But beneath the crunchy-conservative advice about how to get kids to eat organic lies a techno-optimism strikingly like that of the pediatrician prescribing semaglutide to sixth-graders. “What if we treated humans like rockets, equipping them with sensors before systems fail, to understand where dysfunction is arising so we can address it?” Means writes in Good Energy. The metaphor is borrowed from Josh Clemente, her co-founder at Levels, who is an alumnus of SpaceX. Reducing food to its component parts, and eating habits to an “individualized” health plan, makes it easy to turn the human body into a machine.
Yet Means sees her solutions for chronic disease as not mechanistic but spiritual, in contrast to those of the soulless medical establishment. “Everything is connected,” she writes in her book. And the “spiritual crisis” of America’s chronic disease epidemic is “an assault on the miraculous flow of cosmic energy from the sun, through the soil and plants, through bacteria in my gut, through my cells’ mitochondria to create the energy that sparks my consciousness.”
This is why individualized tech is so much more promising for her than the old wait-and-drug medical model, which waits until people get fat and sick and then charges them to treat their symptoms. “We have the potential to live the longest, healthiest lives in human history, but this will require optimization,” she writes.