Tuberville Speaks with President Trump’s Surgeon General Nominee Casey Means

WASHINGTON - Today, U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) participated in a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) hearing for the nomination of Casey Means to be Medical Director in the Regular Corps of the Public Health Service and Surgeon General of the Public Health Service. During the hearing, Sen. Tuberville and Dr. Means discussed the importance of training medical professionals about nutrition and the positive effect healthy dietary standards will have on combating chronic illnesses.

Read Sen. Tuberville's conversation below or watch on YouTube or Rumble.

TUBERVILLE: "Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Means, thanks for being here. Congratulations on expanding your family. And I know it's an exciting time for you. I also want to thank [the] Assistant Secretary of Health, Dr. Brian Christine, for being here. Thank you for your service. Dr. Means, I've listened to you and your brother, Calley, and I know he's here. I don't know how many tens of podcasts I've listened to, I learned a whole lot. Because I grew up in the health business. As a coach [for] 35 years, it was all about nutrition. So, the question I wanna ask you is, how do we get around this? I talk to people in the health care business, and in the medical field when we train our doctors, we don't teach anything about nutrition. Everything's about a 'priority.' And those priorities are fine. But we need to teach our doctors and nurses about nutrition, about what to put in their body. This epidemic we have going on of chronic disease as we've all talked about is out of control and getting worse. So, how do you prioritize that?"

MEANS: "Thank you so much, Coach. And I really, really enjoyed getting to know you throughout this process. Thank you. This is so key, what you're talking about. Reforming medical education to focus on root causes. And one of the key root causes, modifiable factors of chronic disease is nutrition, as we all know, there has been incredible momentum already in the administration towards making this possible starting with the dietary guidelines for America, which came out about a month ago. This is the first time we've had a full throated, denunciation of ultra-processed food. And I think this is historic. It's historic when the federal government says that out loud.

What that is going to do is impact medical education. It's going to impact procurement regulations for billions of meals served and paid for by federal dollars every year. We're gonna see real food, more real food, less ultra-processed food going into the national school lunch program, prisons, hospitals, and other federally funded organizations. This, I think, it's a point that gets lost a little bit, that by just changing the dietary guidelines, it is going to trickle down into billions and billions of healthier meals for Americans. So, I think that's step one.

I think, secondarily, we've got Dr. Marty Makary, an absolute hero who is approaching the GRAS loophole-the 'generally recognized as safe' loophole-through the FDA. So, this is a program where companies have essentially been self-reporting the safety of the ingredients that they're putting in their foods with very, very little oversight, which has led to literally thousands of chemicals in our food system that we don't know what they are or what they're doing to our body. By addressing this loophole and starting to have much more scrutiny about what's going into our food, this is going to trickle down to affect medical education, affect culture, affect what companies are putting in the food. The zeitgeist is going to shift about a lot of this because we're gonna start to have transparency about what is even in our food system.

Additional things are happening that are just incredible around food. There was just $700 million put forward towards regenerative agriculture. So, we're gonna have more investment in research and studying of soil health, water quality, nutrient density of food, and how that's affecting our health. That's gonna trickle into medical education. There's a whole-person health initiative at the NIH that's being put forward by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who's doing an incredible job. That's gonna study the systems biology perspective of the body, not isolated silos, but whole-body health. And when we look at the body as a system like that, nutrition has to play into it. So, this is just, you know, four or five of some of the stones that are being moved right now that all will lead to nutrition being a bigger part of our healthcare system. I think where I can help on that is elevating the work that's being done [by] having conversations again across the whole medical community to help us in a really positive and unifying way move towards a more root-cause approach to health."

TUBERVILLE: "You think that will be a hard item to push in our medical schools about nutrition? It shouldn't be."

MEANS: "I've had conversations with a number of deans of medical schools who are very, very passionate about this issue. They want to change. It feels hard because we have this behemoth healthcare system that operates a certain way. But right now, there's cultural momentum, there's political will, and I think the time is now to make generational changes that are gonna have a huge impact on all Americans. And I also think it's an issue that all of us can work on together. It's non-controversial. It's positive. It's unifying. And I think that's what we need right now for Americans."

TUBERVILLE: "It's all about educating people. And sometimes people don't wanna be educated, but I think the surgeon general and our whole Department of Health and Human Services, I think everybody's on board with that. And if we do that, what Senator Sanders was talking about-the $5 trillion a year we spend-we can't afford to do that anymore. I mean, we have to stop, and then the root cause is education. We have to educate people. Thank you very much."

Senator Tommy Tuberville represents Alabama in the United States Senate and is a member of the Senate Armed Services, Agriculture, Veterans' Affairs, HELP and Aging Committees.

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