Casey Means Cashed In Promoting Companies With a History of Unsafe Products

Dr. Casey Means’ Good Energy Living newsletter, which she launched in January 2024, has promoted concepts that we can surely all agree on: “We are one with nature.” “Inner peace for 2025.” “We cannot go on poisoning the earth without destroying our own health.” “We are not being protected from toxic food.” 

The newsletter’s rallying cry around nutrition — with its snapshots of clean living and beautiful produce — align with the message she delivered on February 25 to the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee at her confirmation hearing to become the nation’s 22^nd Surgeon General. In her opening remarks, she called for a “great national healing” that makes “healthy living the easiest choice.”  

The newsletter features a lot of nutritional cheerleading, as well as product boosting. It has served as a platform for her book Good Energy: the Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health, which she co-wrote with her brother Calley Means, who is now a senior advisor to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  But, particularly, it pitches products from the wellness brands that paid to sponsor the newsletter: health powders, teas, skincare, snacks, cleaning products — and even luggage. 

However, the brands Means has touted — while being paid thousands to promote them — are not all the epitome of health and safety that she has claimed them to be. At least five of her sponsors sold products allegedly either containing hazardous ingredients, unsafe levels of lead and cadmium, or even traces of the forever chemical PFOA, a review by Rolling Stone has found.    

There is Daily Harvest, the meal kit delivery company, which paid Means $12,000 for sponsorship, according to her financial disclosure report to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics: “I have been a customer of Daily Harvest for 6+ years, and have often joked that I think at least 20% of the atoms in my body come from the Daily Harvest Cauliflower Rice + Pesto bowls and Blueberry + Hemp smoothies, which I adore and eat A LOT,” she writes in the December 31, 2024 newsletter. 

But in 2022, Daily Harvest’s French Lentil & Leek Crumbles sent more than 130 people to the hospital, some for acute liver failure, and 39 had their gall bladders removed, due to the use of tara flour, an ingredient not recognized as safe by the Food and Drug Administration. The tainted crumbles led to a product recall, an FDA investigation, class action lawsuits and resulting settlements in late 2024 and early 2025. (Daily Harvest did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment. But in a 2023 Fast Company article, Daily Harvest said that it would follow a new system to ensure that any new ingredients it used were listed as safe in an FDA database.)  

Pique, a company which makes teas and elixirs, sponsored Newsletter #33, in which Means wrote on Oct. 22, 2024: “I use Pique’s products daily — at least three times a day, in fact! These stunning products have improved my health, taste amazing, and are organic!!!” The company paid her a hefty $46,000 to sponsor her newsletter, Means’ financial disclosure records show.

But starting in 2022, four Pique products including electric turmeric and chaga energy tea crystals, were alleged in a pre-lawsuit notice by the Environmental Research Center, a nonprofit that tests products for safety, to contain lead levels that exceeded California’s allowable limits. A California law known as Proposition 65 allows companies like ERC to sue businesses if they have failed to provide warnings about chemicals in their products that could cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm.

 In 2023, Environmental Research Center alleged in a lawsuit that it had found 13 more of Pique’s products to contain trace elements of forever chemicals. A spokesperson for Pique tells Rolling Stone that the company “categorically rejects the false and misleading characterization of this matter,” and that it is now “actively litigating because we refuse to pay settlements over baseless allegations regarding naturally occurring trace elements in agricultural products.”

And then there is the sponsor EnergyBits, which makes algae tablets. “What other food is so effortless and so nourishing for $1 a day?” Means wrote in a newsletter about the upcoming November 2024 presidential election. “Even better — it’s great for the entire family (pets love them too!).” EnergyBits paid Means $27,431, including what she described in her financial disclosures as “Newsletter Sponsorship and Partnership Fees.” It is unclear what the fees consisted of, the incentives they may have created, or even when the payments were made, as the financial disclosures are undated.   

In 2022, the Environmental Research Center found that the EnergyBits algae tablets contained elevated lead levels. Three years earlier, a division of the Better Business Bureau found that EnergyBits had not identified sufficient studies to substantiate its claims that the algae tablets helped reduce brain fog and improve mood and mental focus, among other assertions, and recommended the company discontinue such statements. 

The founder and CEO of EnergyBits, Catharine Arnston, tells Rolling Stone that California regulations have unleashed “crazy ambulance chasing activity” and that the nonprofit, Environmental Research Center, was seeking settlement money from small food companies. However, she did not dispute the elevated lead levels and says EnergyBits now uses different algae and does independent testing for microtoxins and heavy metals. As to the Better Business Bureau’s claims, she says, “There was science that validated everything we said.”   

