Good Energy
The Surprising Connection Between Metabolic Health and Limitless Vitality
Casey Means and Calley Means · 2024 · Health & Fitness
12 min · 12 chaptersNarrated in your voice
What it's about
Casey and Calley Means argue that nearly every major chronic disease in America — obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, infertility, even many cancers — shares a common root: dysfunction at the cellular, metabolic level. They contend that food, medical, and pharmaceutical industries profit from treating symptoms rather than this root cause, and that individuals can reclaim health by tracking biomarkers and changing daily habits. The book mattered because it reframed a fragmented disease-care conversation around one unifying, testable idea.
Read a little every day
15 min a day
1 days · done Sat, Oct 31
Read together
Start a circle and share the code — everyone sees everyone's honest place in the book. Accountability, not leaderboards.
Who it's for
- A person recently diagnosed with prediabetes or told their labs are 'borderline' who wants to understand why - A primary care patient frustrated that doctors treat symptoms with prescriptions but never ask about food or sleep - A reader interested in food-industry politics and how subsidies, lobbying, and marketing shape the American diet
What’s inside
- 1The Hidden Epidemic1 min
Nearly all chronic disease in America traces back to one underlying condition, metabolic dysfunction, rather than to hundreds of unrelated illnesses.
- 2What Good Energy Actually Means1 min
The quality of a person's health is set primarily by how efficiently mitochondria inside their cells convert food and oxygen into usable energy.
- 3How the Modern Environment Poisons Cellular Energy1 min
The metabolic crisis is driven mainly by environmental exposures — ultra-processed food, artificial light, sedentary routines, chronic stress — not by individual failures of willpower.
- 4A Medical System Built to Treat Symptoms, Not Causes1 min
Doctors are trained and financially rewarded to manage individual symptoms with drugs and procedures, not to investigate or reverse the metabolic dysfunction driving them.
- 5Who Profits From Chronic Disease1 min
Food and pharmaceutical companies are structurally motivated to sustain, rather than reduce, the rates of metabolic disease that drive their revenue.
- 6Knowing Your Numbers1 min
Ordinary people can and should track a small set of biomarkers themselves to catch metabolic dysfunction years before it becomes a diagnosed disease.
- 7Eating for Good Energy1 min
Diet built around whole, minimally processed foods that keep blood sugar stable does more to prevent chronic disease than any pharmaceutical intervention available today.
- 8Beyond the Plate: Movement, Sleep, Light, and Stress1 min
Diet alone cannot correct metabolic dysfunction; sleep quality, sunlight exposure, movement patterns, and stress regulation are equally necessary and often neglected levers.
- 9Rebuilding the System1 min
Reversing the metabolic health crisis at a population level requires policy and institutional change, not just individual willpower, because the current system's incentives actively work against personal effort.
About Casey Means and Calley Means
Casey Means is a Stanford-trained physician who left a head-and-neck surgery residency disillusioned with disease-care medicine, later co-founding the metabolic health company Levels. Calley Means, her brother, spent years as a consultant to food and pharmaceutical companies before becoming a vocal critic of the industries he once served, later advising national health-policy efforts.
