NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump's newest surgeon general nominee is a burgeoning health influencer who has shared her approach to health care through appearances on some of the nation's most popular wellness and right-wing podcasts.
A sampling of Dr. Casey Means' comments from those interviews over the past year paints a picture of someone who could use the nation's most prominent health care position to focus on diet and lifestyle factors as a way to prevent chronic conditions, while raising questions about pharmaceutical interventions and the vaccine schedule for children.
Means, 37, has said she devoted her career to studying the root causes of why Americans are getting sick after dropping out of her residency program.
Here’s a closer look at what Means’ podcast appearances reveal about how she might approach the role as surgeon general:
She believes we’re treating chronic health conditions the wrong way
Means argues that the cause of most health conditions — including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, erectile dysfunction and infertility — is the “toxic stew” of harmful products, air pollutants, food additives and technology overload that we are living in.
She says those environmental impacts are “crushing” the body’s metabolic system of breaking down food for energy, leading to chronic conditions that are rising significantly in the U.S.
“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,” she told podcaster Joe Rogan on his show last October in a discussion about public health. “It’s all caused by metabolic dysfunction, a term that I never learned in medical school.”
That root-cause philosophy aligns with Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.'s stated priorities for his job. He has promised exhaustive studies to identify any environmental factors that may cause autism.
Means attributes a wide range of chronic diseases to those factors. She argued on “The Megyn Kelly Show” in September that COVID-19 “was really fundamentally a metabolic disease" that more seriously affected people who were compromised because of “lifestyle-related and food-related diseases.”
Her approach to health care also has made her critical of some popular pharmaceutical products, from birth control pills to GLP-1 receptor agonists such as Ozempic that treat obesity.
On “The Tucker Carlson Show” last August, she said birth control pills have given women “liberation” but said they are being prescribed “like candy” and inhibit women from assessing important biomarkers related to their menstrual cycles.
“It’s a disrespect of things that create life," she said.
While Means said taking obesity drugs such as Ozempic can help some people jumpstart their way to healthier lifestyles, she also called the drug “very dark” and said it has “a stranglehold on the U.S. population, almost like solidifying this idea that there is a magic pill.”
She advocates against pesticides, ultra-processed foods and seed oils
Means argues that Americans should radically change their diets to improve their health, including sticking to organic fruits and vegetables that have not been genetically modified and avoiding highly processed foods and refined sugars.
The 2020 to 2025 U.S. dietary guidelines recommend that added sugars make up less than 10% of Americans’ diets. On Jay Shetty’s “On Purpose” podcast last August, Means called for an executive order to reduce that number to zero, or at most 6%. She also said there should be no added sugars in federally funded school lunches.
While Food and Drug Administration guidance currently says genetically modified fruits and vegetables are “as healthful and safe to eat as their non-GMO counterparts,” Means disagrees, saying anything modified to withstand pesticides should not be ingested.
“They wanted to be able to spray it with poison and not kill it,” she said on reality TV star Kristin Cavallari’s podcast “Let's Be Honest” in January. “That should set off some red alarms.”
Like Kennedy and some Republican lawmakers, Means has railed against seed oils, which include common cooking oils such as canola, soybean and corn.
Nutrition scientists have pointed out that decades of research confirm the health benefits of consuming such oils, especially in place of alternatives such as butter or lard.
Food scientists agree with Means that people should reduce their consumption of ultra-processed foods, which are linked to a host of negative health effects. But they say there's no evidence that the seed oils themselves are responsible for poor health outcomes.
In her interview with Shetty, Means said the worst advice she’s ever heard is “all good things in moderation.”
“There are things that we do not want in moderation in our bodies, in our temple, especially in our children’s bodies,” she said.
She has criticized the children's vaccination schedule
Asked by Cavallari about vaccines, Means said that’s not her area of expertise but raised concerns about the national vaccination schedule for children.
She highlighted the recommendation that newborns be vaccinated for hepatitis B, which spreads through contact with blood and other bodily fluids.
“This is the one that was kind of, like, my gateway to being, like, asking a lot more questions,” Means said.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the newborn dose is “an important part of preventing long-term illness in infants and the spread of hepatitis B in the United States.”
Means said she didn't think the vaccine needed to be given so widely to young infants when a test for the disease in pregnant mothers is a standard part of prenatal care.
Means also said COVID-19 vaccine mandates “destroyed so many people’s lives” and “broke something open” among American citizens.
“People started to really see that maybe we shouldn’t be, like, trusting the experts blindly,” she said. “Maybe there is such deep, like, corporate capture of industry and honestly corruption of our medical data and information that like, we have to kind of question everything.”
She urges a spiritual approach to solving ‘extinction-level’ threat to health
Means frequently references the current state of the nation’s health as an emergency situation.
“We’re facing, I would say non-hyperbolically, extinction-level trends in our health right now,” she said on “The Megyn Kelly Show” last November. She's repeatedly said “Rome is burning” when talking about the health care system and chronic illness.
As a wellness influencer, she also takes a religious and spiritual approach to solving those problems. She urges people to trust their intuitions and view themselves as part of something bigger.
“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 and we want to build and respect these temples that are interconnected with the Earth to do that, or do we not?” she asked Rogan last October. “That’s the choice we have right now.”
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Associated Press writer Michelle R. Smith in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this report.
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