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Post by the Scribe on Jan 11, 2023 7:24:10 GMT
CALLEY MEANS
Calley Means
Co-Founder of TrueMed - Food and Exercise is Medicine!
Tempe, Arizona, United States
3K followers 500+ connections
Calley Means
calleymeans.com/
www.youtube.com/@calleymeans
Hi, I’m Calley Means.
I am writing a book and starting a company to put food and lifestyle habits (not band-aids like pills and surgical interventions) at the center of how we think about healthcare.
During this journey, I have been exposed to research, people, companies, and ideas that have changed my life and how I think about the health and development of my new son. I am going to write a daily newsletter to share one of these insights each morning. Sign up here:
More About Me
Every institution in healthcare (hospitals, pharma, insurance, med school) depends on more sick patients for growth. I’m working to change these incentives.
I’m writing a book, co-authored with Dr. Casey Means, about how preventable cellular dysfunction (caused primarily by food) is at the root of nearly every chronic condition that plagues American life – and how to fix it. It will be published by Penguin Avery, the editors who shepherded the top-selling nonfiction book of the past two years (Atomic Habits).
I’m also starting a company called True Medicine. It is built around the idea that food (and lifestyle habits like exercise and sleep) *IS* medicine. The company’s goal is to make tax-advantaged spending on healthy food and exercise seamless.
www.truemedicine.care/
Previously, I founded a company with my wife called Anomalie, which recently sold.
techcrunch.com/2019/06/25/custom-wedding-dress/
I’ve invested in healthcare companies trying to subvert the current sick-care system, including: Levels (giving patients more data on metabolic health), Atai (leading mental health / psychedelic company), Delix (leading psychedelic company), Rejuveron (leading longevity company) – in addition to consumer startups such as RapidSOS, UpSmith, Dynamic.xyz, and Vibe.
I graduated from Stanford (I recently gave an interview to the Stanford Podcast here) and Harvard Business School (which recently wrote a case study about Anomalie here).
podcasts.apple.com/vg/podcast/disrupting-the-bridal-industry-with-calley-means/id1446979105?i=1000495311929
www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=57713
I started my career in politics, and have always been passionate about public policy. Today, I am active in groups such as Council on Foreign Relations, Teneo, and Stand Together.
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Post by the Scribe on Jan 11, 2023 7:26:50 GMT
This guy says he is conservative but he makes too much sense. I call myself a Pragmacrat. He is a Pragmacon(servative), right of center if anything a kindred spirit.
The more I read from him the more I like!
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Post by the Scribe on Jan 11, 2023 7:28:54 GMT
Free Market?
You can’t have a free market when the current market is rigged. Healthcare and food companies have co-opted free market thinking. They have lobbied more than any other industry to rig the system and then cry that anyone who questions that system is “anti-free market.” Sadly, even some of the most intelligent conservatives I know fall into this trap.
We Are All on Drugs
In a recent podcast interview, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson gave his reason for not trying psychedelics: “I have always valued objective reality. I don’t want anything interfering with my understanding of what is actually happening in front of me.“
This statement shows a blind spot that is relevant for everyone: We are all on drugs that are highly interfering with our brain’s ability to process objective reality. We should not be outsourcing our analysis of what is a “good” or “bad” drug – or our definition of what constitutes a drug in the first place.
Is a drug an addictive substance that causes damage to society?
Alcohol, caffeine, sugar, porn, social media: these produce dopamine triggers in the brain and dependency that are almost indistinguishable from drugs like cocaine and heroin – and can lead to bad societal outcomes. These substances are neurodegenerative and unquestionably “interfering with our brains” – unlike psychedelics which nearly all available science points to being brain regenerative.
Is a drug something that reverses or prevents disease?
By this measure, statins and antidepressants (the two most prescribed drugs in America) should not count. We spend $1 trillion worldwide on statins a year, and they have been shown to increase life expectancy 5 days. 25% of adult Americans take an antidepressant medication, but the FDA’s own studies show that SSRI’s are no more effective than a placebo and the underlying science backing the medication has been called into question.
