Metabolic Health for Athletes with Casey Means, MD

The Sonya Looney Show

Metabolic health might be something you've never considered. Metabolic health is way more than just the number on the scale or your BMI. It's considering things like having ideal levels of blood sugar, triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, blood pressure, waist circumference and more without the use of medications. These factors directly relate to a person’s risk for heart disease, diabetes, and stroke. Your metabolic health also affects sleep, energy levels, recovery, appetite, and more. A study with 8,721 adults from UNC Chapel Hill noted that only 1 in 8 people, aka 12% of the population have optimal metabolic health.

I've mentioned how much I love InsideTracker on this podcast because you can order a very comprehensive blood test that teaches you about your metabolic health and so much more to optimize your health. In today's podcast, I got to sit down with Stanford MD, Casey Means. She is also the Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer of pioneering digital health startup Levels. Dr. Casey is focused on using continuous glucose monitoring to solve the epidemic affecting the health and wellbeing of 88% of the US adult population: metabolic dysfunction. She also promotes plant-based nutrition for optimal health.

Dr. Means has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Business Insider, Endocrine Today, Startupbeat, Healthy Human Revolution, Well + Good, and more, and her writing has been recently published in TheHill.com and Metabolism with articles about the strong relationship between chronic lifestyle-related diseases and COVID-19 mortality, and innovative healthcare and policy solutions to ameliorate this. She is an award-winning biomedical researcher, with past research positions at the National Institutes, Stanford School of Medicine, and NYU. Her clinical work focuses on Functional & Lifestyle Medicine, with an emphasis on whole foods plant-based (WFPB) nutrition, mind-body connection, and physical activity as foundations of metabolic and overall health.

An app that some friends of mine have recently released is called 80/20 plants that offers one-on-one coaching for changing your diet. There are daily lessons with videos + meal planning help + hundreds of recipes and a supportive community

Topics Discussed in the Podcast

• defining metabolic fitness and why you should care about your metabolic health
• how she started integrating lifestyle medicine and nutrigenomics
• covid comorbidities & glucose
• how athletes can have glucose issues
• how to optimize a whole-foods, plant-based diet
• how lack of sleep affects glucose negatively

Listen Now about Metabolic Health

Links

• Casey Means, MD website

• Levels Health

• Follow Casey on IG

• My Podcast with Cyrus Kambatta /Mastering Diabetes
• 80/20 Plants

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