Exercise, nutritious diet and good sleep all support your metabolic health, which Dr. Casey Means argues is key to preventing chronic disease. pixdeluxe/Getty Images/E+ hide caption In medical school, Casey Means could tell that her own health was slipping.
The culprits? Crummy food, long days hunched over a desk and little sleep -- rites of passage for many future physicians. “I was getting sore from sitting so much,” she recalls. Hoping to make a small dent, she asked Stanford to add a few standing desks in the back of their classrooms.
The administration shot down the idea, but told her they’d reconsider if she returned with convincing data. Means tracked down grant funding, trained up in qualitative research and conducted an analysis of her classmates’ sentiments on the matter. “The data was overwhelming,” she says, “Students actually felt that the amount of sitting was diminishing their well-being and their learning .
” Two years later, Means presented her findings to the powers-that-be, only to hear that standing desks were still off the table. It was a lesson for the surgeon-to-be on the blindspots in the medical system and how prevention of chronic health problems falls by the wayside. “That was just one of those first moments of realizing this was going to be a really big ship to turn,” says Means, who has a medical practice in Portland, Oregon and is chief medical officer for the biotech company Levels.
In her new book, Good Energy , Means lays ou.