Is a drug a substance that has a physiological impact on our body?
If this is true, then the environmental toxins (in our home, air and water), pesticides in our food, and lack of sleep should be considered some of the most destructive drugs in society. These factors are wrecking our microbiome – the trillions of bacteria cells in our gut that regulate 95% of our serotonin (and thus mood).
The institutions that are defining what is a “good” or “bad” drug – or what a drug even is – are not worthy of our trust. And these institutions have continually, repeatedly been wrong:
Adderall, a drug 10% of high school seniors take, was created by Germans during World War II to make Nazi soldiers more effective (it was discontinued for spurring mass psychosis among the troops).
We were told that prescription opioids were not addictive, but 80% of fentanyl/heroin addicts today became addicted from a legal prescription.
Heroin was created by Bayer (the aspirin people) and was a top-selling drug for American babies (to cure fussiness) in the late 1800s.
Also in the late 1800s, the U.S. Surgeon General recommended cocaine to cure depression.
Psychedelics – long stigmatized – have been shown to produce longer remissions of depression (with lower side effects) than any other treatment studied.
The more I have dug into this, the more I am convinced we think about drugs completely backwards:
We have convinced younger Americans that rampant fatigue, obesity, anxiety, depression and infertility is a normal part of daily life that can be cured with drugs – instead of warning signs of larger cellular dysfunction that can only be cured by root cause solutions.
95% of medical spending goes to drugs and interventions after people get sick but nutritional/lifestyle interventions (which can actually prevent and reverse disease) are put into a niche lifestyle buckets.
Psychiatry has been completely taken over by pharmaceutical treatments that numb patients, instead of tools to help get to the root cause of trauma and increase our sense of awe for the world.
We spent 40 times more on pharmaceutical cures to cancer versus ways to prevent cancer – even though cancer is a preventable disease.
Alcohol was considered so destructive to American society that we passed a Constitutional amendment banning it. But now leading scientific figures like deGrasse Tyson don’t even consider it a brain-altering drug.
Our brains and bodies are what perceives reality, and they are under threat like never before. Understanding and optimizing the “drugs” (substances or ideas that produce a physiological change) that enter our bodies is the highest-leverage thing we can do.
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Post by the Scribe on Jan 11, 2023 8:22:33 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Feb 23, 2023 19:02:43 GMT
Welcome!
Thanks for joining this email. You'll get a tangible health idea every morning.
In the meantime, here are 6 books that changed how I think about health:
(1) Food Fix by Mark Hyman. Best systemic breakdown of food + health systems I've read. (Amazon link)
(2) The Hacking of the American Mind by Robert Lustig. Have met many people who said this book changed their life, as it did for me. Explains how confluence of factors (food, environmental toxins, chronic stress from social media, lack of movement) is impacting our brains. (Amazon link)
(3) The Blood Sugar Solution by Mark Hyman. The best book on food principles. If your fasting glucose or cholesterol levels are above optimal, buy this book. (Amazon link)
(4) How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. Deep dive into the science and people behind the psychedelic renaissance. Fascinating and genuinely moving. Also represents how wrong conventional medical wisdom can be. (Amazon link)
(5) The Complete Guide to Fasting by Jason Fung. Explains how the human body is made to go days (even weeks) without eating, and how our constant "fed state" leads to massive problems. (Amazon link)
(6) The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. One of the most interesting insights in this book is how little progress we've made in confronting cancer since the invention of chemotherapy in the early 1900s - despite trillions of dollars in investment. (Amazon link)
Have a book that should be on this list? Let me know!
-Calley
ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER
I am writing a book and starting a company to put food and lifestyle habits (not band-aids like pills and surgical interventions) at the center of how we think about healthcare.
During this journey, I have been exposed to research, people, companies, and ideas that have changed my life and how I think about the health and development of my new son. This newsletter shares one of these insights each morning.
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