In spring 2024, Calley Means had a vision inside a sweat tent in Austin. The food and pharma lobbyist turned health-start-up entrepreneur, who, along with his sister, Casey, wrote the best-selling book Good Energy, about the rise of chronic disease, was at a campaign event supporting RFK Jr., then a third-party presidential candidate. The two sat beside each other, dripping with perspiration and praying over the future of the country. That’s when Calley, who once identified as a Never Trumper, saw in his mind’s eye the candidate standing side by side with his rival, Donald Trump.
As he later recounted on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Calley was struck by a realization: “What RFK represents is actually what Trump represents, and actually what almost every American’s feeling,” a sense that “something doesn’t quite feel right.” A few months later, he called RFK Jr., asking if he would be willing to get on a call with Trump to discuss combining forces. RFK Jr. agreed.
Calley Means is now reported to be deeply involved with the Trump transition team, using his social-media platform to solicit suggestions for FDA reform from his followers, and is set to appear at the Turning Point USA–sponsored AmericaFest later this month alongside Steve Bannon and Donald Trump Jr. In November, The Wall Street Journal reported that Casey, a soft-spoken health entrepreneur with a sizable social-media following, was being considered for the position of surgeon general. (A source close to the siblings refuted this, saying Casey had not been tapped for a government role.)
Both siblings present themselves as former insiders who became disaffected by Establishment politics. (Casey declined to comment for this story, and Calley never responded to our request.) They grew up in Washington, D.C., where their father, Grady Means, was a government economist and assistant to Vice-President Nelson D. Rockefeller. Calley worked for John McCain’s 2008 campaign before becoming a consultant. In 2023, he wrote a tweet alleging that when he consulted for Coca-Cola, the company donated to the NAACP and other civil-rights organizations to ensure soft drinks would be covered by government food stamps. (Neither Coca-Cola nor the NAACP has commented on this, though tax forms from the period when Calley worked as a consultant show donations to the NAACP via the Coca-Cola Foundation.)
Casey, meanwhile, trained at Stanford before dropping out of her head-and-neck-surgery residency at the Oregon Health and Science University. In Good Energy, she writes that she became disillusioned with traditional medicine after operating on a patient with sinusitis and realizing that while she was trained to treat the condition, she was unable to address the root cause of it. She started her own functional-medicine practice and later launched Levels, a continuous-glucose-monitoring start-up popular among health influencers.
Calley says it was their mother’s death in 2021, resulting from stage-four pancreatic cancer, that led him to “start speaking out in ways that I might have been scared to before.” In Good Energy, the siblings argue that chronic illnesses, and even cancers like their mother’s, can be attributed to “metabolic dysfunction” caused by lifestyle factors such as poor diet, minimal exposure to sunlight, and lack of exercise.
While the term metabolic dysfunction is something of a vague catchall, their main argument — that Americans are too sick and that processed foods and lack of exercise are partly to blame — is largely supported by scientific consensus, as are many of their other arguments: that poor diet and sedentary lifestyle contribute to chronic illness; that federally funded studies are often hampered by conflicts of interest; that the health-care system is deeply flawed. It’s easy to see how a suburban mom concerned about her kids eating processed foods or a young adult frustrated with high health-care premiums would embrace their content.
But in interviews, it doesn’t take long for their claims to lapse into dog whistles and conspiracy theories. Calley, for instance, has implied that some mental illnesses were invented to benefit big pharma, that “metabolically healthy” people do not die of COVID, and that the body-positivity movement was funded by processed-food companies like Nestlé. Calley has tweeted that he considered COVID-vaccine mandates for children “a war crime.”
Casey, too, has raised long-settled questions about the safety and efficacy of vaccines despite not representing herself an anti-vaxxer. She is also prone to alluding to right-wing talking points, often presented within the framework of more consensus-supported arguments. On Tucker Carlson, she expressed concern about the over-prescription of hormonal birth control and how it can disrupt women’s health — not an uncommon, or unreasonable, question — before claiming that suppressing the menstrual cycle reflects “a disrespect of life,” rhetoric that echoes that of the anti-choice movement.
It’s not an accident that the Meanses couch their more extreme ideas in language designed to appeal to a broader audience. “They’re using all of the logical-fallacy traps that we warn against,” says Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and a science-communications adviser for the de Beaumont Foundation. “They make people feel like, Well, if we just ate cleaner and had less drugs from pharmaceutical companies, we’d all be a lot healthier.” But by undermining trust in evidence-based, life-saving scientific protocols in the process of offering commonsense advice, “they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
Calley has stayed close to RFK Jr. heading into January. In November, he headlined a panel with RFK Jr. and Jordan Peterson. Most recently, Calley posted a photograph of himself in Palm Beach with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s nominee for NIH head; Dr. Marty Makary, Trump’s proposed FDA chief; and Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s pick to head the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. All three were highly critical of the government’s response to COVID, including vaccine and mask mandates as well as school closures. The men are standing arm-in-arm, beaming and triumphant. Calley captioned the picture, “We are on the verge of a revolution in health.”
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