In Longevity Game, Most Americans Have It All Wrong, Doctor Says

Levels co-founder Dr. Casey Means advocates for a simple approach to metabolic health that emphasizes eating clean, exercising and managing stress over fancy wellness gadgets

Six in 10 Americans have a chronic illness. 74% of Americans are overweight or obese, and according to at least one estimate, 93% of American adults are dealing with metabolic health dysfunction.

One doctor and tech entrepreneur, Dr. Casey Means, is looking to break through the noise and deliver a simple message: “I think the most disruptive truth that needs to be brought to the forefront is that it’s actually very simple and very straightforward to be healthy,” Means tells Athletech News.

The Los Angeles-based, Stanford University grad has achieved the trifecta of achievement in health and wellness as a medical doctor, co-founder of Levels , a metabolic health company, and an investor/advisor for TrueMed, Function Health, Farmer’s Juice and Zen Basil.

Having trained as an ear, nose and throat surgeon, Dr. Means became disillusioned with conventional medicine, frustrated with its failure in chronic prevention and reversal of metabolic health conditions. It’s a familiar narrative these days, as other physicians have also become disenchanted, but for Dr. Means, it’s also personal, having experienced her mother’s untimely passing.

“I was four and a half years into my training as a surgeon and sort of had an awakening that the unfortunate reality in America right now is that every single year, American patients across the lifespan are getting sicker,” Dr. Means says. “Children’s health, adult health and elderly health are getting (by most objective measures) worse — our life expectancy is going down for the past three years, kids are developing chronic illnesses that have never before been seen in kids, like pre-diabetes and high blood pressure and autoimmune diseases,  astonishing rates of mental illness. Young people are getting cancer at alarming rates, especially colon cancer.”

It’s a grim picture, but one that Dr. Means says can be remedied. For the past seven years, she’s been on a journey to explore the root causes of Americans’ illnesses on a cellular level.

“When I did that, what emerged was this very obvious reality — that most of the chronic diseases and chronic symptoms are facing the U.S. — essentially, all the top killers of Americans today are rooted in the same thing — which is metabolic dysfunction,” she explains. “It became clear that the reason we’re becoming very metabolically dysfunctional in this country is because the world we’re living in today, the environment that our bodies exist in, is almost universally damaging to our mitochondria, which make energy in ourselves.”

The Great American Health Paradox

Her new book, “ Good Energy ,” has become a New York Times bestseller. Within its pages, Dr. Means provides a guide that covers the environmental factors that influence mitochondria and simple strategies for building a life that supports mitochondrial capacity and metabolic health. The book also highlights her mother’s own battle.

“I think she really represents the archetypal American patient right now — (someone) who racks up a bunch of symptoms and diagnoses and faithfully sees all her different doctors over the years and takes all the pills they tell her to take and is very dependent on the health care system that ultimately is let down by it and die prematurely from cancer,” Dr. Means says of her mother.

Dr. Means says she is fascinated by the amount of people who are trying very hard to be healthy, but continue to face an uphill battle –  a similar experience that her mother underwent.

“50% of Americans go on a diet every year, gym memberships doubled since the year 2000, and during that rate, obesity has gone up 10%,” she points out.

CGMs & Biomarker Tests Can Help

She’s encouraged, however, by the rise in technology that allows Americans to monitor their own health, such as CGMs .

Dr. Means emphasizes eating unprocessed, clean food, walking more, lifting weights , managing emotional health and stress, getting sufficient sleep and sunshine, as well as reducing exposure to blue light late at night, and removing synthetic, chemical-laden cleaning products as key actions people can take. Tracking basic biomarkers , such as fasting glucose, can also be helpful.

“We have to understand our baseline and really be the CEO of our biomarkers,” says Dr. Means, adding that comprehending basic biomarkers isn’t tricky. “Then focus on interventions that are simple and safe that improve mitochondrial health, which will improve metabolic health, then recheck to make sure we’re moving in the right direction.”

Taking an almost rudimentary approach to health seems nearly unbelievable at a time when wellness is marketed and sold as a commodity.

“We are absolutely missing the forest for the trees in the health and longevity conversation — so focused on the margins and on products,” Dr. Means says. “When, in fact, we can get most of the way there by targeting simple elements of our diet and lifestyle towards what actually matters. The average American is eating 70% of their calories from ultra-processed food — step one is literally just making that towards eating real, unprocessed food. The average American is walking 3,500 steps per day, less than two miles. We need to just at a baseline get that up to at least 7,000 steps per day.”

Pressing the Brakes on GLP-1s

In Dr. Means’ viewpoint, the widespread use of GLP-1s is alarming.

“It’s a very dark trend that is essentially trying to gaslight Americans to believe that health is found in a weekly injection for life and not from changing the environment that is so obviously crushing our ability to be healthy,” she says. “If you had a sick fish in a fish tank filled with dirty polluted water, you obviously would not inject that fish every week for the rest of its life. You would change out the water.”

While Dr. Means agrees that drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy can help a patient jumpstart a weight-loss process and isn’t fully against their use, she says GLP-1s provide neither the end of the journey nor serve as a public health solution.

“Nothing about this injection actually gets us closer to nature, which is fundamentally what we need to do,” she says. “The problem is not obesity – obesity is a result of the metabolic issues caused by our environment.”

Dr. Means practices what she preaches – she buys food as fresh as possible, tries to cook all of her meals from scratch, avoids ultra-processed foods, meditates and keeps in movement. She says focusing her own health journey on a sense of awe and presence rather than avoidance of disease, fear of early death or attachment to longevity has been a game changer.

“I think that to be healthy, many of our lives are going to have to look very different than they have,” she says. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be an expensive, or super time-consuming process. But it’s definitely going to look different because the standard lifestyle in America is leaving us to be very sick.”

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