctors who are incentivized to really be head down in their specialty lane and not actually step out and look at the big picture of how things are connected when in fact it's all connected. We don't see the body anymore. And I'm just telling you this from like sheer experience of being In medical school, we are not trained to see the body as a unified system.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
We're trained to see it as 20, 30 different parts. And so no one's seeing the forest for the trees. But like Kelly's saying, look at what's happening. You look at what's happening with kids. We've got ADHD through the roof, autism through the roof. These are neurodevelopmental issues. Then you look at midlife. Well, Women and men are depressed. We have huge rates of mental illness. 25% of women.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
25% of women now are on SSRI. I mean, we're living in like the wealthiest, safest country in human history and 25% of people are on SSRI. That's insane. Then you go into menopause, perimenopause, that age group, and it's sort of brain fog. And then we have full-blown Alzheimer's going up. So we've got all these neurodevelopmental issues and neurodegenerative issues sort of across the lifespan.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And, you know, then you look at kind of the hormonal side of things. We've got girls going through puberty much earlier than they ever were. You know, we are the, of continents on Earth, we are the earliest puberty rates right now. That's gone down on an average six years since 1900. Our puberty rates are way earlier. So girls are reaching sexual maturity at like age 10.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Then you've got in midlife, you look at women and infertility is the roof. We've got PCOS is affecting 26% of women. This is a metabolic fertility issue. It's the leading cause of infertility in the country. Then we look at older age and like menopausal symptoms are a disaster for women.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
This is why a book like The New Menopause is like the number one book in the country for a while because women are desperate. So if you step back and look at all these different things, we've got these neuro issues throughout the lifetime all exploding. These hormonal issues throughout the lifetime all exploding.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
it's happening all over the place but no one stopping asking why like why is this happening instead we put adhd in a bucket we put depression anxiety bucket we put alzheimer's in a bucket um and so that's that's really the problem and i think you know when you think about some of these things it's like we're becoming infertile and we're losing our minds across the lifespan like what the hell is happening like that's what these diseases these buckets of diseases represent and i think
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
That's why I think it's... We talked about health is the tip of the iceberg of fundamentally a planetary issue. But the planetary issue is the tip of the iceberg of what I think is really, really going on here, which is a spiritual issue. We are not fighting for life in this world anymore. And I think that's more of a consciousness issue. We talk about, why is no one covering this? It's like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
I think people see it. I think in some way we have like totally lost respect for like the miraculousness of life. That's what our actions are reflecting. Like we know a lot. We have the technology, the money and the resources to fix all of this, the planet and health. And we're not. And that's why I think there's something darker happening on like the consciousness level.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And I think we could get our way out of this if we like, I think it's going to be hard to get our way out of this. If we stick to like partisan politics and quibbling about individual policy ideas, I think it has to start with like, are we committed to life and to awe and to connecting with source and then listening and moving our way out of here? Or are we not? Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And if we choose not, which is what I think we're doing, I mean, I think there's huge light happening because that's why everyone's interested in this. That's why a lot of people are interested in this issue right now. But, like, if we don't, like, I do think we're on the road to existential disaster because we're that powerful now. And so, you know, I think...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So step one is us deciding, like, what choice do we want to make in this lifetime? Do we want to do we want to believe that humans are that life is a miracle? This universe is a miracle. Our bodies are miracles. And we want to connect with God in this lifetime. We want to build and respect these temples that are interconnected with the earth to do that. Or do we not?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And like, that's the choice we have right now. And I think we have to take that very seriously. And I think a lot of the political stuff that's happening, Maha, it's all just reflection of people. wanting to find a way to fight for life and not knowing how. But on the biggest level, that's what I think is kind of happening here.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Well, if you ask the New York Times, they'll write a headline that says girls are going through puberty weight weight earlier and no one has has any idea why. And of course, that's because there's not a double blind placebo controlled peer reviewed, you know, RCT in a in a journal that can exactly pinpoint the one reason why it's happening. But again, if we put the dots together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Which, of course, I'm going to be called like not evidence based for saying that what's happening in our environment right now. So what drives early puberty is excess estrogens. Right. We're like we're pushing estrogens to basically, you know, spark that whole process of puberty. Well, look at our world. Where are these? Why would we be having extra estrogens?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Well, let's look at our environment, the plastics. So we've got plastics, as you know, everywhere. I love you were talking about this, I think, with Brigham, like you've got the metal cups and I love it. But like there have been eight.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
billion metric tons of plastic produced on planet earth since about 1907 with when plastic was commercialized and the interesting thing about plastic is that when it breaks down it acts like a xeno estrogen an exogenous estrogen molecule that can literally bind to our estrogen receptors and act like estrogens so now we've got you know we've got you know this like we've got plastic
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
effing everywhere it's literally in the air we're breathing the nanoparticles it's in our food it's in our water it's in everything um and we've now found plastics in every human organ so of course that's affecting our bodies and our young girls bodies it's actually affecting our bodies in utero there was a recent study that was done that showed a hundred percent of placentas that were dissected had microplastics in them so that's one number two look at the pesticides
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So there are pesticides actually where their molecular activity is to increase aromatase, the enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogen. So atrazine, which is banned in Europe, but we spray 70 million pounds of it per year in the U.S., increases aromatase, which converts testosterone to estrogen. Illegal overseas and illegal. It is – we buy it from other countries.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So China and Germany and other countries are selling us a chemical of which 70 million pounds are sprayed on our food, invisible and tasteless, which upregulates aromatase and converts testosterone to estrogen. So that's number two. And then you look at just the fat that we have on our bodies.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So fat, and especially visceral fat, the metabolically active fat around our midline, that is a metabolically active organ that actually converts testosterone to estrogen. So we are living in this wildly estrogenic era. environment that is created by humans and it's all invisible. And, and, you know, again, it's like, how would you even do the study right to show that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And yet it's, if you put the pieces together, it's very clear. Now go into later life and talking about estrogens. We've got a huge percentage of American women on birth control pills. That's of course, post, hopefully post puberty, but we're, we're putting women on exogenous estrogens, for acne, for PCOS, for menstrual irregularity, sometimes, of course, for actual birth control.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
