Good Energy: Transformative Metabolic Health Tips with Dr. Casey Means | 1167 | Dave Asprey

Take mitochondrial enhancing supplements, learn how to eat so your blood sugar doesn't crash and you can be more conscious and then you can have less pain and you can evolve and you can not age and you can do all the good stuff. So you understand that in a way that not a lot of people do. But biochemical fear is a great explanation for it. I call it physiological anxiety. It's like, no, your body's stressed because you're treating it like you could fix that.

Chris Palmer's book Brain Energy espoused this so beautifully of like, he's psychiatrist at Harvard and truly believes, based on his research, that everybody neurodegenerative, neurodevelopmental and mental health issue are fundamentally rooted in mitochondrial dysfunction.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today I want to talk about metabolic health. Not like I haven't talked about it, oh, 500 times out of 1200 episodes. But the reason that I keep coming back to this and sharing more with you is that when your metabolism works, you can live way longer than you're supposed to. You can become a nicer person, or more importantly, a kinder person. You can be more conscious, you can be less sick, you can have less pain, and you can handle things in the world that otherwise would feel like they were overwhelming. So you want to be limitless. This is what we do. So I found someone unique and interesting to chat with today because, yeah, you might hear me say mitochondria a few times in almost every episode. There's a reason, but Dr. Casey means is a Stanford trained physician, a leader in the field of precision health, and she's a co founder and one of my favorite biohacking companies called Levels. Her brother Calimenes was on the show back in March where we talked about a new blueprint for fixing the American food and pharma system. Just a quick summary of that. The food and pharma system should not have any interaction with each other in a healthy country. And if you'd like to learn more about that, listen to episode 1146, because today's episode is a companion to that episode, or I guess you could say a sister episode. More to speak. Dr. Casey, welcome back to the show.

Dave, thank you so much for having.

Me back in 2021. You came on, you shared the best and worst foods for your metabolism, which I really appreciated. And today, because you have a new book called Good Energy, by the way, what a great name for a book. That talks about what you, what decisions you make in lifestyle and what it does for your energy. Like that's biohacking, right? Ground zero. Change the environment around you so you have control of your own biology. And the lifestyle is some of the stuff going on outside and inside of you. So thanks for writing a cool book focusing on energy first, because that's how the world actually works.

That's right. I mean we're, we could not be more aligned. Dave. You know, being in the healthcare system for almost 15 years, really the awakening I had was that it all comes down to metabolism. We have, have an obscene number of specialties in the western medical system. I think at this point we're over 100. And most of the conditions I think that most of the doctors in those over 100 specialties are treating are fundamentally rooted metabolism. And yet we get the most basic cursory overview it in, overview of it in medical school, even at the, you know, quote, best institutions in the country. And this is an absolute scandal. It needs to be the forefront of how we think about health, how we think about the body, how we think about prevention and treatment. And it's not, it's the biggest blind spot in the western health care system, which of course is why the more we invest, the sicker we're getting. We're not focused on the right problem. So I'm absolutely with you. And that's why I had to write this book and leave being an ear, nose and throat doctor to focus on what's really happening inside all those little cells that create the problems that we play whack a mole with in our conventional system.

Do you ever feel a little bit schizophrenic? Like, I'm a Stanford trained physician and here you are talking about energy metabolism, like, how dare you?

Yeah, I, I do sometimes because it, it takes, you know, a lot to say, to stand up, you know, to, to an industry that's so big and so prestigious and controlling so much of our lives. And to say, like, actually I think you're wrong, I think you're focusing on the wrong issue. And, but to me, like this, this all came down to actually doing what everyone's telling us to do right now, which is follow the science. You know, you see this plaster on billboards now, if we follow the science, if we actually go into PubMed and read about the pathophysiology of what's leading to most chronic conditions and symptoms, we go straight to metabolism. That's, that's what the papers actually show. We are just in A funny way, putting on these weird goggles when we go to the science and, and reading sort of more about the downstream effects of all this problems. But when you put on a different lens, it's just like what's actually. What are the invisible things happening inside of cells that actually lead to these symptoms that we treat? And if you follow the science, it takes you straight to metabolism. It takes you to what I call in the book the trifecta of bad energy, which is mitochondrial dysfunction or oxidative stress and chronic inflammation, which is the tornado of dysfunction that ultimately leads to metabolic dysfunction, which underpins almost everything that we ail from today. And I think a real invitation I have for doctors and people, but really everyone is go into PubMed, go on to Google and start to actually Google your symptom or your disease, your diagnosis with those words after it. Mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation. What you will find is a lot, and yet we don't learn about it.

