The author's experience teaching at all-girls schools revealed patterns of competitive starvation (e.g., pupils taking a single lettuce leaf) and self-harm (e.g., cutting one's own skin), where only one form of self-harm seemed to predominate at a time and spread rapidly among small groups.
Historically, social contagions are especially common among teenage girls, with numerous precedents such as the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 (girls seeing demons), medieval dancing plagues (impacting young women), German schoolgirls involuntarily shaking hands (1892), and a medieval Swedish village where girls inexplicably began to limp.
The Rise of Gender Identity as the Latest Social Contagion
The author identifies the latest social contagion in the Western world as girls identifying out of their femaleness, often through claims of being trans or non-binary.
There has been a dramatic increase in referrals to the NHS's Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), rising from 250 referrals (mostly boys) in 2012 to more than 5,000 referrals (mostly female) by 2021.
In this episode, Dr. Casey Means, a physician trained at Stanford University School of Medicine, an expert on metabolic health and the author of the book, Good Energy, discusses how to leverage nutrition, exercise and environmental factors to enhance your metabolic health by improving mitochondrial function, hormone and blood sugar regulation. We also explore how fasting, deliberate cold exposure and spending time in nature can impact metabolic health, how to control food cravings and how to assess your metabolic health using blood testing, continuous glucose monitors and other tools. Metabolic dysfunction is a leading cause of chronic disease, obesity and reduced lifespan around the world.
The Global Metabolic Health Crisis
The latest research indicates that 93.2% of American adults have suboptimal metabolism.
Metabolic dysfunction underlies nine of the ten leading causes of death in the United States.
Chronic disease rates are worse, and life expectancy is lower in the United States compared to other high-income countries, despite higher healthcare spending.
This crisis is spreading to other countries that adopt the Standard American Diet and Western lifestyle norms.
Current healthcare systems are criticised for their focus on downstream symptoms and isolated specialties (siloing conditions), rather than addressing the underlying root cause of metabolic dysfunction. This approach is seen as profitable but ultimately failing to improve health outcomes.
The "Trifecta of Bad Energy": Root Causes of Dysfunction
Metabolic dysfunction is rooted in a "Trifecta of Bad Energy": mitochondrial dysfunction, chronic inflammation, and oxidative stress.