But it's very ubiquitous now in the environment. And it's like, when you kind of know this stuff, you're like, How are we allowing this to happen? And then, of course, it's affecting boys, too. Right. You know, and so I kind of just think about this world we're living in where it's tons of estrogens. It's not like there's a bunch of exogenous testosterone. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
It's not like the plastics are also stimulating testosterone. So you've got these estrogens. Then we're.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
barreled with sugar and it's literally like it's in our kids school lunches the sugar everywhere sugar is driving the visceral fat in kids which is turning estrogen testosterone so it's like we live in a world that's basically feminizing us which for women that's going to make puberty early for men it's going to feminize them you know and then we also have an entire food system that driving visceral fat to make us
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
more estrogen sort of rich. And what is this doing? I think in a lot of ways it's depleting American vigor, right? Like we're living in this estrogen stew that's hard to get away from.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
No, I think Callie's getting into something also that I think is part of the reason why... I mean, there are a lot of... Fortunately, there are a lot of doctors speaking out right now, and I have so much, like, gratitude for all the other, not only doctors, but, like, NPs, DOs, chiropractors, like, nurse practitioners, all these amazing people who are speaking up and getting a lot of shit for it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
But this is very tribal, you know? And I think that when you think about... And it's hard. Like, this is a primal instinct to not break out of the pact and to not go against what the norm is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So I think in a lot of ways that we're dealing with like here is going to come down to like how courageous are we willing to be to move humanity back and by humanity very much also the Earth's health because they're interconnected. They're one in the same. How courageous are we going to be to stand up for that? Or are we going to let things slip through our fingers?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And I think the tribe, when I was in medical school, like it's amazing how
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Because of the interest and the fact that Stanford got a $3 million grant from Pfizer while I was there to revamp the curriculum, and the fact that the American Diabetes Association that makes clinical guidelines is getting millions of dollars from Coke and Cadbury, and the American Diabetes Association is getting millions of dollars from Mead Johnson that makes formula, and Abbott Nutrition that makes formula, and vaccine companies that make flu vaccines.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
The fact that the money, I mean, 8,000 major conflicts of interest were just reported at the NIH with food and pharma. So at every level, the medical guidelines that if you step out of, you are at risk for litigation as a doctor and the NIH, you know, like, you know, this thing that we all respect, tons of conflicts of interest and the medical schools accepting money.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
The tribe that then you become a part of as a trainee is a tribe that only hears one thing. And so I have a lot of compassion for doctors because I was I did go through medical school and not learn anything. any of the things that I had to learn after to actually figure out how to help myself and others truly generate foundational cellular health to be healthy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
I just look back at what I've had to learn since medical school. I learned about basically Organ specific physiology, pharmacology. And then in residency, I learned how to do surgery. And then, of course, throughout the whole thing, I learned how to bill. But that that is ultimately those are not the tools that actually generate foundational cellular health.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
You know, 80 percent of medical schools in the United States don't require a single nutrition course, not one minute of nutrition. And yet 90% of our health care costs are tied to diseases. The things that are torturing American lives are tied to food. And doctors, it's not a hammer in our toolbox.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
I didn't learn at Stanford Medical School that 95% of the people on the USDA Food Guidelines for America Committee had a conflict with the food industry. I didn't learn that there were 8,000 conflicts of interest at the NIH. I didn't learn that there are 8 billion tons of plastic on planet Earth that are degrading into estrogen analogs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
I did not learn that there are 6 billion pounds of pesticides sprayed on our global food supply every single year, most from China and Germany, and that these are literally tied very strongly to Alzheimer's, dementia, cancer, obesity, mitochondrial dysfunction, infertility.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
ADHD, liver dysfunction, I didn't learn that, you know, simply taking 7000 steps per day can slash your risk of obesity, type two diabetes, Alzheimer's, dementia, even gastric reflux by 40 to 60%. And the average Americans walking 3500 steps per day, like we're literally just not moving as a country. And if you just walk a little
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
bit, 7,000 steps, which takes like 45 minutes, you slash your risk of every major, you know, chronic disease. I didn't learn that we need to be getting sunlight because circadian biology dictates our cellular health. Like we are diurnal animals that have biologic processes that happen during the day and other biologic processes that happen at night.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And the way your body knows whether it's day or night is if you get photons hitting your retina and your skin cells. Pretty basic, pretty foundational for human health. Didn't learn anything about it. Didn't learn anything about sunlight. Didn't learn anything about photons. Didn't learn anything about sleep. You know, we're sleeping 20% less on average than we were 100 years ago.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And sleep is a huge risk factor. You can, in an experimental setting, take a young, healthy person and subject them to sleep deprivation for five nights and they become pre-diabetic. Well, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic and type 2 diabetic and we're not sleeping well. And I didn't learn not one minute on sleep. So all the things and so many more, and of course, nothing about nutrition.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
You know, and Marty Makary talks about this, like, I certainly didn't learn that medical error and medication is the third leading cause of death in the United States. I learned that patient comes in and I need to label their diagnosis and give them a pill. So When I speak of the tribalism, it's like I have so much compassion for doctors who feel stuck right now. They're stuck in a broken system.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
The tribe that they're a part of has taught them a certain set of things. There are huge trillions of dollars of interest to make the things that they learn a specific myopic lens. And... Putting together dots is risky because if you step outside the guidelines, you're at risk for intense litigation and potentially ridicule.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
I mean, I'm called pseudoscientific alt-right, you know, woo-woo caucus all the time. And so it's scary. And I think that fundamentally this is, again, why it comes down to like this is actually more of a consciousness and spiritual issue because it's like we need to pray for courage. We need to sit down every morning and decide what we want for the future. What do we want? We're all players.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
We're all important. We all need to use our voices. Being complicit, like what future do we want and what are we willing to do for it? And get our priorities straight. Is our priority like our house and our mortgage and our boat and our comfortable life that's killing us? Or is it to elevate, to be stewards of the future and of the planet and to make some harder choices
