The Make America Healthy Again movement’s infiltration of federal health policy took another step forward last week when President Donald Trump nominated Dr. Casey Means, a “metabolic health evangelist” and an ally of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be his surgeon general.

If confirmed by the Senate in the coming weeks, Means will hold one of the most visible public health roles in the country, and would be set to boost Kennedy’s vision for remaking the nation’s approach to health and wellness.

But who is Means? And where does she fit in the broader MAHA space?

Like Kennedy, she is an insider turned outsider: She graduated from Stanford Medical School but dropped out of her residency program in 2019 shortly before completing it because she came to view the health care system as “exploitative.” She’s since pivoted to focus on personal wellness, challenging the health care establishment along the way. In doing so, she’s found an eager audience, attracting hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.

In 2019, she started a health tech company called Levels that marketed at-home glucose monitors. Means herself has pitched the devices as a general health tool not only for people with diabetes, for whom they were originally developed, but for everyone — even though research studies have found no benefit for those without the condition. Perhaps coincidentally, last month, Kennedy floated having the federal government cover the costs of such devices for some patients, rather than cover new weight-loss drugs, as one way to arrest the country’s obesity crisis.

Last year, Means published a bestselling book called Good Energy, co-authored with her brother Calley Means, that cemented her place as a MAHA champion who would take on the health care industrial complex.

In their book, the Meanses advance a theory of “metabolic dysfunction” — that Americans’ bodies are bad at producing energy because of our poor diets and sedentary lifestyles, and which is the root cause of chronic diseases, including not only obesity and diabetes but even schizophrenia and depression. (Scientists have found that metabolism is

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