Google is not a useful search engine for anything related to health. About three years ago, they, they stopped listing any of the websites that I use for trustworthy info. And they are, they're truly unreliable. So that's a search engine I do not use for any of my health research anymore. Google's, they've lost the plot. It's no longer a way to find the world's knowledge. It's a way to find really a very select lens on knowledge that's filtered through both big pharma and through some weird woke stuff that they've done with their. Even their AI stuff. It's. It's truly scary. I don't need a sensor built into my search engine, thank you very much.

So true. Yeah. So scratch the. But I think in PubMed I even there, I think it's like if you search migraine.

Oh God, yeah.

And just look at what's out there. You're gonna get a lot of papers about pharmaceuticals for migraine. If you search migraine and mitochondrial dysfunction, you're gonna get a lot more interesting stuff. Stuff and actually about what's really happening.

My protocol for fixing migraines, as soon as they start happening, which I had to hone quite a lot when I was married for a long time with someone who had a lot of migraines. I've had a few. But it's amazing. You just upregulate mitochondrial function and much of the time they resolve in minutes. In minutes, yeah. And here they are giving you all these crazy drugs, which sometimes are helpful, but for God's sake, Sometimes sugar and three shots of espresso right away will upregulate mitochondria function enough and maybe throw an aspirin in there and what do you know? That's a cocktail that's worked for a long time for migraines. And then you do the other big mitochondrial biohacks and suddenly maybe you don't need a thousand dollar injectable drug. And the fact that we don't do both as available options, it drives me crazy.

Crazy.

And just knowing that means you are free to, to look at a book like Good Energy and say maybe I should have some good energy and maybe I'll do something else. But just knowing it's possible is, is profoundly important. If I'd have known that when I was 19, when I really was sick, I probably wouldn't have spent $2 million on getting well and then on reversing my age and all of that. I'm kind of glad that I got to do it, but I would have rather just looked it up online and gotten quick instructions from an AI bottle, which is why I'm releasing one like that.

Love that.

But walk me through your path. Stanford trained, you know, they taught you. There's, you know, anyone who has more than three symptoms is probably crazy. And here's all the drugs and here's all the flowcharts and how dare you think. And all the things they do. How did you break out of that? Personally?

