Dr. Casey Means is a former Stanford-trained surgeon who pivoted to functional medicine when she started to see a pattern emerging of chronic inflammation and diseases that could be prevented through better lifestyle choices. She’s now the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Levels Health, a health tech startup that uses continuous glucose monitoring to give users actionable data to improve their day-to-day behaviors and health. On this episode of PAVELCAST, Dr. Means talks to Pavel Tseytlovskiy about chronic inflammation and how it hurts the body, the effect of high glucose on our long-term health, and how wearable tech is the future of preventative medicine. Dr. Means has been pushing back against the medical status quo since medical school. "Something that really bothered me in medical school was during our cardiovascular block, we were talking all the time about how important, Oh, you should tell your patients to exercise, and here we are medical students sitting in this dark room for eight to 10 hours a day, sitting in these chairs with virtually zero time in between classes to even go to the bathroom.
And so I’m like, we’re actually engaging in the behaviors that are risk factors for the diseases that we’re studying. Not to mention, we only have access to our cafeteria food here, which is terrible and full of all the things that we’re saying we shouldn’t be telling patients to eat. So it was, it was funny. Acute inflammation is a normal immune system response and helps us to heal, but chronic inflammation is often the underlying cause of many chronic diseases. "Acute inflammation is like you cut your finger. A little bit of bacteria enters. Your immune system, it releases signals for a bunch of immune cells to come that causes your finger to come red and swollen. And then in a few days, it all resolves and you’ve healed. So that’s great. Now, chronic inflammation is more something like you have gut dysfunction, your microbiome is screwed up. And so now your gut lining is constantly, your gut barrier has become a little bit tattered and, and Glyco Care reviews all of a sudden, every day, every time you eat little teeny bits of bacteria are kind of constantly getting into your bloodstream.
And now your immune system is like, Hmm, I always have to be on alert. I am always sending signals that there is a threat and that can be extremely sort of damaging to the body. Another thing that can do this is chronic stress. So, you know, we live in a, even though we don’t have a lot of really massive corporeal threats. Very unlikely we’re going to get shot. Very unlikely we’re going to get chased by a lion. And yet our bodies still think we’re under constant stress because honking, the cell phone going off, Glyco Care reviews the emails, the constant meetings, you know, all these things are interpreted by our body in the exact same way as a real physical threat. So that chronic stress is telling our immune systems, get ready. A problem could be happening. Dr. Means decided to leave surgery to focus on metabolic and preventative health to reduce these chronic diseases caused by our lifestyles.
"I kind of got pretty obsessed with this concept of metabolic health. And why are we so metabolically unhealthy right now? Why this is a key root cause of our inflammation, our metabolic dysfunction, and what are we doing to ameliorate this? I mean, the USDA puts out a food pyramid that doesn’t help really at all with metabolic disease. Doctors don’t have any idea how to recommend the right diets or exercise regimens or anything. So who is fixing this because it’s driving the majority of our healthcare costs, it’s driving the majority of suffering and it’s driving the majority of what’s going to the operating room. So, I spent some time, couple of years thinking, how can I merge the surgical world with this and kind of have this hybrid practice. And then ultimately I realized that I’ve been fortunate to have over a decade of medical training and that we don’t need a few more head and neck surgeons in the world.