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And I think one thing I would just say, if there are doctors listening, I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but like this tribe on the other side, you know, that I think we're all in of like promoting health, like it's beautiful and people are really healthy and happy. And it's not that hard and it's not that expensive.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And everyone is welcome here in this tribe of trying to move humanity towards more health. harmonious future. And everyone is welcome. It's bipartisan. It's really about, like Brigham was saying, this is about team humanity. And team humanity always by extension will be team planet because they're interconnected. And so I think we need to break out of that sort of more
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
our past, you know, human selves of tribalism and really realize like, we need to be brave, we need to be courageous, we need to fight for life. And, and it's pretty, pretty bright and wonderful when we start doing that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
I would just add a few more dates. I think one thing about the research, we're one of the only countries in the world where the burden of proof for harm, we allow these chemicals to just enter our food system. We have 10,000 chemicals in our food system. Europe, only 400 because they have to show that it's safe before they use it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
We're allowed to use it and then only if there's issues that crop up do people have to do research. There's this ridiculous
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
GRAS generally recognizes safe designation which is essentially a company self assesses whether the chemical that they are creating is generally recognized as safe no one's overseeing it and Brigham talks about this like compassion for the FDA they're overwhelmed there's a lot of stuff to do it's kind of like a hoarder's house where do we even start like I don't necessarily know if I buy that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
I think that it's pretty bad and bought off that we have all these chemicals. But they basically just have to self-designate if it's generally recognized as safe and then it can go into our food system. One thing that I find really interesting is like that I really reflect on a lot is like, what is the difference between a food chemical and a drug?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
They're all just synthetic molecules that are made in factories, in labs by scientists. Do you know what the difference is? Intended use. So basically, if the intended use is for food, you can synthesize almost anything you want and put it in food.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
We are being mass drugged and poisoned in our food system with 10,000 virtually unregulated chemicals, which have bought off papers saying that they are safe. I mean, you look at what happened with all the Monsanto litigation about non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. They had to release...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
this whole thing called the monsanto papers they were declassified where they ghost writ scientific they ghost wrote scientific papers saying that glyphosate is safe so there's all this corruption in there where basically we have 10 000 unregulated chemicals in our food system and we're getting sick as hell obviously and then you've got the evidence-based people saying well we need to have a 10-year longitudinal study to show that glyphosate is causing xyz disease and it's like obviously that's not the right approach because first of all
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
It is the synergistic combination of all the toxins that are now in our environment that are leading to all these pleiotropic health issues. That's very hard to study. So we have to get our heads out of our ass and use our common sense and realize what's going on and not wait 10 years with these, you know, NIH-funded studies that are going to be corrupted. And, you know, I think...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
That's just one thing about the food chemicals. I just wanted to add to your point, Cal, some other dates. You look at the processed food emergence. Processed food really didn't start taking off until these mergers. There was a little bit of a start of it. Ultra-processed foods did not exist before World War II.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And we needed to have shelf-stable food for soldiers and things like that that we could ship, and so there were maybe some good intentions there. But then there was an opportunity there that got seen. And we can also weaponize the feminist movement against, oh, being in the kitchen, you're a slave. Your value is outside the home. You need to climb the corporate ladder.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Here, have this convenience food that we basically made for soldiers, and we're going to tell you that this is actually your liberation. So, of course, we got people not cooking. Families aren't eating together anymore. Like, you know, kids are eating 67% of children's calories now are ultra-processed foods. These means foods that come from a factory made by food scientists.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Not just processed, ultra-processed, the highest form of processing, 67% of calories. Then you go to the 1970s, and we have the advent of high-fructose corn syrup, which, as Callie talks about, this preceded some of the mergers. But high-fructose corn syrup is a weapon of mass destruction that basically food scientists used in understanding about hibernating animals, like bears.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
who, fructose is one of the only types of calories where instead of making you feel satiated, it makes you more hungry. And this is evolutionarily, and we knew this. In the fall, when animals are preparing for hibernation and they start eating fructose-rich berries, they need to put on a ton of fat for winter.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And so there's a feed-forward mechanism with fructose where it actually gets the bears to be hungry and even violent. to out-compete other animals to get as many berries as possible in a short period of time, to lay 3D print fat for winter.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So you have the scientists understanding this and say, hey, we can make liquid fructose a thousand times more potent than the fructose you'd find in berries, same molecule but in higher concentration, and we can add it to everything. We can add it to salad dressing. We're going to add it to ketchup. We're going to add it to children's school lunches. We're going to add it, obviously, to sodas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And we're going to make people insatiable. We're going to make their bodies and their brains think that they're preparing for winter that's never coming. And there has been research that shows that high fructose corn syrup is associated with violence, ADHD in kids, all of these different things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Just last thing I'll mention, flash forward 1986, I think another very important date, which is the date when the litigation went through that said we couldn't sue vaccine manufacturers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And the Vaccine Safety Act, that's a very important date in the whole history because it is one of the first times where we were able to pass legislation through Congress that said that pharmaceutical companies could not be sued for wrongdoing. And that still is present today. They basically put together a little
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Paltry little fund that people could apply to get, you know, no fault reimbursements for for for vaccine harm. But you cannot sue the company. So you start to get companies being legally immune from wrongdoing, which has then accelerated. And they're now starting to try and push things like that for pesticides as well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So that's just some of the history of like why we're why we are where we are today. It's not rocket science. This has all been very institutionalized and structured. And it's the last 50 years. Like we can undo all of this with leadership. And so that's just a little bit of the picture of how we are where we are today.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
