Short clip from Ben Greenfield’s podcast featuring Sami Inkinen warning that unsupervised prolonged water fasting (e.g., 7–30 days) can be dangerous—especially for metabolically unhealthy patients or those on hypoglycemic or hypertensive medications—and that claims about fasting often outpace published evidence. The speakers advise medical supervision and reference a longer piece by Dr. Phinney summarizing evidence and risks.
Hey, this is Ben Greenfield. I thought you'd like this little clip of my latest podcast.
So I really never fast. And this is something that we have to address with a lot of our patients, vertahealth patients, because people find all kinds of stuff on the Internet and this is sort of another reasonably hot topic by people who want to improve their metabolic health. There's a lot of fasting chatter going out around and it's a little bit like exogenous ketones, that the claims are way ahead of published evidence. And certainly for people who are metabolically unhealthy and are perhaps on hypoglycemic or hypertensive drugs, these type of seven day or even I've seen these 30 day water fasts and I'm not kidding, what I'm going to say, this is serious, is very dangerous. It can be extremely dangerous. So we are very careful with our patients, most of whom are very sick, when they come in, that they should not be playing around with water fasting for a number of reasons. And my co founder, Dr. Phinney wrote a pretty long piece where he referenced all the published evidence around fasting and sort of highlighted the dangers.
If you enjoyed this clip, you should check out the whole episode and a host of other topics over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing day.
