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May 8, 2025<\/b> \u2013 Yesterday, President Trump nominated Casey Means<\/a> as the country\u2019s top doctor.<\/p>\n Means, a health entrepreneur who advocates for changing food choices and farm practices,\u00a0 and her brother Calley Means have been fixtures<\/a> of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.\u2019s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement since last fall. As surgeon general, she\u2019d join her brother at HHS, where he is a special advisor to Kennedy.<\/p>\n Unlike past surgeons general, Means has limited experience practicing medicine. She got her medical degree from Stanford University in 2014 and then dropped out of a residency program before finishing. She co-founded Levels, a health start-up that sells bracelets that continuously monitor blood sugar<\/a> in service of healthier choices, in 2019. For comparison, the last surgeon general, Vivek Murthy<\/a>, had cared for thousands of patients and trained medical students for nearly a decade at Brigham and Women\u2019s Medical Center and Harvard Medical School prior to taking the surgeon general position.<\/p>\n Instead, Means says she was struck by the lack of attention to root causes of disease in modern medicine and set out on her own path to address those. \u201cFor most of us (literally 93 percent of adults!), our metabolism is not doing well because of our toxic, ultraprocessed food system and modern industrial environment,\u201d she wrote in a recent newsletter. \u201cThis is the root cause of nearly every chronic health issue we\u2019re facing today, and we need to get it back on track.\u201d<\/p>\n Means has called<\/a> transitioning to organic and regenerative agriculture practices \u201cthe number one thing we can do to improve health.\u201d On a wishlist<\/a> for the presidential administration she made last fall, more than half of the 15 items involve food or farming. First on the list is getting more \u201creal food in schools.\u201d She also lists restricting pesticide use, reforming farm bill subsidies away from corn, soy, and wheat, and breaking up meatpacking monopolies.<\/p>\n As surgeon general, those items would be outside her jurisdiction, but HHS and the U.S. Department of Agriculture\u00a0 have already been collaborating on MAHA priorities<\/a> like getting soda out<\/a> of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n