How To Reverse Type II Diabetes, Create Billion Dollar Companies, Win Triathlons With A Fraction Of The Normal Training Time & Much More: The Sami Inkinen Podcast

Oh, hey, what's up? It's Ben Greenfield. Any alcohol fanatic or cocktail connoisseur or wine smellier would flip if they saw the type of drinks that I drinky drink at night. I just flew in from Boise where I was racing the Spartan race down in Boise. And I'm here in my office this evening recording commercials. And as I'm prone to do when I'm working in my office at night, I vape a little bit of organic tobacco and sometimes I'll blend some herbs in with that and some essential oils. I've got this fantastic little vaporizer called abuda da Budda and I drink a little cocktail before dinner. Right now I'm drinking a sauvignon blanc that is poured over ice, blended with, well, not blended with, but just topped with a little bit of sea salt. B propolis, half a can of Fit Aid and an electrolyte tablet. I also like to take my Fitvine wine, the organic biodynamic wine that I drink, and I'll like cut that half and half and I'll put some ice in there, some elderberry extract, some Kona black salt, another electrolyte tablet. I do weird things to my drinks. I will admit I have this weird, weird kind of infatuation with bastardizing alcohol. Anyways, though, my guest on today's show is way more intelligent than I am when it comes to nutrition. And he's also just a freak of an athlete. You're gonna, you're gonna dig him. Sami Inconen. I've known the dude for years and he, he's brilliant and he's fast. Freaking fast. Amazing athlete, talented guy.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, once it became clear to me that, hey, there's, there's an alternative evidence based and very effective way to treating, not just treating, but reversing type 2 diabetes. I just got so mad. I was like, I have to start this company. 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, 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.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield, power Speed, mobility.

Balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield and I've got a pretty crazy cat on the show today. I actually ran into this guy for the first time back in my triathlon days, back in my Ironman days. He used to kick my butt. He used to kick everybody's butt. He'd show up to the races on like a minimal training, eating macadamia nuts in full ketosis back when nobody was really doing this and he would dominate. I actually interviewed him on a podcast several years back, back in the day when I was doing triathlons more and we did a whole podcast on how to maximize fitness with minimal training time. And we talked about how to train for Ironman triathlon with about 10 to 12 hours per week. He revealed some of his top swim sessions and run sessions and cycling sessions. I could save you tons of time. He talked about his self quantification methods, what he e eats. And it's been several years since I'm having since I've had him on the show and he's been up to quite a bit since that time. His name is Sammy Incan and you may have heard of him. He's the CEO and the founder of a relatively new San Francisco based company called Virta Health, which is a company that is attempting to reverse type 2 diabetes. And he's also an active investor in a whole bunch of different human health and human performance companies. He also was a co founder and the COO and the president of Trulia, which he eventually sold for about 3.6 billion. So the dude knows how to make money as well. He's a good businessman. He also rode across the Pacific Ocean. Yes, the entire Pacific Ocean from California all the way to Hawaii, unsupported with his wife, I believe, also doing like the whole like low carb, no carb thing. So he's got a great website that I'll link to in the show notes along with everything else that we talk about. And you can access today's show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Sammy2 as in BenGreenfieldFitness.com SammyTheNumber2 so Sammy, welcome back, dude.

Hey Ben. And thanks for inviting me back. Obviously I didn't embarrass you too much last time.

Yeah, well, you actually you interested a lot of People with your crazy training methods and actually, I know we'll kind of delve into your current minimalist fitness routine later on in today's show. But I gotta ask you first, man, like, what was up with that crazy rowing adventure that you did from California to Hawaii?

I wanted to test if my marriage was built to last. I was gonna say, I'm happy to report we are still married. And after the row, we also managed to produce two little girls, two little children. So it was built to last.

Oh, wait, so sitting down and rowing for copious periods of time does not actually affect sperm quality then, is what you're saying?

Well, correlation doesn't prove causality, but we got pretty lucky and here we are. But yeah, joking aside, it was definitely part adventure. But what I also wanted to prove and show to the world. So this was 2014, and we started planning very late 2013 that you really don't need to be sipping sugar or sugary drinks or sports products to do 30 minutes or 1 hour jog or workout. And I kind of got angry. How much of this crap is being marketed to kids and juniors who start doing some sports. It's like if you go, if you walk out of your door, you better be drinking. I'm not going to say a brand, but some sort of a sports drink.