Yeah. For me, I think it culminated in a moment that I remember vividly, which is I was, when I was in the operating room, I was about 29 years old. I was four years out of medical school and you know, so it become a doctor at like 26, had gone to surgical residency to become a head and neck surgeon. And I was just about to launch after residency to become sort of the independent faculty surgeon and start making the money and doing well. And I'm standing over this woman, a patient who I'd become quite close with, and we're in the operating room and she's on the table. It's her third revision sinus surgery. She has all the other issues. She has pre diabetes, she has a little bit of overweight, you know, borderline obesity. She's got arthritis, she's got a little bit of depression because her, you know, her sinus symptoms are always plaguing her. Just kind of the average typical American patient. A little bit of this, a little of that. She's got some sinus issues. We're going to go in there, we're going to bust Open a hole in her skull, suck out pus, send her on her way, all feel good about our day. And I'm standing there, you know, this naked, unconscious patient in front of me who I really care about. And I'm just thinking like, are we really going to go through this charade again where I'm going to do this surgery? We're going to build tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. We're going to send her out of the post op area and really think that we've done anything to make this patient actually healthier. All her other issues, which I am systematically trained to ignore, right, her prediabetes, her arthritis, her depression, her obesity, not my lane. And we all know she's gonna, she's gonna come back, she's gonna have the sinuses again. We're giving her some time, we're doing some plumbing, but we are not healing. And I just standing there, I just felt this deep sense of honestly being a little bit of a fraud. Like I am so deep in this training. Nine years, four years of medical school, five years of residency. And a couple things were so clear to me in that moment. I don't really know why she's sick. I actually, I don't really know why she's really know how to heal this patient. I know how to diagnose drug cut and bill, and that's not what I'm here to do. And I think there was something about being ready to launch and do this very independently, you know, and to start really raking in big money for this, that I thought, this is not what I came here to do. And I've always been interested in nutrition and food. I lost a lot of weight when I was a teenager, almost 70 pounds, just by learning literally about the power of real food and eating real food. And so I always have known that food is powerful. I studied nutrigenomics in college and I realized, you know, all these conditions we're treating as an ent, everything's inflammatory. Sinusitis, laryngitis, thyroiditis, otitis, cellulitis, perioditis. It's all itis, it's all inflammation. And yet I have no idea what causes inflammation. There's something wrong with that. I've heard this term anti inflammatory diet. I know that certain food compounds are anti inflammatory from back in my neutron no IC days. And yet this is nowhere to be found in my surgical training or the guidelines that I'm practicing under. And I think there was a part of me that said if there is anything I could possibly be doing to keep this patient out of the operating room. It's so dramatic to drill into someone's skull to cut into their neck. I got to figure that out. And actually from that moment on, I almost couldn't operate anymore. Like, I literally was like I felt wrong in some way. Like I need to figure out if there's anything we could be doing to keep people out of the operating room. That was the start of the Pandora's box. Then of course you start diving into the true root causes of why people are sick. Going down that rabbit hole of inflammation and it leads you to mitochondrial dysfunction and a metabolic health. And you just can't go back. And then once you go down that road and realize, wait a minute, it's actually very simple to reduce inflammation. It's actually very simple to improve metabolic health. And yet the whole business model of the industry I'm operating under is that innovation and complexity and specialization is the answer. And the only reason we're not getting well is because we're not spending enough money and there's not enough access to health care and we're just not advanced enough. We need more crisper and immunotherapy and all this stuff. The secret, the secret that I really feel like I was born to tell is that actually being healthy is so much simpler than we've been led to believe. And the industry profits off our confusion and this buying into the sense of complexity. And so that, that was sort of from the patient to the bigger picture, how I ended up leaving, putting down my scalpel, leaving the surgical world, quitting dramatically from my residency program and devoting my life to the true reasons why people are sick and how to help people actually heal. And that of course led me to be a metabolic warrior, to co found levels and to ultimately write this book and try and get this message out. So really a foot soldier in the, in the work that you've been doing for years and. But I don't think we can have enough voices and messengers sharing this information.

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Yeah.

And you find a guy who, you know, could have had a, you know, million dollar a year great career as a surgeon and said, no, I'm going to do stuff that makes people well. And it's, it's not the easy path. So thanks for just standing up and saying, let's do it and showing people, oh wow. Can you track the health of your metabolism by looking at your blood sugar and seeing, huh, the body's not using your blood sugar. So it's building up. I wonder why. Maybe we can fix that. Like, it's a data driven, it's true science, but it does take a very different way of thinking. So it's funny, you work with your brother, you decided to write a book with them. How's it, how's it working with, working with a family member to write a book? I, I kind of think that would be hell.

