Dr Casey Means is the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Levels Health, a med tech company that provides closed-loop continuous glucose monitoring to help people optimize their diets and so much more.
As Dr Means points out, eating the right food isn't sufficient. Whether a particular whole, plant food – say, a banana, a sweet potato, or bunch of grapes – will spike your glucose to a dangerously high level depends also on the time of day, what you're paring it with, your level of stress at that moment, how active you are physically, any environmental toxins that might be disrupting your metabolism, and the state of your microbiome.
Levels Health's monitor is the size of a stack of two quarters, attaches to the back of your upper arm, and tells your smartphone about your glucose level and heart rate every 15 minutes.
With this information, you can literally see how different foods and activities affect your blood sugar levels.
And blood sugar levels are highly predictive of long-term metabolic and overall health. Spikes and wide swings are not good for us, and lead in the short term to fatigue and mood swings, and inflammation, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune conditions, and dementia in the long term.
As a behaviorist, I love how that kind of hard, objective, instantaneous data can help us change behavior. Sure, sugar may make me fat in a month and sick in a year, but when it spikes my blood glucose in 10 minutes, that's when I'm motivated to do something about it.
In our conversation, I pitched all the hardball questions I could think of:
- What about carnivores who avoid all carbohydrates and could interpret their results as positive even if they're killing themselves?
- Isn't the root problem that humans are disconnected from nature? So how will more technology move us in the direction of natural health?
- What if the optimal diet for an individual isn't the best thing for animals, or the planet?
Dr Means not only handled them, but converted me to a believer. Her vision for instantaneous, closed-loop data actually holds the promise of moving us back in the direction of natural human movement, reduced pollutants and pesticides, less animal consumption (especially from factory farms pumping out antibiotic- and hormone- and pesticide-laden meat and dairy), and healthier soil and more regenerative agricultural practices.
Because health is holographic. You can't have a healthy skin cell on the pinky of your right hand if you have a systemic disease in your entire body. And we can't be healthy individuals within a diseased ecosystem, on an overburdened planet.
Given that according to a recent UNC study, fully 88% of the US adult population suffers from at least one metabolic dysfunction, there's a huge existing market for the device, which is currently available only via prescription. (Although they are running a public beta, which allows regular old consumers to sign up for the service directly from Levels Health website. Here's a link that allows you, as a loyal Plant Yourself listener, to cut in front of 60,000 people on the wait list and get yours now.)
But the real potential game changer here is for the monitor to become as ubiquitous as FitBit – showing millions of people that the moment-to-moment choices they make immediately and significantly determine their metabolic health.
As the Levels Health blog reminds us, “Metabolism is Life.”
Links
Levels Health
Get your own Levels Health Continuous Glucose Monitor (and skip the 60,000 person waiting list) – NOT an affiliate link
UNC Study on American metabolic health status
Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition
Dr Means' Official Bio
Casey Means, MD is a Stanford-trained physician, Chief Medical Officer and Co-founder of metabolic health company Levels, and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention. Her mission is to maximize human potential and reverse the epidemic of preventable chronic disease by empowering individuals with tech-enabled tools that can inform smart, personalized, and sustainable dietary and lifestyle choices.
Dr. Means’s perspective has been recently featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Techcrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, The Hill, Metabolism, Endocrine Today, and more. She is an award-winning biomedical researcher, with past research positions at the NIH, Stanford School of Medicine, and NYU.
Dr Howie Jacobson
This podcast is a labor of love and a way to give back to the world that has given me so much. That's why there aren't any sponsors (except me :).
My day job is helping leaders and their teams master their mindsets to remove all obstacles to heart-centered high performance.
Here are three gigs that I do:
1. Trigger-Free Leadership: Executive and Senior Leadership Mentoring and Facilitation
I work with high performing executive teams in organizations — and executive teams that need to become high performing. My focus is mindset mastery, because it’s our mindsets that either support high performance or get in the way.
At this level, everyone’s got the skills and experience to excel and contribute at the highest level. What holds people back is mindset stuff: specifically the triggers that get them out of creative engagement and into fight-or-flight defensiveness.
My practice is all about teaching people to respond differently to those triggers by updating old maps — essentially removing the glitches that the triggers grab onto.