Oh, you can totally, you can totally say brands. We talk about Gatorade, we talk about Power Bar, we talk about Clif Bar. I'm sure they all, they all love us. And we've actually talked about this a lot on the show before that, you know, it is a myth that you need completely topped off glycogen stores to go out and frickin, you know, run up a hill with your dog.

Exactly. And from all the populist science and surrounding anecdotal evidence, it was clear to me that I, sugar and related or sugar filled products is sort of public enemy number one now that we've gotten rid of tobacco mostly. And so what we wanted to prove with the raw was you really don't need all that crap to exercise an hour or exercise for 18 hours a day, or in our case, exercise 18 hours a day and 45 days in a row. So that's what we wanted to show. We wanted to show that you can exercise basically as much as running two marathons a day. That's how much the total workload, or if you measure it, how many calories you put in today, you would need. And we want to show you can do that with no sports products, no sports drinks, no Sugar and in fact, practically very few carbohydrates either.

Yeah, that's, that's actually what I was going to ask you, Sammy, is when you say no sugar, do you actually mean like no starch or do you mean no, like, you know, fructose and maltodextrin and glucose and sports drinks and things like that?

None of that. And so practically speaking, we were only eating real food and there was zero starches. And the only, I'd say the only carbohydrates we got during the row were from dehydrated vegetables. We had some trail mix, which is mostly nuts, but most of the food was, you know, dehydrated beef, olives, olive oil, macadamia, nuts, lots of nuts. So, yeah, there were no sports products, no maltodextrin, no gels, no bars, no drinks. And we kept going for up to 18 hours a day, probably on average 16 hours of work roaming per day per person. And went from California to Hawaii, took 45 days, three hours. Broke the speed world record for two person boats. So apparently we weren't slowed down by the fact that we didn't have any Gatorade.

Wow, that's crazy. I mean, like, I could see, and I know some people will probably jump into the comments section and mention this, like, you know, the body can take, for example, some of the odd chain fatty acids from like, you know, what you'd find in animal meat and convert some of that into, into pyruvate. And that could potentially be used to, you know, form glucose, like via gluconeogenesis or some of the backbones from fats like the glycerols could potentially be used for glucose to give you that little bit of carbohydrate that would allow for fat to burn in the flame of the tiny amounts of glucose that it does need. But regardless, that's a pretty hefty adventure to do on dehydrated vegetables and nuts and a little bit of animal meat. And in terms of your actual volume, like your, your training leading up to that, what, what were you doing to get ready to do the equivalent of a couple marathons a day?

Well, first of all, I have no rowing background. My wife doesn't have rowing background. We don't even have sailing background. So it wasn't like we were ocean experts either. The preparation and the physical preparation was just about six months, little one, I'd say five to six months. So we started in January and we pushed off in June, so about six months. And I did not train more than I think 10 hours a week. And what might be surprising is we did not row three hours a day, six days a week. So the training was primarily two things. I'd say three different types of things. One, weightlifting. So I did a fair amount of pull ups, front squats and deadlifts. So that was one. And the purpose of that was to strengthen all the shoulders and joints and muscles and things that you need in rowing and rowing motion. And by the way, ocean rowing is pretty different from flat water rowing in expected waves and things. And it's not small sailing, it's kind of like a boxing match of the time. So that was one so pheromone of weightlifting, maybe two or up to three sessions a week and then two. I did fair amount of high intensity rowing on an erg. So concept two, which I bought not very expensive from Amazon, two to three sessions a week. And then thirdly we did one outside row per week and that was anywhere between two to four hours. So that was kind of long, slow on the water just to get a few more hours, but that was pretty much. And then you know, I had a little bit cross training, running here and there, a little bit swimming there, a little bit biking there. But the core training was really weights intensity rowing and then one slightly longer rowing session per week.

Yeah, it sounds actually kind of similar to your triathlon training. When I talked to you about your triathlon training back in the day you were doing like really short, highly intense sessions on the computrainer. You're doing some hill sprints and I think you're mostly doing like 50s and hundreds in the pool for something long, like a 10 hour day or in your case like at eight and a half hour day for, for Ironman. And it sounds like you did something similar to this. So like a concept to rowing workout for you, like a high intensity rowing workout to get ready for a long row from California to Hawaii. Well what would that look like? Like a high intensity concept to work out?