No, it's really interesting. There's two amazing books on this. Richard Johnson from University of Colorado wrote Nature Wants Us to be Fat, and then David Perlmutter wrote Drop Acid. Both books are about a molecule called uric acid, which is unique to fructose metabolism.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So when fructose is metabolized in the body, not like glucose, it creates uric acid, which creates oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction in the brain and the body. That if you have mitochondrial dysfunction, you're not going to be able to process sugars to energy. You know, mitochondria powerhouse the cell.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So you break the mitochondria with the excess fructose overloading the mitochondria with uric acid. And then what happens? You can't turn sugars to energy. So what do you do? You turn sugars to fat. So you start 3D printing fat because you break the mitochondria with excess fructose overloading.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And on top of that, the mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress when happening in the brain is what may inspire the violence and the ADHD and all that stuff to make the bears manic so they get as much berries as possible. This is what's happening in every kid in every classroom in America now. And so that's kind of some of the biology very simply about what's happening with fructose.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Well, it's... generally is going to have sucrose, which is going to have some amount of glucose and fructose. But this is the thing about fruit, is that we have 40 trillion cells, and we have the ability to clear uric acid, and we have the ability to process fructose in a physiologic amount.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
We're never going to have the uric acid increasing and overloading the mitochondria if we're eating an apple. It's when you're eating 20, 30 times the fructose that an apple has, and you're literally pouring it down. That all of a sudden, imagine, you get this huge rise in uric acid in the body and other things that are happening. And that's when it overwhelms.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So it's a bit of that dose makes the poison because our body has the ability to excrete toxins. Our body has the ability to deal with some heavy metals. Our body has the ability to probably clear some level of glyphosate. But we can't clear all of it all the time, 24 hours a day, in 100 times the quantity of all these things together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And the research and the evidence-based thing and this cult of the science, they love to ignore that. The idea of synergistic effects, of this of this overwhelming breaking of our cellular resources is just conveniently forgotten because we study things in isolation. That's literally the definition of how a double-blind, placebo-controlled study happens.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
It's one variable and one thing that you're testing. That doesn't make sense. We live in a toxic stew.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
It's like with vaccines. It's like, yeah, I bet that one vaccine probably isn't causing autism. But what about the 20 that they're getting before 18 months? We don't look at it in synergistic. And so that's a big problem. And this is where the cult of the science, and I say the science specifically because science is beautiful.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Using the scientific method and using that way of inquiry into the natural world is a beautiful art. But weaponizing... papers that are often bought for or corrupted. And, you know, the leaders of some of our key medical journals have actually even said that 50% of scientific research that published ends up being wrong. So it's bought for corrupted or wrong. We rely on this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And if one interesting trend that we're seeing in our world is that if we do choose to put dots together, use our intuition, our God given intuition, Anything other than this particular way of examining things, you are dangerous. You are dangerous. And I think that that's something we need to really question. You know, I think especially as a woman, like, and I'm thinking about having kids soon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
I'm like thinking about like, wow, like I am. I have the ability in my body to build a human, 3D print a human, pull in a soul to that human. I don't need a peer-reviewed study or a textbook to tell me how to do that. Our body and our intuition and our minds and the subtle things happening inside us are important. They are incredible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
We have now been told that you can't trust it and you are dangerous if you do that. And I think that's one of the reasons why I think parents are very frustrated right now is because parenting, I'm not a parent yet, but Callie is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And, you know, when we're being told now that parents are the enemy for using their own judgment about their families and kids, like, I think that's probably it's deeply frustrating to people. And that's basically what we're being asked to do. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Yeah, no, I think the point about incrementalism versus radical is the question we need to be asking ourselves. Like, we're not, yeah. And so in terms of Alzheimer's, so I think something really interesting framing is that the brain, you know, it's only 2% of our body weight, but it uses 20% of our body's energy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And there's been this theory with Alzheimer's of like, oh, it's the plaques in the brain. It's the tau and the tangles and the beta amyloid and all these things. And so we thought, OK, well, if we can get rid of those with a drug, like maybe that it'll improve. But no Alzheimer's drugs really work meaningfully.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And more recently, there's been this understanding of like, OK, metabolic dysfunction is definitely going up. We know metabolic syndrome and diabetes are going up and the brain uses 20 percent of the body's energy. And something that's happening in the body like diabetes is also happening in the brain. There's been this interest.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Chris Palmer talks about this in such an amazing way in his book, Brain Energy. But like we've somehow decided to separate the brain from the body as if they're different things when, in fact, they're all just made of cells. They're all just made of cells that do the same things. They need to do metabolism to keep the cell working.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So we've got this organ that uses 20% of our energy, and we've got 50% of Americans with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, which is fundamentally a metabolic issue. And of course, the brain's basically underpowered. It's not getting the energy it needs, and that's going to express itself as dementia. So it's been increasing exponentially.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
in parallel with everything that's happening with our increasing diabetes rates. And then the early onset dementia and Alzheimer's disease, that has tripled since 2013. So younger people, and that makes sense, though. We've got 30% of teens now with prediabetes. That was like 0% in the past. You didn't have kids with the adult onset diabetes in the past.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And so you've got now 30% of teens with prediabetes. You've got You've got middle-aged people now, 50% with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Of course, that's also creating an energetic deficit. So this neurometabolic, neuroenergetic theory of Alzheimer's, maybe with these cells crying out for help, maybe some of these plaques that we're seeing are actually a protective mechanism.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
The brain actually laying down almost like protective shielding. It's a response to an underlying metabolic deficiency. issue as opposed to the problem itself. But of course, in our paradigm, we're like, we just got to get rid of that symptom of the problem.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
When in fact, actually, if we could unencumber the brain to be able to make energy properly, make good energy properly, that's why our book is called Good Energy, they would actually be able to heal itself and to have the power to do its work, which is cognitive thinking. I was just going to say, an amazing book about Alzheimer's
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
That just hasn't gotten as much attention as I think it should, as Dale Bredesen's book, The End of Alzheimer's, because he talks about when you really look at the research, there are about 36 different biomarkers and factors. I think he calls them like the 36 holes in the roof of what creates like if it's raining and you plug one hole, your house is still going to be filled with water.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
You have to plug all 36 holes to prevent or reverse infection. alzheimer's disease and of course all these are related in some way to metabolic health but it's things like your vitamin d levels your insulin levels um the amount of uh you know movement you're getting vitamin d insulin b12 other things like that these these things that we know are part and parcel with metabolic health so
