Casey Means Quotes

key way that you regulate your hormones, metabolism, weight, and risk for disease is by showing your cells what time it is by exposing your eyeballs to direct sunlight throughout the light part of the day and by hiding your eyeballs from as much light as possible when the sun is down.

Migraine, like my patient Sarah had, also correlates closely to poor metabolic health. In the ENT otology clinic, we often saw this condition and had limited success in treating it. Sufferers of this debilitating neurological disease — about 12 percent of people in the United States — tend to have higher insulin levels and insulin resistance. A comprehensive review of fifty-six research articles identified links between migraine and poor metabolic health, pointing out that “migraine sufferers tend to have impaired insulin sensitivity.” The review supports the “neuro-energetic” theory of migraine. Additionally, evidence suggests that micronutrient deficiencies in key mitochondrial cofactors may also be a contributing factor of migraine. Research has suggested that migraines could be treated by restoring levels of vitamins B and D, magnesium, CoQ10, alpha lipoic acid, and L-carnitine. Vitamin B12, for instance, is involved in the electron transport chain responsible for the final steps of ATP generation in the mitochondria, and studies have indicated that high doses of B12 can help prevent migraine. These micronutrients usually have fewer side effects than other drugs used to treat migraines, making them a promising option for relief, which can be obtained through a diet rich in these micronutrients, or supplementation. Having high markers of oxidative stress, a key Bad Energy feature, is associated with a significantly higher risk of migraine in women, with some studies suggesting that migraine attacks are a symptomatic response to increased levels of oxidative stress. Less painful and more common tension-type headaches are also linked to high variability (excess peaks and crashes) in blood sugar. Hearing Loss The same story of metabolic ignorance in the ENT department unfolded for auditory problems and hearing loss, one of the most common issues presented to our ENT clinic. We’d typically tell our patients that their auditory decline was inevitable, due to aging and

When our cells sense sustained danger, they divert resources to defense and alarm pathways instead of normal functions that generate sustainable health. Given this, no matter how pristine your dietary intake is, how much you’re moving, how much sunlight you’re getting, or how many hours of quality sleep you’re getting, if the cells are bathed in a stew of stress created by the way psychology translates to biochemistry (via hormones, neurotransmitters, inflammatory cytokines, and neurologic signals), all the other healthy choices will fall

Fortunately, we’re entering a new era of medicine. Doctors no longer need to serve as the middlemen for interpreting lab results. This new era will benefit patients profoundly. Levels CEO Sam Corcos calls this concept “bio-observability” — the ability to observe your own biology through technologies like wearables, continuous monitors, and direct-to-consumer (DTC) lab testing. Let me be clear: bio-observability is one of the most disruptive trends our health care industry faces. You should not blindly trust your doctor and you should not blindly trust me. You should trust your own body. Your body can “speak” to you through accessible testing and real-time data from wearable sensors that help you understand how individual symptoms are connected to overall metabolic health.

Keep It Simple With food, we covered three simple rules that get you quite far: don’t eat added sugar, don’t eat industrially processed vegetable and seed oils, and don’t eat highly processed grains. With fitness, I also suggest three simple rules. Walk at least 7,000 steps per day and space these steps out throughout the day. Work up to 10,000 per day. Get your heart rate above 60 percent of your maximum for at least 150 minutes a week. (That’s 30 minutes, five days a week.) Lift heavy things multiple times per week in a way that hits every major muscle group.

Refined added sugar causes astronomically more deaths and disability per year than COVID-19 and fentanyl overdoses combined. We need to see refined added sugar for what it is: an addictive, dangerous drug that has been included in 74 percent of foods in the U.S. food system and for which the body needs zero grams in a lifetime. Of all the levers most damaging our cells and preventing Good Energy, I believe the worst offender may be added sugar. This substance has become a mainstay of food that we and our children eat regularly. As Dr. Robert Lustig has noted, sugar shows up on labels in fifty-six different names and sneaks in everywhere.

research has shown that people on diets who keep food journals lose twice as much weight as those who don’t.

Metabolic syndrome is clinically defined as having three or more of the following traits: Fasting glucose of 100 mg/dL or higher A waistline of more than 35 inches for women and 40 inches for men HDL cholesterol less than 40 mg/dL for men and 50 mg/dL for women Triglycerides of 150 mg/dL or higher Blood pressure of 130/85 mmHg or higher

But the medicalization of chronic disease in the past fifty years has been an abject failure. Today, we’ve siloed diseases and have a treatment for everything: High cholesterol? See a cardiologist for a statin. High fasting glucose? See an endocrinologist for metformin. ADHD? See a neurologist for Adderall. Depressed? See a psychiatrist for a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI). Can’t sleep? See a sleep specialist for Ambien. Pain? See a pain specialist for an opioid. PCOS? See an OB-GYN for clomiphene. Erectile dysfunction? See a urologist for Viagra. Overweight? See an obesity specialist for Wegovy. Sinus infections? See an ENT for an antibiotic or surgery. But what nobody talks about — what I think many doctors don’t even realize — is that the rates of all these conditions are going up at the exact time we are spending trillions of dollars to “treat them.

It might not sound like it, but the theme of this chapter is optimism. We are amid a modern health crisis. The good news is that our system can be fixed, and the crisis can end. Just 120 years ago, starvation, malnutrition, and early death were the norm. Tuberculosis and pneumonia were leading causes of death. Life expectancy in the United States was around age forty-seven. Back then, 30 percent of all U.S. deaths occurred in children under five years of age, compared to just 1.4 percent in 1999. If you transported someone living in those times to the present day, they’d be in utter shock as they tried to process society’s advancements. There is no

Another way to practice mindfulness at any moment is to close your eyes and scan every sensation in your body: your heartbeat, your butt on the chair, any areas of warmth or cold, your toes on the ground, the air moving into your nose and lungs. Because this body scan forces you into the present moment, it takes you away from mental states of anxiety or stress.

If a medication could slash Alzheimer’s risk by 50 percent, it would be front-page news and prescribed to every patient. But this “drug” does exist — it’s walking! Yet less than 16 percent of doctors prescribe movement to their patients, and 85 percent of practitioners report zero training in prescribing exercise.

On my mom’s final day of consciousness, she woke up weak and started to lose control of her speech. Later in the day, in a burst of energy, she urged us to take her to the place where she would soon be buried — a rustic forest grove overlooking fields and ocean, just three minutes from her house. We quickly drove her there and took her in a wheelchair to the natural burial site. My mom expressed amazement at the beauty of the ocean view and the trees she would soon be buried under, and we hugged as a family. She asked my dad to kneel beside her in the wheelchair and cupped his face in her hands. She looked at him and talked about how magical their life was together. On this small patch of earth with the Pacific Ocean behind them, they exchanged silent looks that expressed emotion and gratitude for each other that are impossible to fully convey in words. The awe and connection they shared as they exchanged their final embrace will forever be my definition of the meaning of life. “It’s just . . . so perfect and beautiful,” my mom burst out as she looked at her family embracing her at her final resting site. Minutes later, she lost consciousness. Two days later, surrounded by her family holding hands around her, she died. The final thirteen days I shared with my mom were the most meaningful of my life. If we had taken the advice of the medical system, they wouldn’t have happened.

low-grade activity that occurs more frequently and regularly throughout the day is extremely important for cellular health and glucose control, even more so than chunking all your physical activity in one discrete block and sitting for the rest of the day (a pattern most Americans adopt).

Good Energy is also known as metabolic health. Metabolism refers to the set of cellular mechanisms that transform food into energy that can power every single cell in the body.