Uh, I did two types of things. So one was sort of VO2 max plus, so sort of 10 times one minute, pretty much max. And then one to two minutes very easy in between and a little warm up, a little cool down. So that's you can do that in well under 40 minutes. And then another one would be more tempo, so sort of just below threshold, six times five minutes or something like that. So those were the two typical workouts that I did during the week as an intensity workout.

So basically like one short high intensity, like, like minute long efforts and the Other one was, was more like 4 to 6 minute long efforts.

Yes, yes.

Nice. I like it. So you're. So you're kind of targeting more like lactic acid tolerance, like, and with a shorter effort and more VO2 max, those.

Longer, longer tempos, the intensity is pretty low. Obviously, when you're exercising 18 or 16 hours a day, the more. The most important thing is that your body is strong, that you don't have injuries and overuse. Injur, we went in fresh because we didn't grind three, four hours a day for seven hours a week. And then we did a fair amount of lifting. And I think that lifting is quite important, that your joints, the muscles, your soft tissues are very strong. So when something unexpected happens, you know, you don't lose your arm or your shoulder in the first wave.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And people, people always ask how it's possible. And I even talk about this in my book, how there's two different pathways to achieving mitochondrial density. There's the AMP K pathway and the PGC 1 Alpha pathway. And one is dependent upon extremely high intensity training that allows you to get to your goal, perhaps at a higher risk of injury and more trips to the pain cave, but allows you to get just as much mitochondrial density as the other pathway. That's more like the long aerobic chronic cardio sessions. So, yeah, I mean, you obviously have done a very good job tapping into the fast high intensity pathway and paired that with, you know, kind of like almost paradoxically. Right. Because we assume it's so glycogenic, this whole like low carb or ketogenic type of approach, which is related. I want to talk a little bit about your fitness routine as well now, but first I want to talk about this whole virta health thing because that's really even more important, in my opinion. You're freaking trying to reverse type 2 diabetes. Tell me about this new company and what you're doing with that.

Yeah, so our mission is to reverse diabetes in 100 million people by 2025. And yeah, may sound ambitious and perhaps it is, but the background is I think most of your listeners probably know that type 2 diabetes is a massive, massive problem in America. There's about 30 million people and globally more than 400 million people. And you and me as taxpayers or through our insurance payments, we waste about $200 billion a year in America on diabetes. And so when I realized that the underlying cause for type 2 diabetes is insulin resistance, and that insulin resistance could systematically be reversed without surgery, without new drugs, without even exercise, and without Even necessarily losing a lot of weight. I thought this is kind of nuts. It's nuts that if you have advanced type 2 diabetes today, your options are insulin therapy or some other hyperclassemic drug or bariatric surgery. And I thought, this is just nuts. Why don't we create a protocol and treatment that's medically supervised and can be delivered anywhere through our own online clinic? Now that there has to be an alternative to these patients who are just being managed with these expensive medications with no light at the end of a tunnel, if you can systematically reverse this disease. So that's what we started 2014. So we're basically a treatment to reverse type 2 diabetes. We run a clinical trial. We've shown that it works. The results last past two years. So it's not some sort of a crash course, one month or three months, and the patients are very happy. So that's what we're trying to do. And if all goes well, hopefully diabetes is a thing of the past in the next 15 years.

Now, I've seen some interesting studies, Sammy, on like pancreatic cell regeneration in mice who undergo like, for example, fasting or calorie restriction. Is that what you're doing with virta or are you using like some kind of a fancy multimodal approach to diabetes? Like, what are you guys actually doing with the patients that you're working with?

There's basically two key parts into our treatment protocol. One is medication management, and in most cases that means pulling people safely and sustainably off of medications. And so that's one of the reason we are a licensed provider in all 50 states, because only physicians and licensed doctors who are full time employees can obviously do that and know how to do that safely. So that's one part of it. And then the second part of it is really the nutrition protocol. We don't perform surgery or develop new pharmaceuticals. And the nutrition protocol is highly individualized, but basically at the core of it is using individualized nutritional ketosis to reverse insulin resistance in a long term sustainable way. So those are the two key components and you need both those two. How do you manage medications? And how do you individualize something that can be very complex nutritional ketosis into basically any lifestyle and any kind of a metabolic health situation. And then we deliver that 100% remotely, which, again, as I mentioned, is a licensed provider in all 50 states. Obviously it's possible today because everyone has a smartphone, everyone has a computer. We send bunch of sensors to people so we can collect all the data that we need. But that's basically how it works. So if you are a patient, you should feel, and practically your experience is such that you have a doctor and a clinical team member that we call a coach, basically following you 24, 7 when you need help, when something needs to change, we intervene and give you the right guidance. But that's basic. That's the basic approach.