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And there was an amazing Lancet paper from a couple of years ago that showed that if we just got on top of some of the basic modifiable factors of our metabolic health, we could slash Alzheimer's rates from happening.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So, you know, I think, yeah, fundamentally, it's one more branch on the tree that is rooted in this metabolic dysfunction in our body, which is fundamentally rooted in three processes that uniquely really hurt the brain, which is oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction and chronic inflammation. These are the three hallmarks of metabolic dysfunction.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And the brain is so sensitive and such a complex, high processing power organ that these core cellular disturbances that make up metabolic dysfunction, which are caused by our environment and cannot really be addressed with drugs, mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, they're showing up so prominently in the brain.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
You were talking about this with Max Lugavere. Yeah. Max Lugavere.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Well, this is coming out every day. We're hearing about a new premier researcher who's published hundreds of papers in their field who literally are... Western blots are one of these things you see in scientific papers that basically show you protein levels. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
copied and pasted Western blots in like papers across their career, like just made up data that then has served as foundational dogma for future research. So you think about the ripple effect.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Yeah. And so this but this is it really gets back to the core problem that's above all the problems, which is an incentive problem. Like it's a simple economic incentive problem that's basically causing all these problems. And I think it's that what we're striving for in this country is ultimately economic growth and value. That is what we care about.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And so, you know, in each industry, you see people fighting for that, including at the NIH, including researchers. We're all motivated by this carrot that is destroying us. And yeah, it's very, very dark because, yeah,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And they're living eight years longer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Eat that pizza. You know, it's like the only place in the world I can eat gluten because it doesn't destroy my gut.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And I think this is why the freedom of speech issue is actually so important and so existential, because the thing that gives me hope right now, like this all sounds dark, but we're both extremely optimistic. But if the ability to talk about these issues is taken away, that is when I would lose hope. Right. Because the fact that, you know, independent media is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
is the most listened to form of media on planet earth right now that is a good thing we can still discuss ideas and the light can connect across the globe but when you start severing that ability like there's a beautiful force happening right now i think we all see it like people are waking up people understand that there's a problem like we see this every day and you know twitter has its issues and whatnot but like people are talking and connecting from around the world to try and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
figure out how to solve these issues that we all know on some level in the quietness of our heart are a really big, big deal, and that the time is now. And if that gets taken away, I worry about what's going to happen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Should we rethink the Constitution? Is the First Amendment a major roadblock?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Yeah. So just like Callie, you know, we grew up in D.C. I was I loved biology, went to Stanford Medical School, went on to do surgical residency and head and neck surgery, climb the ladder, you know, do what every good medical student and resident is supposed to do, climb the academic ranks, publish papers, et cetera. And so I was heads down in that journey. And.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Just like Kelly's saying, like with what I think is happening with the American people right now and really more globally, like there was something inside of me that was whispering and then speaking a little louder. And then finally was a deafening call to me that like something is not right. Like I'm operating. I'm working eight hours a week.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
I'm operating, you know, two, three, four or five surgeries a day. And, you know, in some ways, I feel good about that. You know, people, maybe their sinusitis is a little better for a little while. But fundamentally, when you pop up for just a second, which they don't want you to do in health care, you know, everyone's working their tails off.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
But when you pop up for just a second and look around at what is happening to American health, children's health, health across the lifespan, as well as global health, it's a disaster. It's literally a disaster. And again, this isn't... People will say that's alarmist, but I... You know, in trying to understand, like, why don't I feel right about my work?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
I also just can't imagine like if what's Callie's talking about from the top is happening and putting voice to power to some of these things that people feel and people know if this is actually right now it is silenced at the top. We went through four years of COVID without a single health care leader at an agency ever telling us to get on top of our metabolic health and how to do that ever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And yet people were talking about it. So if we are able to give voice at the highest level to these concepts, I just wonder also what that ripple effect through our country is going to be like when people are part of that tribe and can actually speak about it without the fear of being called, you know... just totally all right, you know, crazy person for even talking about these things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
That grassroots momentum that I think could happen would be incredibly powerful where we can all come together to work on this because as opposed to it being adversarial with the top, it's connected to what the top is talking about. We so believe, you know, parents don't want their kids getting sick. We don't want to be sick. We don't want to see our parents dying of Alzheimer's and cancer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And all of these diseases, there is this pervasive thread that Americans are lazy and they don't want to be healthy. I was indoctrinated with that message as a medical student and as a surgical resident. It's not true. People want to be healthy. There's a huge system rigged against them. You know, we've got people don't want to be feeding their kids this dead trash food that comes in a package.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
But it is what is cheaper because of corrupt policies at the top with the farm bills. You know, people don't want their kids to be eating this plastic meat in school. But, you know, Lunchables and Kraft Heinz and the USDA forged a deal that's now putting Lunchables in schools that serve seven billion meals to children per year.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
You know, and doctors then don't get a single minute of nutrition education in 80 percent of medical schools. So you just imagine like. We've got people who want to be healthy. We truly believe that Americans want to be healthy. And for the first time in many years, this could be an opportunity for that to be aligned with the country's vision and priority as opposed to adversarial to it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And I think that that, you know, Jason Karp in the Senate hearing. who's one of the co-founders of Who Kitchen, talked about if 5% of revenue of some of these big companies like Kellogg's and General Mills drops because people are no longer willing to buy these food because there's a real movement about it, they will change. They will re-innovate towards what people actually want.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
I just started looking at the data in a different way. And I started to look at what's happening with health trends. And if you just kind of run through the list of what's happening, it's unbelievable. Like we are getting destroyed and it's very recent and it's accelerating. The stats speak for themselves. You know, you know this very well. Seventy four percent of Americans are overweight or obese.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