We always joke about the fact that our next book is going to be about siblings. We're going to talk if we're going to unpack this sibling relationship because it's a fascinating relationship. Right? Like, I don't know about you, but I don't know a single adult who doesn't have some interesting thing to say about their relationship with their, with their siblings. And I, I actually am fascinated by the whole relationship because like, you come into this universe as a conscious being through like this shared portal. You know, I mean, there's lots of different ways to be siblings, but we share the same mother and you know, you're kind of self assembled and 3D printed in the same portal, you know, and brought into this world. And then you are born into the same family with totally different brains and are having different experiences. And I think in many ways a sibling can be your absolute best teacher because you're here on this journey for some reason together. And I think that it's been, you know, so big picture. It's been a fascinating journey to work with my brother. I have so much respect for him and his intellect and his. The way he sees the world. And. But fundamentally, the reason we came together on this project is because it was to honor my mother. And, you know, we shared an experience that, that weaves throughout the whole book, which is that we lost my mother far too early to the end stages of metabolic disease that really the. The blind spots of our opportunistic, exploitative health care system, the intentional blind spots to root cause physiology, allowed for everyone within this system to ignore the connecting points between what she had racked up over 30, 40 years of her adult life that ultimately led to her death. And, you know, I think through a different. A different structure of our system where we actually are thinking about the connections between diseases, there were dozens of points where she could have had a different outcome. And, and we really don't want that for other people who are going through a similar situation to my mom, where they are dependent, loyal and faithful to this system that they believe in and ultimately let down by it, which is, I think, how most people feel today. But we are both dependent on the system and we are certainly not being, you know, truly benefited by it. And we know that because Americans are getting sicker every year, we are literally getting sicker. For every marginal dollar spent on health care in the United States, people are getting sicker. This is the definition of an unsustainable, ineffective system. And yet we. We don't really think that we have a better option, which of course we absolutely do. It's outside the system. And the point that Kelly and I really have to make in the book is that, sure, trust the system on acute issues, you know, you have a trauma, a broken bone, you need emergency surgery. The system we have, we thrive. American healthcare thrives on that. But right now, 90% of health care costs are going towards chronic acquired, lifestyle, rooted diseases. And unfortunately, the system has abjectly failed on the prevention, treatment, or management of chronic diseases. And we know this because they are all exploding all at once the more we spend. And so this book, this coming together, you know, Callie and I came to this experience from different places. He was a. He was in policy and business and at one point was a lobbyist for food and pharma. And so he saw things that way. I, of course, was a doctor and sort of had my awakening about root cause issues. And then we both experienced this just tragic situation with my mother where no one put the pieces together for her throughout 40 years. And then the entire system sprang into action when she was lethally sick with a stage 4 pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Trying to, you know, get as much. Squeeze as much out of my mom in terms of profit as possible in her last two weeks of life. And in, in horror and disgust, we decided we were going to write, devote the next three years of our life to writing this book. And so, you know, just to briefly share what, what sort of happened with her. You know, she essentially. She had me when she was 40. I was 12 pounds. I was a huge baby, which is a fetal macrosomic baby, which of course was probably a sign that she was developing insulin resistance, that fetal macrosomia is a sign that both the mother and baby are going to have metabolic issues, which both of us did. I was, you know, obese by the time I was in eighth grade. And she had a lot of trouble losing baby weight. She then got the standard diagnosis. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, statin, ACE inhibitor, metformin. Everyone just said, you're getting older, you're postmenopausal. This is part of the journey, you know. And then she's 71 years old and she has stomach pain, she gets a CT scan, she has stage 4 pancreatic cancer, and she's dead 13 days later. And at the time, you know, she was seeing doctors at Stanford. She was seeing, quote, unquote, best doctors in the world. And all of them literally stared us in the eye and said, you know, we're so sorry this was so unlucky. And we knew enough to know, like, this was not unlucky. This is totally, this was totally predictable. Because through that root cause goggles, each of these conditions, a large baby weight loss resistance, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, high blood pressure, and even cancer are all branches of the same tree of fundamental metabolic dysfunction. And if anyone in that entire system had known how to actually focus all the effort she was doing and the cost she was spending on the mitochondria, I think we'd had a different outcome. So that's really the message that we're, we're spreading and also trying to spread some awareness about, you know, the healthcare system, sure, it has produced miracles, but when it comes to, to these chronic illnesses that are torturing our lives, it's not doing well. And we, we really need to learn to trust ourselves and to learn how to manage and track our own metabolic health. And the system's not catching up fast enough. So we gotta. We gotta really understand that this is a system that unfortunately profits off our dependency and sickness. And it's a system that makes more money when we're sick and not when we're healthy. And that's not to scare anyone, but it's the simple economic reality that we all need to be aware of if we're gonna live our healthiest lives. So that's, that's what brought us together to write this book together. And it's been the. The journey of a lifetime.

Well, you're. You're doing some good in the world. That's what I think. And, and I guess I should disclose this to you guys. I am an investor in Lowells and Advisor since the CGM stuff. Just so I maybe have a financial interest for saying that I don't. I just like to put my money where my mouth is because I think having. Having straight information unfiltered about how my body's working gives me more power. So I love it that I can do that without having to go beg for a monitor from a doctor. Because it doesn't make sense.