What do you mean when you say medication management?

You know, we've had patients who come in with more than 100 units of insulin. And insulin is a super potent hypoglycemic drug. So it gets your blood sugar down, which is part of the diabetes management. Once we start getting your blood sugar down, naturally, it is extremely dangerous if you still take insulin on top of that. In fact, you take insulin, you have a hypoglycemia and either coma, death in minutes, not hours. So you need to have a physician who knows how to safely titrate you off of insulin on an hourly or daily basis, depending on how quickly we have to do. So somebody has to do that. Somebody has to do somebody who knows how to do it, somebody who's legally allowed to do that and somebody who can do that safely. So that's an example. So in this case, if we have a patient who comes in with 100 units of insulin, somebody needs to say, okay, tomorrow morning you take 30 units off and then maybe 350 units off or whatever that might be. And of course that's individualized, but that's what it means. And then of course, you know, most people with type 2 diabetes or who had type 2 diabetes for a long time, they come with a bundle of chronic conditions. So most of our patients come in with a dozen or so medications. So if you are not a physician who really understands metabolic health, you have no idea which medicine you can touch and which you should not touch. And so people have hypertensive medications, they have lipid medications, they have blood glucose medications, they have inflammation medications, they have pain medication. Like it's, you know, how America we, we're treating these diseases by treating symptoms. So people come in like, you know, a bag full of pills and injections. So you can't just say, stop taking those and change your nutrition. That would be life threatening.

Yeah, yeah. It's actually very interesting that you're using this ketogenic approach in a medical model like this, because I've seen evidence on leptin sensitivity and insulin sensitivity, both improving on patients who are consuming a high fat diet, as well as fasting glucose and triglycerides and thyroid. But when it comes to insulin. Have you guys or has anybody looked into the mechanism of action? Like what's going on? Like are high blood glucose or high blood ketones somehow improving the expression of the insulin receptor on the cell surface? Are they just basically lowering blood glucose and that's resulting in better insulin sensitivity? Do you guys know what's going on?

We had a pretty good. So what's very clear is that insulin resistance is the primary underlying cause of type 2 diabetes. The mechanism of what causes insulin resistance is somewhat understood, but not fully understood. And the same applies to the mechanism that reverses insulin resistance. It's somewhat understood, but not fully understood. And we'll be publishing some papers and some editors around this topic. And it's kind of, it's weird to think about that we've been, we are dealing with a 200 billion plus dollar problem. We as a collective with society and science, we do not explicitly understand the mechanism that what causes insulin resistance. In fact, most of the world thinks it's just obesity. Obesity is the primary contributor, but that certainly is in it. What we have shown now, and we'll be publishing some of these results soon, is when we reverse insulin resistance, we can see that the insulin resistance itself gets reversed, not just lower glucose levels. So we measure. One of the things we measure is Homa ir, which can be calculated from fasting glucose and fasting insulin. And that substantially improves in our patients. But the mechanism behind that, we'll be publishing more information about that probably in the next 6 to 12 months.

Very cool. And you guys are seeing good results with your patients. This isn't just stuff that you're doing based on research. You've actually seen reversal of type 2 diabetes?

Yeah, absolutely. So what we've done is one, we've run a formal clinical trial of our own where we have almost 400 patients in the middle of America. We published first set of peer reviewed results already where we've shown that in majority of our patients we've reversed type 2 diabetes and got them patients off medications. And these patients are, you know, average age near 60, average BMI near 40, so these aren't, you know, fit. Ben Greenfields from Northwest this is the real deal. Like you take a patient who is kind of at the tail end of their diabetes suffering and we can pull or turn the clock back and reverse their disease. So we've already published sponsor results and there's half a dozen papers coming out this year and the clinical trial itself is past two years. So we have the data and practical experience to do this Very sustainably because that's the most important thing. And then similarly, we now treated patients in commercial setting throughout the country and replicated the same results. So it really works. And my goal is to make sure that every person living with type 2 diabetes, it should be as easy to prescribe the virta treatment as it is to prescribe insulin or bariatric surgery. And it should be covered by its runes.