2. Executive Coaching: Quick Wins for High Performance
I work with individual executives and leaders, one on one. The program is called Quick Wins for High Performance, and what we do is, we work strategically on one or two areas that are holding you back and keeping you from performing at your best.
We reverse engineer the presenting problems — too much work and not enough time, underperforming employees and teams, maddening organizational inefficiencies, etc — and identify and rewire the suboptimal mindsets that are behind those problems.
The work is all about updating your mental maps so your actions and responses are always appropriate, proportionate, and strategic.
3. High Stakes Conversations for Fast Growing Small Business Teams
I help small business teams have high stakes conversations with skill, humor, and grace. When people feel safe, they can do their best, most creative, most collaborative work.
So that's what I do. If you'd like any of those results, drop me a line and tell me about yourself.
You CAN Change Other People!
Well, that's what Peter Bregman and I claim in our provocative book of that title.
What we really mean is, you can bring out the best in the people around you. If you think you're powerless to help people change, it's because you've been going about it the wrong way.
Discover our straightforward, replicable process here: You Can Change Other People.
Music
The Plant Yourself Podcast theme music, “Dance of Peace (Sabali Don),” is generously provided by Will Ridenour, a kora player from North Carolina who has trained with top Senegalese musicians.
It can be found on his first CD, titled Will Ridenour.
You can learn about Will, listen to more tracks, and buy music on his website, WillRidenour.com.
Gratitudes
Thanks to Plant Yourself podcast patrons – Kim Harrison – Lynn McLellan – Brittany Porter – Dominic Marro – Barbara Whitney – Tammy Black – Amy Good – Amanda Hatherly – Mary Jane Wheeler – Ellen Kennelly – Melissa Cobb – Rachel Behrens – Tina Scharf – Tina Ahern – Jen Vilkinofsky – David Byczek – Michele X – Elspeth Feldman – Leah Stolar – Allan Kristensen – Colleen Peck – Michele Landry – Jozina – Sara Durkacs – Kelly Cameron – Janet Selby – Claire Adams – Tom Fronczak – Jeannette Benham – Gila Lacerte – David Donohue – Blair Seibert – Doron Avizov – Gio and Carolyn Argentati – Jodi Friesner – Mischa Rosen – Michael Worobiec – AvIvA Lael – Alicia Lemus – Val Linnemann – Nick Harper – Bandana Chawla – Molly Levine – The Inscrutable Harry R – Susan Laverty the Panda Vegan – Craig Covic – Adam Scharf – Karen Bury – Heather Morgan – Nigel Davies – Marian Blum – Teresa Kopel – Julian Watkins – Brid O'Connell – Shannon Herschman – Linda Ayotte – Holm Hedegaard – Isa Tousignant – Connie Haneline – Erin Greer – Alicia Davis – Heather O'Connor – Carollynne Jensen – Sheri Orlekoski of Plant Powered for Health – Karen Smith – Scott Mirani – Karen and Joe Crabtree – Kirby Burton – Theresa Carrell – Kevin Macaulay – Elizabeth Rothschild – Ann Jesse – Sheryl Dwyer – Jenny Hazelton – Peter W Evans – Dennis Bird – Darby Kelly – Lori Fanney – Linnea Lundquist – Emily Iaconelli – Levi Wallach – Rosamonde McAtee – Dan Pokorney – Stephen Leinin – Patty DeMartino – Mike and Donna Kartz – Deanne Bishop – Bilberry Elf – Marjorie Lewis – Tricia Adams – Nancy Sheldon – Lindsey Bashore – Gunn Marit Hagen – Tracey Gulledge – Lara Hedin – Meg from Mamasezz – Stacey Stokes – Ben Savage – Michael K – David Hughes -Coni Rodgers – Claire England – Sally Robertson – Parham Ganchi – Amy Dailey – Brian Tourville – Mark Jeffrey Johnson – Josie Dempsey – Caryn Schmitt – Pamela Hayden – Emily Perryman – Allison Corbett – Richard Stone – Lauren Vaught of Edible Musings – Erin Hastey – Sean Owens – Sagar Naik – Erika Piedra – Danielle Roberts – Michael Leuchten – Sarah Johnson – Katharine Floyd – Meryl Fury – for your generous support of the podcast.
Disclosure
This post may contain affiliate links. I may receive compensation from your actions on such links. It don't cost you a dime, tho.
