Dr. Casey Means

We have 80,000 synthetic toxins in our food, water, air, personal care products, home care products.

We live a thermoneutral existence now with our thermostats.

There's no real swings in temperature unless you're intentionally trying to.

And then our emotional health is very different.

We are very much exposed to low-grade chronic stress triggers.

So across...

food, sleep, movement, emotional health, toxins, light and temperature, things are not what they once were.

And it's changed in the blink of an eye.

I mean, the light bulb was created in 1806.

This is like 0.04% of human history that we've even had artificial light.

So things have changed.

And the unique thing

about all of these changes in our environment is that each one of those pillars, each of those changes in our environment synergistically directly hurts the mitochondria through different mechanisms, the chronic low-grade stress, the sitting, the ultra-processed nutrient-devoid food, even the blue light at nighttime.

All of it through different core biologic mechanisms synergistically hits this part of the cell, the mitochondria.

So we have the food coming in, but we're not doing a good job of converting it to an energy form we can use.

So we have these underpowered dysfunctional cells because of mitochondrial dysfunction caused by our environment.

And...

of course what happens if you've got energy substrate that you can't process it's going to be stored and that's of course why we have an obesity and overweight epidemic that's affecting close to 80 percent of americans so wild it's it's just we talk about obesity like it's the problem obesity is one branch of a tree that's rooted in this mitochondrial dysfunction that's caused by our environment and

Just to back up a little bit to just sort of share kind of maybe like how I sort of started thinking about that.

You know, I had trained as an ENT surgeon and I was at Stanford Medical School.