But right now, it's controversial to even push. You exercise your far right. You know, you have to have so much strength to be healthy in this country. And not only that, you have to have financial resources and strength, strength of courage. And so, you know, he says, yeah, if people change their buying decisions, which I think will be easier to do culturally now,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
If we are talking about these things on the highest level, then it's going to change. I think also I think a potential light filled vision of what could happen is that some of these companies might adapt to consumer demand and do better, do better processes. Like we need as we need to get back to American agriculture being regenerative agriculture. We're totally screwed if we don't do that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
We cannot continue with this mass poisoning of our farmland. Not only is it horrible for our farmers who are dying at astronomical rates from chronic disease, but it's terrible for our children and our bodies. And if people start understanding that because people like RFK are in the leadership positions and that's becoming part of the zeitgeist,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
It will change the way people buy and what they're willing to tolerate. But right now, the norm, because of corrupt incentives in a rigged system, is to be unhealthy. And I think when people get permission to push back against that, we could see an incredibly bright, beautiful future in a very short period of time in America. We believe that's possible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
I never ever learned in medical school or residency that I could write a prescription for food or exercise. It's totally legal. And if you do that, it can be covered by, you can use tax advantage dollars tax-free. Never learn that in nine years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
50% now of American adults have type 2 diabetes or prediabetes. These were diseases where there was 1% of Americans in 1950 had type 2 diabetes. Now it's 50% of Americans have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Alzheimer's, dementia are going through the roof. Young adult dementias have increased like three times since 2012. So early onset dementias, we're seeing...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
That is right now legal. I never learned that. It's called a letter of medical necessity.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
You know, this one in two Americans are expected to have cancer in their lifetime now. One in two. And young adult cancers are going up 79% in the last 10 years. We've got, of course, the autism rates are absolutely astronomical. One in 36 children has autism now in the United States. That was one in 150 in the year 2000.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Trust yourself, not your doctor. But like the evidence on chronic conditions, which is where they have abjectly failed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Like, like, like, like, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you think about what's happened over the past 50 years, all of these chronic diseases are exploding. And the more we medicate them, the higher the disease rates are. Like the more SSRIs we prescribe, the more depression we're getting. The more metformin we're prescribing, type 2 diabetes rates are going up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
The more clomiphene we are prescribing, the more we're having to do IVF procedures. You know, it's not making sense. The more hypertension, ACE inhibitors, you know, beta blockers, the more hypertension is going up. And so it doesn't really make sense that we would say, oh, they're crushing it on these diseases by prescribing more pills.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
We're prescribing 221 million prescriptions for statins per year, and heart disease is continuing to be the leading cause of death in the United States. This doesn't make... any sense. And, you know, it's like Callie's saying, like, it is a free country and people should be allowed to make choice, but we don't need to pay for the bad choices for people, which is what we're doing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
We're incentivizing sugar. We're putting it in their school lunches. We are also making those foods cheaper. Through the farm bills and through our complete and utter support of $500 billion program, the farm bill program. And it's all, in terms of the crops subsidies, going towards commodity crops that are turned into ultra-processed foods and making them cheaper. Less than 1%.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And in California, where I live, it's one in 22, one in 22 with a lifetime neurodevelopmental disorder. We've got infertility going up 1% for a year. 25% of men now under 40 have erectile dysfunction, a quarter of the country. You know, this is fundamentally a metabolic disease. We've got 77% of young Americans can't serve in the military because of obesity or drug abuse.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
of the entire Farm Bill budget goes towards fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, legumes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
We've got autoimmune diseases. Some studies are saying they're going up 13% per year. It's just, it's really unbelievable. And I could go through so many more diseases. Of course, we've got heart disease, which is almost totally preventable as the leading cause of death in the United States, killing around 800,000 people per year.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if all these medications were crushing it and there were no side effects, everyone should probably take them. Yes. Right? But if that's not really the case, then we need to silence anything that talks about it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
I think COVID, obviously, as you've said, like it broke something open. It broke something open that I feel like is light because it's awareness. And, you know, I was probably a little more cynical having been in the health care system going into COVID because I was raised as a young surgeon with the mantra, as a surgeon, you eat what you kill.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Like that is the unofficial mantra of the surgical world, which is that as a private practice surgeon, what you eat, i.e. what your salary is going to be, is what you kill, how many surgeries you sell and book. And so it was very black and white to me to understand that the financial security of everyone in the health care system is dependent on how much we actually do to people, how much we –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
unfortunately see these bodies essentially a box that we can either take things out of or put things in a in you know surgery is taking things out um or put medications in like that's it's very dark that's why i left that's why i literally just put down my scalpel because i was heading out of residency into private practice and i thought i can't i can't do this i can't that's crazy right that this is like the business model of my industry because it's very personal and then
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
You know, I had a really good friend who was with me in the hallway before taking a job as a as a cancer surgeon and, you know, tearful saying, you know, I don't know if I can do this. Like when people come through the doors of the surgical oncology department here, they are going to get a surgery whether they need it or not. Those are her exact words. And this is this is because it is. And again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
We I every doctor I know is a good person went into health care for noble reasons. But if you have if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If that's what you know and that's what you can offer people, that is what you're going to offer people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And especially with cancer, when people are hopeless and desperate and you have something you can do for them and it happens to be really profitable. This this revolving door keeps happening. Yeah. And then just always getting back to systems issues, because that's where Callie and I really focus. You look at some of these things that sound good on paper.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And I think what, as I kind of just looked around, and again, these are just statistics, I started trying to put the pieces together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And I think this is actually a lot what's happening with politicians, is they see these bills, lots of things coming across their desk, and they kind of sound good on paper. It's going to be good for farmers. It's going to be good for absences. It's going to reduce obesity. Sounds great, but the devil's always in the details. You look at what happened with...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
