Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health

by Casey Means

the biggest lie in health care is that the root cause of why we’re getting sicker, heavier, more depressed, and more infertile is complicated.

preventable lifestyle conditions are responsible for 80 percent of modern human deaths.

Despite surgically treating inflamed tissues of the head and neck day in and day out, not once—ever—was I taught what causes the inflammation in the human body or about its connection to the inflammatory chronic diseases so many Americans are facing today.

When I reflected on what I was treating as an ENT surgeon, something struck me: it was almost all inflammation. In medicine, the suffix -itis means inflammation, and our practice was made up of sinusitis, tonsillitis, pharyngitis, laryngitis, otitis, chondritis, thyroiditis, tracheitis, adenoiditis, rhinitis, epiglottitis, sialadenitis, parotitis, cellulitis, mastoiditis, osteomyelitis, vestibular neuritis, labyrinthitis, glossitis, and more. I was an inflammation physician, and I didn’t even realize it!

Our modern diets and lifestyles are synergistically ravaging our mitochondria.

A mighty immune cell trying to support a cell that is ailing and threatened from its mitochondrial dysfunction is rendered completely impotent. The immune cell cannot halt the damaging factors and the lack of resources resulting from the unnatural environment of our modern industrial world. An immune cell can’t stop you from drinking a soda, filter your water, turn off the stress-inducing notifications on your phone, prevent you from eating hormone-disrupting pesticides and microplastics, or get you to go to sleep earlier. So the immune cell will use the tools at its disposal: it will recruit more immune cells, send out more inflammatory signals, and just keep fighting until things resolve. But the problems don’t resolve, because the damaging environmental inputs never resolve. This is the root of chronic inflammation.

A key reason why we are chronically consuming far too much food energy is because of the wide accessibility of ultra-processed, industrially manufactured foods, which impair our body’s self-regulatory satiety mechanisms and directly trigger hunger and cravings. These ultra-processed industrial foods are chemically engineered to be addictive and make up nearly 70 percent of calories that people in the United States consume today.

Many medications hurt the function of mitochondria. These include several antibiotics, chemotherapy drugs, antiretroviral drugs, statins, beta-blockers, and high blood pressure medications called calcium channel blockers.

A most basic and accessible way to see if you have a reasonable level of metabolic health is by checking five markers that are almost always tested and tracked at your annual checkup: blood sugar, triglycerides, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, blood pressure, and waist circumference.

I focused on addressing the root causes of illness rather than just treating isolated symptoms,

for most people in the United States, metabolic dysfunction is a key cause of their cellular dysfunction.

The procedure was being recommended to alleviate the doctor’s checklist, algorithm, chart note template, and billing codes—and decidedly not for my mom’s benefit.

these conversations led to an insight that I believe is whispered by doctors in every hospital in America: they feel trapped inside a broken system.

when it comes to preventing and managing chronic disease, you should not trust the medical system.

Economically, acute conditions aren’t great in our modern system, because the patient is quickly cured and no longer a customer.

Billing is based on completing and coding an interventional action rather than addressing why people get sick. Measuring and reimbursing an act (such as prescribing a pill, conducting surgery, running an MRI) can be coded, while a multifactorial physiological outcome that improves patients’ health (reversing diabetes, preventing cancer, reducing inflammation or oxidative stress) cannot be.

The most blatant and deadly example of the intervention-based incentives of our medical system is that medical leaders are absolutely silent on the things that are actually making us sick: food and lifestyle.

most doctors don’t understand how to interpret the lab results in a meaningful way.

I urge you to take the symptom questionnaire on my website (caseymeans.com/goodenergy), adapted from the Institute for Functional Medicine, and see what has been affecting you over the past thirty days.

If you remember one thing from this chapter, remember this: you need to know your insulin sensitivity.

I recommend searching the functional medicine doctor database (https://www.ifm.org/find-a-practitioner/)

We can’t have a healthy society without well-functioning humans. We can’t have well-functioning humans without well-functioning cells. And we can’t have well-functioning cells with mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, and cellular and hormone disruption from toxic chemicals in our food. We combat those things through nutrient-dense, unprocessed foods grown in living, thriving soil.

82 percent of independently funded studies show harm from sugar-sweetened beverages, but 93 percent of industry-sponsored studies reflect no harm. When food companies fund research, the studies are six times more likely to have a favorable result about the food in question.

Ultra-processed foods make up 60 percent of calories consumed by adults and 67 percent of calories consumed by children, and they drive Bad Energy diseases like obesity, high blood pressure, dementia, type 2 diabetes, and insulin resistance.

Refined added sugar causes astronomically more deaths and disability per year than COVID-19 and fentanyl overdoses combined.

By avoiding added sugar, industrial seed and vegetable oils, and processed grains, you avoid almost every ultra-processed food. And by doing this, you also avoid the innumerable additives in ultra-processed foods that directly damage us, like synthetic or ultra-processed preservatives, flavorings, emulsifiers, and colorings. Many of the additives in American ultra-processed foods are outlawed for use in other countries.

Eat Earlier: Amazingly, the exact same meal will likely cause a lower glucose spike if it’s eaten in the morning instead of late at night. Our bodies are naturally more insulin resistant at night, so in a sense we get “more bang for the buck” by eating carbohydrates earlier in the day, when we can process them better.

Apple cider vinegar is known to have a glucose-lowering effect when taken before or with a meal,

I called my supervising physician to alert him to the situation. He quickly cut me off and barked, “Are you seriously waking me up to tell me about a dead person?” and hung up. I was stunned at the time, but in retrospect, his response was understandable: this man was getting woken every night by residents, still had a full operating room schedule every day, and was similarly desperate for sleep, even thirty years into the job. By my fifth year, when I was a chief resident, I looked back on my time in residency as if it were a blur. For most days, I stood in a windowless operating room, stealing sporadic sleep when I could find small breaks and shoving packaged food into my mouth at all hours of the day and night. I later learned that sustained disruptions to the ingrained sleep needs of our bodies result in measurable brain damage, emotional dysregulation, metabolic issues, and even memory deficits.

Research shows clearly that our modern erratic sleep schedules, light exposure, and eating schedules directly lead to mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, and chronic inflammation—the three hallmarks of Bad Energy.

You can assume your doctor knows virtually nothing about sleep, despite good sleep being one of the most effective tools in preventing and reversing diseases of all kinds.

Up to 73 percent of physicians are overweight or obese, and the leading causes of death for doctors are all the largely preventable Bad Energy killers, with heart disease, cancer, and stroke at the top.

The emerging understanding of the obesity-promoting qualities of industrial chemicals tells us that eating an ultra-processed food like Cheerios means that you may be getting a quadruple dose of Bad Energy potential: one in the ultra-refined food itself, one in the additives and preservatives, one in the pesticides, and one in the plastic packaging. Wash it down with conventional milk and a glass of unfiltered water and you compound the issue.

The fear of death is weaponized to get patients to do anything: more meds, procedures, operations, and specialists.

Through widespread use of oral hormones for everything from acne to PCOS to contraception, we’ve trivialized the stunning—and life-creating—rhythmicity of women’s bodies, as well as the cycle’s potent utility as a biofeedback tool of a woman’s overall health.

clearing out the “Unholy Trinity” of Bad Energy foods (refined grains, refined sugars, and industrial seed oils).