In Defense of Casey Means

In the hours following President Trump’s Wednesday announcement that he had nominated Casey Means to become America’s next surgeon general, legacy and other media have subtly and not so subtly maligned her by association.

In The New York Times, Benjamin Mueller and Christina Jewett write, “Dr. Means, an ally of the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has described becoming disillusioned by establishment medicine.” They continue, “She rose to prominence last year after she and her brother, Calley Means, a White House health adviser and former food industry lobbyist, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show.”

The Times and others want the public to view Means as just another fringe figure in what they view as Trump’s MAGA-sphere, even as they pretend to be engaging in straight reporting.

Means is not fringe.

The Associated Press snidely titled its article on the nomination, “Donald Trump taps wellness influencer close to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for surgeon general.”

PBS News quoted Gabby Headrick, a nutritional researcher at George Washington University’s school of public health, criticizing Means for over simplifying the impact of eating processed foods. “It is much more complicated than just pointing the finger at ultra-processed foods as the driver of chronic disease in the United States,” Headrick said.

Taking to X on Thursday, Kennedy vigorously supported Means, writing, “The Surgeon General is a symbol of moral authority who stands against the financial and institutional gravities that tend to corporatize medicine,” he wrote. “Casey Means was born to hold this job. She will provide our country with ethical guidance, wisdom, and gold-standard medical advice even when it challenges popular orthodoxies. She will be a juggernaut against the ossified medical conventions that have helped make our people the sickest in the world at the highest cost per capita. Casey is a breath of fresh air, and we can’t wait for her to get started at @HHSgov. Thank you, President Trump for nominating this outstanding woman.”

Later on Thursday, Kennedy posted a second time on X: “The absurd attacks on Casey Means reveal just how far off course our healthcare conversations have veered, and how badly entrenched interests--including Big Food and its industry-funded social media gurus--are terrified of change. Casey has excelled in every endeavor she has undertaken. She was President of her Stanford undergrad class, was a standout at Stanford Medical School, and was a top performer in surgical residency. She had the courage to leave traditional medicine because she realized her patients weren’t getting better.”

Kennedy continued: “The attacks that Casey is unqualified because she left the medical system completely miss the point of what we are trying to accomplish with MAHA. Casey is the perfect choice for Surgeon General precisely because she left the traditional medical system--not in spite of it. Her leadership has inspired many doctors to reform the system and forge a new path away from sick care, which fills corporate coffers, and toward health care, which enriches all of us. After leaving traditional medicine, Casey started a company and wrote a New York Times best-selling book that empowered patients and helped launch the MAHA movement. This ability of Casey’s to inspire Americans to rethink our healthcare system is also an existential threat to the status quo interests, which profit from sickness.”

Dr. Casey Means has long been a scientific rebel with a cause. While she was first in her class at Stanford, she quickly grew disillusioned with a medical and scientific establishment that, in her view, neglected the root causes of the health problems Americans face every day.

“I learned virtually nothing at Stanford Medical School about the tens of thousands of scientific papers that elucidate the root causes of why American health is plummeting,” she said during a roundtable discussion in September. “I did not learn that for each additional serving of ultra-processed food we eat, early mortality increases by 18%. This now makes up 67% of the foods our kids are eating. I took zero nutrition courses in medical school. I didn’t learn that 82% of independently-funded studies show harm from processed food, while 93% of industry-sponsored studies reflect no harm.”

Dr. Means often speaks about her skepticism of a medical establishment rife with corporate capture. Like HHS Secretary Kennedy, Means discovered that both public agencies and many otherwise respected universities have been ‘captured’ by pharmaceutical and food processing industries that have invested millions into studies whose outcomes reflect the desired hypothesis of major industries rather than an empirical gold standard science.

Rather than allow cynicism to take hold, Dr. Means researched the root causes of the chronic disease epidemic in the U.S. Like Kennedy, she’s been motivated to make America and, in particular, American children healthy again.

Means concluded that metabolic health holds the key to solving related crises in metal health and even societal tension. “I reflect on the fact that many of the problems in society—including violence, mental illness, developmental issues, and pain—start in humans, and humans are made by cells that become dysfunctional largely because of oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and chronic inflammation. How miraculous that food can directly combat those things,” Means has written.

Dr. Means believes she has a solution: “Eliminate the holy trinity—refined added sugars, refined grains, and refined industrial seed oils—from your diet. These foods are destructive to our cells, and are found in almost every processed food on the grocery store shelves. If you commit to shunning these from your lives, you will naturally gravitate towards more unprocessed food.”

Along with her brother, Calley, the Means’ wrote the 2024 book Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health, which became a New York Times best seller, selling over one million copies.

Last September, when it was still far from clear who would win the 2024 election, Dr. Means spoke at a senate conference organized by Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. The meeting, which Kennedy also attended , highlighted the financial, clinical and emotional toll of the chronic illness epidemic. Speaking in support of Kennedy’s position, Dr. Means said that those who question the quality and safety of the American food supply should not be censored, ridiculed nor ostracized from the medical and scientific establishment as she and Kennedy had been.

That same month, Dr. Means told Fox News radio, “RFK Jr. has been fighting this battle for decades and understands how the nexus of pharma, the ultra-processed food industry, industrial agriculture and government are keeping Americans sick.”

Her remarks came at a time when the Biden administration's HHS officials continued to suppress truthful studies relating to many of the toxic artificial additives that are commonly found in some of the nation’s top selling ultra-processed food products.

Dr. Means took a career risk in associating with Kennedy and, by extrapolation, President Trump, who was in the final months of his campaign against former Vice President Harris.

She not only planted her flag on MAHA ground, but she did so before it was clear whether the MAHA movement would join MAGA and help send Trump back to the White House.

While she eschews politics, Means, like Kennedy, now sees Trump’s Republican Party as the only political party in America willing to fight for change in our nation’s health system, to fight for nutrition and healthy living.

To advance her nomination, Dr. Means will likely face scrutiny from senators on both sides of the aisle, who will challenge her as Kennedy had been.

Means is ready.

Her courage should be applauded, not ridiculed, as Kennedy states in his X post. “The goal of MAHA is to reform the largest and most powerful industry in the United States,” he wrote. “I have little doubt that these companies and their conflicted media outlets will continue to pay bloggers and other social media influencers to weaponize innuendo to slander and vilify Casey, the same way they try to defame me and President Trump.”

No candidate is perfect. However, Dr. Casey Means, who will advance the MAHA agenda, is extremely well qualified for the position for which she’s been nominated. MAHA supporters should view that as a victory.

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