No. And right now that's a strain a lot of people are in. Like, the way the system works right now is we're actually like kind of begging for breadcrumbs about our own health information. And in 22American states, patients don't even own their own health care records. The doctor, the hospital does. This is a system that often is justified to, like, patient data security or the fact that patients are going to make bad decisions if they have their data. But actually the real data shows that the opposite is true. The more information people have about their own biomarkers, they do far, far, far better. So what's created is this systemic information gap and mismatch between the doctor and the patient that unfortunately can be exploited. Because if you have a patient who doesn't understand their own body and doesn't understand the feedback between the choices they're making every day and what's actually happening in their biology, then they're kind of spinning. You know, they're investing, but they're not making progress. They become dependent on the system. And that's just really what. What we need to subvert, obviously, because people who are empowered with their own data and can close the loop between what they're doing and how it's impacting them can cut through so much of the noise out there and just focus on what really matters. And you get, you get the fun, you get, I'm gonna say funniest, you get a lot of pushback against this concept. I'm sure you've received a lot of this too because you've been such a, such a vocal advocate for personal data. But people will say, oh, this will cause obsession, this will cause people to be obsessed with their data and they're, they're going to become orthorexic and they're going to become stressed out about it. But I would say we've actually seen a very different picture, which is that there is so much noise right now in the health space. There are doctors saying one thing, the ADA saying another thing. You've got health influencers, you've got books, you've got podcasts, everyone. There's wars going on and people get very confused and it makes them doubt their choices, which is a huge cognitive overload. People are afraid to eat a lot of different things. And a real message is like, you don't actually need to trust anyone but yourself, but you do need to understand how, interpret what your body is telling you. And you can do that actually very simply in this modern age with two things. One is analog, one is technological. Analog is like learn to interpret your symptoms.

How do I feel?

How do I feel? And in this crazy distraction industrial complex of our modern world where we've just put productivity and you know, consumerism at the top, like we are all so damn busy that people just don't even have a second to sit and just hear their bodies talking to them all the time through their symptoms. So step one, a point of the book is just like, slow down, understand this multi dimensional matrix that we're all living in and buying into and realize that like a big part of your health journey is actually just like doing things in the world and then listening to how your body is feeling, looking, you know, what is the experience. Step two is obviously technological, which is like in the past five years we have these trends converging that are incredibly wonderful. We have direct to consumer lab testing things like Function Health and Inside Tracker and others. We've got bio wearables like continuous glucose monitors and more coming down the pipeline. And then we've got of course the other wearables, the, the auras, the whoops, the, the Fitbits, all these things that can give us these real time feedback and so if we can learn to understand the numbers and then the subjective experience and then try things on and just be able to prove to ourself like is it working or not? We can cut through all the confusing noise that keeps us spinning and feeling paralyzed. And so I, I actually think for so many of our levels members it has cut through the stress to actually get them to a place of feeling a lot of with, hey, yeah, I can eat this and I can take a walk afterwards. Or like I know that if I put some more fiber on this, like it'll help. And so that's, I think reducing the cognitive overhead is actually the end result.

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Right?

Let's see, I didn't hire my Doctor or my government to be my daddy because I'm a grown ass adult.

Yeah.

And if I'm going to choose to obsess over something, I would rather obsess over my health information than your stupid social media algorithms or your big pharma ads that are designed to create obsession.

Right.

So anyone who says they're doing it for your own safety is pretty much telling you that they think you're stupid.

That's right.

And no, I'm in charge of my own safety. And that's why I would like to have access to my metabolic data. And if someone tries to stop me, I ignore them because my metabolism is mine and I didn't sell it to anyone and I'm not going to. And I think levels has done a great job because maybe it's heavy metals, maybe it's a toxin, maybe it's just because you eat vegan stuff that you think is health food but is highly processed industrial food. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. Or maybe it's just trauma. Whatever it is, does it show in your blood sugar? It's. It's a measure. Does it show on your aura ring? On your heart rate variability? And that's the game you're playing. How do I make those numbers better? Via any means necessary. And if you just do that magically, your risk of Alzheimer's, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, those all go down. But you feel better. And you have this weird thing called good energy, which is a great name for your book. Talk to me about the things that are stopping good energy, what you call.

Bad energy in the book, unfortunately, you know, the, the bad news. There's a lot of good news, but it's, it's essentially every single aspect of our modern environment and we unpack really all of them in the book. And there's really seven, seven areas that I, I focus on, not to scare people, but because just like you, I believe that like share the information and people can do with it what they would like to do. But when we're talking about the seven pillars, it's our food system, it's the way we're relating to sleep, it's our emotional health and stress and sense of fear, it's our movement patterns, it's our relationship with light, it's our relationship with temperature, and then it's our relationship with toxins.

You sound like a biohacker. Like a lot like a bio. Oh my gosh.

I know.

Like that's a list of environmental inputs. Right?

Right. I. And so I think about everything I do is from, I think, really the perspective of compassion for ourselves and our mitochondria. Like, I. I believe my framing for the body is that we are miracles, each of us. And it's like literally just the self assembly of matter and energy. It's freaking incredible. That's constantly evolving and changing throughout our lifetime. And it's, you know, our body's not a thing.