Reportedly, the views of Casey Means, MD, have influenced the healthcare thinking of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., HHS Secretary nominee. If so, Dr. Means’s writings could shed light on the nomination’s merits.

In Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health, Dr. Means criticizes modern agricultural and nutritional practices and, to a lesser extent, the role of pharmaceuticals in healthcare.  She finds little to her liking. Dr. Means posits that the foods we consume, and the medications we take, create an internal environment as dangerous as the external one that RFK, Jr. has long condemned.

Dr. Means provides a book-length rap sheet against much of what we eat, especially “ultra-processed foods” and “refined added sugars”, allegedly “addictive”; how our food is produced; and even indoor heating, cooling, and lighting, which in reducing our time outdoors limit our immune systems’ vitality.

On these villains, Dr. Means casts blame for everything from acne to stroke. She prescribes foods she considers “natural,” exercise, time outdoors, and a later start of the school day.

Dr. Means writes with clarity and zest, and she seems genuinely convinced of her arguments. Perhaps RFK found here a rationale for at least some of his claims. Dr. Means does not support Mr. Kennedy’s assault on vaccination, though.

For those more scientifically trained than RFK, however, the book may prove less persuasive. At the Good Energy website, one finds no fewer than six options for purchasing the book, at least four highly favorable blurbs on its value, one by Dr. Means herself, a tool for subscribing to Good Energy Newsletter, and a gushing bio. Dr. Means promotes her company “Levels, a health technology company with the mission of reversing the world’s metabolic health crisis.” The support of companies touting supplements, fish oils, and foods Dr. Means presumably approves of is acknowledged. One can scarcely help contrasting the critique of those who profit from food sales and the promotion of that commerce which will feather the author’s nest.

The link to “scientific references” is sandwiched among a variety of products Dr. Means created or promotes, but does present 58 pages of citations. Some are mere websites, but many come from real journals. Nowhere does one find the customary list of weaknesses in any paper cited, however, nor the sizes of trials, nor any estimate of their scientific rigor. Despite this reference list, the book is remarkably anecdotal, extensively discussing the author’s mother’s final illness, and the author’s own personal health practices.

Dr. Means favors hyperbole. (“Hormones dictate all aspects of our biology…”). The best example may be her subtitle: this side of the pearly gates, “limitless health” is hard to find. In places, Dr. Means assumes what she must prove. The best example: her claim that food is addictive. If one applies the DSM-V criteria, this case is hard to make. Food, even highly processed food, is not fentanyl.

The most striking inconsistency is the author’s attitude about hallucinogens. After taking psilocybin, she wrote: “…as I basked in the moon’s bright rays, I experienced the embodiment of being one with the moon, every star, every atom in the grains of sand I was sitting on…”  Yet, one page on, she writes: “The road to maximal well-being is not paved with more pharmaceuticals…”

Perhaps in RFK Dr. Means has an acolyte. But wholesale condemnation of western civilization, alarmist characterizations of Americans’ diets, and especially the notion that our diets and poor exercise habits explain all the ills that flesh is heir to do not convince.