obamacare and like they they did they did speak about this idea of value-based care which sounds really good it's like we're gonna have we're gonna pay doctors more for better outcomes which which is awesome so a doctor would have to show essentially that they're the patient is getting better and they're doing it for a lower cost that's the value equation and if that happens they get paid more well the
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
easiest, by far, evidence-based way to make a patient healthier for a lower cost is to have them eat real food and exercise and go in the sunshine and sleep, right? And manage their stress, obviously. Not drugging them for life. And unfortunately, even that... That whole project got co-opted by industry because what happened was industry got their fingers in it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And the quality metrics that doctors were going to have to report on to get that increased payment, instead of it being quality, good outcomes, being a healthier patient who reversed their disease, quality, good outcomes was measured by how many of the patients in that doctor's practice were medicated on long-term medication therapy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
why is this happening why are these all going up all at once and that led me on what is now a seven eight year journey ultimately leaving the surgical world putting down my scalpel forever because what i realized is that when you go to the science with a root cause perspective you go back to pubmed with a slightly different perspective not how do i treat these diseases once they emerge but why are they happening you see a very obvious blaring answer which is why we had to write a book about it which is that it's all caused by metabolic dysfunction
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So a doctor, instead of saying, I reversed these 50 patients' diabetes and now they are non-diabetic, they would report that they had their patient panel on long-term diabetes medication and they were compliant with it. That was a good outcome. So even something that sounds good, Obamacare, value-based care, can get corrupted if we don't look at the details.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
There's a new bill right now that's been introduced that's all about protecting farmers, that's basically going to allow the EPA, which is totally bought off, to decide at a federal level whether these different pesticides are safe or not.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And so if the EPA says that a particular pesticide is safe, then state by state, it's going to be similar to the vaccines where people cannot sue for harm caused by pesticide injury if it's got the label that the FDA said it was safe. So it's like, oh, well, this is going to create less complexity for farmers and we're going to have less litigation. But it's the devil's in the details.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And so, you know, I think that all that is to say, I think COVID broke something open that is good because it's basically giving people the courage in the face of total insanity that happened to ask why and to be a And but there's you know, there's a lot to clean up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And I think that just seeing it firsthand in the health care system, like I have a little cynicism about it because of the way the incentives are in the business model. But I think like Callie said, with executive leadership, this could change rapidly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
I was just going to say, the immediate response to what Callie's saying is that's going to decrease access. People are going to starve. This is an equity issue. People can't afford regenerative agriculture. Yeah, by design, right? That is also a systems issue. The fact that people can't afford that food is because we're subsidizing the shitty food.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So it's like that's why at every level, you know, the immediate backlash to saying any of this is that, oh, that's elitist, classist, racist, whatever, you know, because not everyone can afford this. But that is literally by design. And that could be changed as well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
A term that I never learned in medical school. I learned about metabolic syndrome and the different individual diseases that make it up. But there is a problem. There is a fundamental breaking of our core cellular biology that is caused by our diet and the world we're living in, the modern world we're living in today.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Or complicated. How are we going to get the food there? It's not complicated. You know what's complicated? Sitting a 12-year-old down once a week to get an injection for their obesity. This is insane. Like going to the pharmacy, having to pay for that, having to get the kid to accept the injection.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
That kid's still going to be living in a toxic stew. They're still going to have a totally challenged life. Their mitochondria, you know, is that ozempic going to go into their cell and somehow clear out the mitochondria of all the other toxic crap that we're still living in? Absolutely not. So it's like we are being gaslit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
We are being gaslit to think that for some reason the pharmaceutical approach is the only one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
It's the only thing we should be passionate about. It's the only thing that defies complexity or cost and silence on kids need to be outdoors playing. Right now, the average kid in America is spending less time outdoors than a maximum security prisoner. We should think about that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
The fact that the pesticides, the plastics, the sleep, all the things, and somehow that's all too complicated, but we can jam kids for life with a shot weekly for $1,600 a month.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
that is crushing the very way that the human body and our human cells can transmit food energy to life energy, to cellular energy. And so our bodies are essentially, I mean, fundamentally, because metabolic health is how we make energy in the body,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And if we're not thinking about this, like what are we doing with our time?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
You know, I just really don't understand sometimes, but I think that that gets into some of the tech and the more cultural issues. Like we're so distracted and by design, right? Like we're so obsessed with on our phones, technology, 10 hours a day. You know, the average kid, I think it's seven hours a day now on a screen. So we're not, we're totally funneled in on this stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And then you've got these other cultural factors that may have good intentions. Like tech has a great side and feminism has a great side, but they get weaponized culturally to say like, yeah, you know, like we were talking about earlier, women, Don't cook. Being a mother is second class citizenship. It's associated with like being property and slave. Get out of the workforce.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Rise the corporate ladder. And women are now 25 percent of them on our SSRIs. Divorce rates are 50 percent. Men are lost because basically women are saying like men don't have a role anymore. You know, we got this. And kids kids are not being able to, you know, get that quality time with their family to play and to be wisdom to be passed down and to have home cooked meals.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And, you know, and I feel. It's obviously the beautiful sides to that, but also it's like we've totally lost our priorities and we're giving away our attention freely so that we're so distracted that we're missing the existential issues that are happening here now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And I think that what Kelly and I really want to share is that there's a way to get back to, I think, deep fulfillment and genuine happiness.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
health but it's it you know we do have to the chronic disease epidemic is just part and parcel with all of this because you know our brains and our bodies are basically getting destroyed and then it's a vicious downward cycle where if our bodies aren't strong and our minds aren't strong we're actually less strong to build a
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