Charles Poss, in-house counsel for the Environmental Research Center, says that since 2009 when Proposition 65 became law, ERC has “tested more than 30,000 products and issued hundreds of Notices for Proposition 65 violations.” He adds, “At times we engage with companies that market themselves as healthy and consumer and environmentally friendly who fight us with overly litigious tactics so they can both avoid telling their customers that their products contain harmful contaminants and avoid fixing the problem.”   

Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, says that Means’ “credentials, research background, and experience in public life give her the right insights to be the surgeon general who helps make sure America never again becomes the sickest nation on Earth.”  

THE SENATE HELP COMMITTEE, WHICH IS expected to vote on Means’ confirmation this month, is now weighing not just Means’ clinical judgement, but the question of what she would really be selling the American public. As America’s chief medical communicator, the role of Surgeon General is really one of vision selling: to help publicly diagnosis a societal problem and frame solutions for the American people, such as the effort by Dr. Vivek Murthy, President Biden’s surgeon general, to draw attention to the crisis of loneliness.  

Means does not have an active medical license and, in 2018, quit her residency in head and neck surgery at Oregon Health & Science University just months before completing it, a move that she has repeatedly presented as a selling point and proof that she acted on her realization that the U.S. healthcare system is broken. 

While Means has said she will focus on the root causes of chronic diseases, critics point to her promotion of minimally regulated wellness products that make dubious health claims. 

“Casey Means spends all her time not practicing clinical medicine, but in business efforts, wellness, and longevity that are murky at best as to what they offer patients,” says Dr. Vin Gupta, a practicing pulmonologist who serves as a medical reservist with the U.S. Air Force. “Her promoters say that her biggest qualification is that she almost became a doctor and decided she didn’t want to be. If that’s her qualification, she shouldn’t be the nation’s doctor.”  

Under Frequently Asked Questions in her newsletter, Means states that she only considers sponsors that are “mission-driven brands that support root-cause human health, human empowerment, free-thinking, spiritual development, and/or soil and environmental regeneration.” To partner with a brand, she requires “transparent sourcing” of ingredients, “no industrially refined seed oils, no refined grains, no ultra-refined sugars” and other nutritional requirements. (The newsletter states she is not currently accepting sponsor or partner relationships.)   

But a 2025 AP investigation and a Public Citizen report found that she failed to consistently disclose, as the Federal Trade Commission requires, that she had an affiliate marketing relationship with a number of the brands she promoted online and sometimes got paid a percentage of sales when consumers purchased products through links she provided. 

The HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon did not respond to specific further questions about Means’ partnerships with the brands she promoted online, and whether she’d failed to fully disclose those to her followers. But he says, “It is a shame that Rolling Stone is not looking into the big pharma donations given to Senators serving on the HELP committee.”  

At the confirmation hearing on Feb. 25, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) introduced Means, saying she was “poised to shift us from reactive sick care to proactive health care, emphasizing metabolic health, to truly make America healthy again.”  

While Means smiled broadly, looking relieved, as friendly Republican senators posed softball questions as to her goals for America’s health and what inspired her work, she tussled with Democrats — and even some Republicans, including the committee chairman Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) — over multiple issues: her lack of an active medical license; her previous endorsement of psychedelics; allegations that she had not fully disclosed her financial interest in some of the products she was promoting online; and previous unfounded claims she’s made about vaccine harms, including tweeting that administering the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine is a “crime.”    

Throughout the hearing, she refused to whole-heartedly endorse the use of vaccines, in an apparent effort to not contradict her prospective boss, Secretary Kennedy. 

“Do you believe that there is evidence that the flu vaccine prevents serious disease and prevents hospitalization and death in children?” Sen Tim Kaine (D-VA) asked her.  

“I believe that all patients should talk to their doctors,” Means stated. 

When Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), in detailed questioning, accused her of failing to transparently reveal her financial stake in sales of products that she had promoted online, Means returned repeatedly to the notion that she would not be taking compensation from companies while in office, and had been cleared by the Office of Government Ethics. But as several senators pointed out, that did not address past conflicts of interest or instances in which she’d endorsed companies with allegations of unsafe products.  

“You are railing against pharmaceutical companies that you say are advertising…products that mislead the public, and yet you’ve received compensation from companies [accused of selling unsafe products] and you’ve promoted them in your newsletter” Senator Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) pointed out.  

Reached after the confirmation hearing, Sen. Alsobrooks tells Rolling Stone that her vote will be an “absolute no” and that the hearing only deepened her concerns. “The surgeon general has to be trustworthy. Parents and families have to be able to trust she has basic integrity.”