Not lengthy earlier than the 2024 election, Dr. Casey Means wrote a letter to her Good Vitality publication 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 Normal. 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 e book Good Vitality: 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 incessantly about how medicine are overprescribed and that many fashionable illnesses are attributable to preventable life-style situations. She believes that kids ought to be served extra nutritious meals in class lunches, and she or he 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 concerning the selection. Means’ pinned submit on X is a celebration of Kennedy’s swearing-in ceremony on the White Home, which she known 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 e book, the siblings make a number of factors that might probably be embraced by Democrats. One is that diet and train play an enormous function in our general well being (one among Michelle Obama’s signature public well being campaigns, Let’s Transfer!, tried to scale back childhood weight problems by way of 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 drugs are overprescribed and that they sign a “disrespect of life.” She mentioned Ozempic has “a stranglehold on the U.S. inhabitants” and convinces folks that there’s a magic tablet 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 delivery, a observe that the U.S. Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention (CDC) recommends.

She additionally calls into query the security of childhood vaccines, writing in her publication, “There’s rising proof that the whole 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 Medication Institute at Tufts College. “That is the highest situation going through People’ well being.” Means criticized Mozaffarian in a previous publication for main a 2021 examine 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 concerning the significance of well being and train matches into the sphere of purposeful medication, which focuses on figuring out and treating the foundation reason for ailments moderately than simply treating signs. It disrupts conventional medication’s deal with prescribed drugs—which is an efficient factor, says Dr. David Perlmutter, a neurologist and advocate for low-carb diets and purposeful medication.

“What Casey brings to the highlight is this angle that we should always actually be specializing in well being and protecting folks wholesome,” says Perlmutter, who has recognized 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 observe their real-time metabolic measures by way of using steady glucose monitoring. (She is the corporate’s chief medical officer; it’s unclear whether or not she would step down from that function as surgeon normal.) Means has additionally appeared on Perlmutter’s podcast. In 2021, the 2 co-authored an op-ed in MedPage Immediately, an internet site for well being professionals, criticizing the Biden Administration and federal pointers for not recommending, of their view, a low-enough most threshold for day by day added sugar.

Means went to school and medical faculty 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 e book, that she wasn’t studying the foundation causes of why folks 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 function, Means primarily edited poems, essays, and artwork work, in line with Kim Allan Williams, the journal’s editor in chief. “I can’t reply a lot besides outdoors 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 publication. A poem she wrote in April (with the assistance of AI, she notes) known 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.”