Letter to the Editor of The New Yorker Magazine Regarding its Profile of Surgeon General Nominee, Casey Means, MD
To the Editor:
The mission of the U.S. Surgeon General is to give the public the best scientific information available on how to improve health and lower the risk of illness and injury.
Jessica Winter’s profile of Dr. Casey Means is less a critique of the prospective Surgeon General than an uninformed, sneering defense of the status quo – one in which healthcare consumes 19% of U.S. GDP, with 90% going to manage mostly preventable chronic illnesses.
Winter derides Means’ warnings about ultra-processed food, seed oils, metabolic dysfunction, and the misplaced incentives in our food, agriculture, and pharmaceutical industries. But these are not fringe concerns. Microplastics have been found in human arteries and brain tissue. NIH trials show ultra-processed foods drive disease. The WHO confirms that most chronic illnesses are preventable through lifestyle change.
For analysis of just one chronic illness, I commend to your readers Neil Barsky’s three-part series on type 2 diabetes for The Guardian. Spoiler: the current standard of care results in 100,000 Americans per year undergoing amputation of a limb due to a preventable, reversible condition.
Although Casey Means' approach to nutrition is unnecessarily complicated, and she seems out of touch regarding accessibility to improved care, she grasps the magnitude and urgency of our crisis, whereas Vivek Murthy and his predecessors completely ignored it. Means urges readers to take control of their own health in 'Good Energy' because our institutions have failed us.
It's painful for long overdue attempts at health care reform to come from this administration. Our challenge is not to choose between health and democracy, but to refuse to surrender either. Doing so will likely require setting aside any certainty that we have nothing to learn from Casey Means.
Sincerely,
Julie King
Advocate for Metabolic Psychiatry