to face and to push back against the things that are trying to capture our attention. You know, you get a kid who is eating the dead food filled with the sugars and the seed oils and their brains inflamed. They're on the dopamine treadmill from life. And so they're going to be more
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
um easy to succumb to the the phone that hits the dopamine or the drugs down the road i think you talked about this with brigham like you put the rats in a group and if they're in community and they have kind of that purpose of community they're not going to choose the heroin water right they're going to just choose the regular water but that's why the food is so interlinked with all of it like i just look at the food we're feeding our kids and we're we're doing this because families feel strapped for time and money you know and that's a societal issue
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
the way that our environment is now synergistic to you storing our metabolic health and the science is very clear about this it's basically like all of us are a little bit dead while we're alive that's what metabolic dysfunction is it's less energy in the body we're underpowered and that's very dark like when you step back and and say okay This is clear from the research, and I never learned it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And we've also bought into this idea that both parents may be working all the time for women to have any value in society, which is insane, and forgotten that parenting is the most precious, incredible act we possibly could do, I think, as humans, and raising healthy, strong, critical-thinking people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
But because of all of these forces, we are just giving food to our families that is literally dead. Ultra-processed food is dead food. The second... People don't really understand this. Doctors certainly don't. The second food comes out of the earth or is killed, if it's an animal, like it starts degrading. That's just what happens.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And the food has tens of thousands of molecular components in it that work miraculously with our cells to generate health. And right now, the average piece of food, I mean, 67% of our calories are ultra processed food, totally dead, totally stripped of all those miraculous nutrients.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And the average piece of fresh food is traveling 1,500 miles from the soil to our plates and is usually out of the ground for weeks. So we are literally eating dead food that has lost all of its magic that is God-given for us to have cells that function properly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And all of this is tied in to all these cultural societal factors that are being used against us to make us think that our priorities are basically just climbing the corporate ladder. It's all interconnected. And fundamentally, we need to just wake up and really focus on like, again, like get back to the core basics below all of this, above all of this, which is that our life is a miracle.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
It is a miracle that we are here, that you're here, that I'm alive, that Callie's alive, that we're all here. It is so insane that we get to have this experience and privilege to be alive once.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And to have these finite number of days and we're squandering that because we're distracted and we are we are allowing ourselves to live in fear when in fact we don't need to have fear because we are these incredible miraculous beings. And I think so. That's why I think.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Just to, we're talking a lot about policy and it's really important, but I think it also like a lot of this is going to come down to us having a reckoning in our families and our communities with ourselves of like getting back to that higher level of like, Jesus Christ, like we're alive. This is insane. And this body is our temple. It's our one home.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
and we're destroying it um and that's not the best idea like we could actually be doing it differently we could be honoring it respecting it letting it produce the energy it needs to produce to be able to reach our highest purpose in this one lifetime and it's not that complicated and i don't understand fully i reflect on this every day with cali like why are there dark why are there forces that don't want that to happen i don't understand i don't know if it's just money like
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Because it's big, right? Like, everything we're saying is not the direction we're going in as a country, as a world. And, you know, I don't understand that. It feels like we have an opportunity to elevate consciousness here on this planet for future generations, and we're choosing not to. But we could make a different choice today, all of us, by...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
by really digging deep into our spiritual strength and being bold right now. I think now's the moment. And it's above political. There are political tactics that I think can help bring it to fruition, but fundamentally it starts with us, each of us individually believing that this life is a miracle and fighting for it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
I didn't learn it at Stanford Medical School. I didn't learn it in my surgical residency. And we could fix it. We could fix it really quickly if we all popped up and woke up and looked at the data and put pieces together. But of course, we're not trained to connect dots. That's not our job in medicine. We are trained to follow algorithms and to be reactive. And so I think, you know, just to sort of
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Yeah, I'm at caseymeans.com. I have a weekly newsletter that examines all of these things. I'm also the co-founder of a company called Levels, which is part of this whole mission, which is to basically empower people. We have democratized access to continuous glucose monitors so that people can actually understand their own metabolic health because it's the most important aspect of our health.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And right now that technology has been actually, by the healthcare system, been sequestered just to people who already have type 2 diabetes. And the vision of the company is to help people
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
before they get these diseases to understand how their diet and their lifestyle are affecting their metabolic health by using these totally available, not very expensive sensors and pairing it with intelligent software. So we've seen amazing things. We've had people lose 120 pounds just by having awareness of what this disaster food is doing to our blood sugar.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
So levels.com, caseymeans.com, and then, of course, our book, Good Energy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
kind of back up to the bigger picture of why we're so passionate about this. I think that the reason there's a Maha movement, the reason that people are so passionate about your podcast that talks about this so much, people know that something's not right. And people know that this health issue is the tip of the iceberg. of what's actually happening in our world today. It is a reflection.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
Our human health is simply a reflection of the destroyed ecosystem of our globe. The fact that we have forgotten that we're completely connected to nature and we're completely interdependent with nature. But the health crisis is simply a reflection of a destroyed ecosystem. And humans have become...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
so powerful and so technologically advanced and so connected in the recent decades that we now actually do have the power to both destroy the world and destroy our health. And the health is just the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger thing happening that is existential. And I think that's... We all want kids to be healthy. We all want humans to be healthy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
But this is also... It's interconnected with all the systems and all the issues. And that's... I think it's hard for people to totally articulate that, but that is what's happening. And we actually have a choice right now. And I do believe this is the moment that we need to decide, are we going to address these interdependent issues?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD
And are we going to make the effort and be courageous enough to fight for this? Or are we going to let ourselves be told that there's nothing wrong? Nothing to see here while our health and the health of the planet is just absolutely being destroyed. So that's what our mission is.