That's so cool. You know, like I've done genetic testing with 23andMe and exported my results to a wide variety of different websites that will analyze your genetic results. And Prometheus was one of those, for example. And I actually possess a lot of the SNPs that place me at a higher than normal risk for type 2 diabetes, which influences my own decision in great part to continue to adhere to a lower carbohydrate, kind of like a ketogenic approach or a semi ketogenic approach. And you know, of course, as, as I know that you found, I think this was, and correct me if I'm wrong, like, like really your, your foray into like an interest in this type of approach was, was fueled by performance just as much as health. Am I correct? Like, like you were, you were using this type of approach back in your days of, of racing triathlon.

Yeah, absolutely. And my wake up call to realizing that insulin resistance is something that you might be dealing with even if you're lean was completely accidental. It happened to myself and that was really the aha moment to even start for the health. And so what happened to me was 2011 I won the world championships in triathlon in my age group. And then 2012 I did my fastest Ironman which was 8, 8 hours 24 minutes. And simultaneously I found out that I was pre diabetic and.

Oh, you did? I didn't realize that.

Yeah, yeah. So I thought this, this is nuts. It doesn't make any sense. Like how can I know what my body fat was? But you know, you know, like you're pretty lean when you're doing an 8 hour 24 minute Ironman. And I thought this just doesn't make any sense. And I started researching and reading published research and this is how I ended up meeting with Dr. Steven Finney, who's now my co founder at Virta and our chief medical officer. And that's how I found out that oh wow, insulin resistance is something that you can become even if you're lean, even if you exercise, and that you can actually reverse insulin resistance without all these things that we think are needed, which is bariatric surgery or even more exercise or even more dieting. So that's how I ended up becoming very interested in this topic. And then once it became clear to me that, hey, there's an alternative evidence based and very effective way to treating, not just treating, but reversing type 2 diabetes, I just got so mad. I was like, I have to start this company, I have to make this work because it makes economic sense, it makes sense for the patients. And if we can do this at scale, we'll be saving so much money that who knows, maybe we even, even have a lower tax rate in this country.

Yeah, you're doing a lot of good for people. How'd you, how did you find out that you had pre diabetes? You're just doing like a, like a blood glucose monitor?

Yeah, I was. To your earlier second part of your question, you were doing this for performance reasons. I was tracking my fasting blood glucose practically on a daily basis. And initially I was like, well, you know, if it's 115, 110 consistently doesn't really mean anything, but that's pretty high. I realized that I'm, I'm totally pre diabetic and insulin resistant. And you know, I was doing that as I was testing how my blood glucose reacts to different sports foods while I'm exercising. So that's how I figured out that I'm metabolically actually pretty unhealthy. And then I had high blood pressure and I had all the kind of, I had all the markers of metabolic syndrome without being overweight and obese or having much extra body fat at all. And so that was kind of my wake up call myself.

You still do a lot of self quantification, like your website samyankonen.com, a lot of times you've posted different experiments that you've done things you've tested on yourself. Have you been up to anything recently when it comes to self quantification? Any devices that you're playing around with or any experiments that you've done in your body that you've gotten interesting data from that you, that you think would be of interest to the listeners?

Well, most of my time these days goes to building and scaling vertical health and then trying to take care of these two little girls that we have.

But are they, are they twins?

They're not. We have a two and a half year old and a half a year old. So. Okay, you know, full handful, Full handful. So I haven't done anything particularly crazy. I think my sort of main routine is I am a patient of the Virta Clinic myself, so I track certain things that my doctor and coach here can see all the time, which is mainly glucose and blood ketones. And then every, I would say, three to six months, I do a comprehensive metabolic health panel blood work. Now that I know what I'm doing, the good news, bad news is really nothing changes. It's all good. And so probably nothing too super exciting there. I would say more reason than what I've tested out of curiosity is exogenous ketones, which we can talk about if you want. And then probably the most valuable measurement tool that I use, and it really isn't a measurement tool, is I try to pay a lot of attention to my energy level and my mood when I wake up and then during the day. And I find that that is a way more powerful leading indicator than any kind of, you know, hormone levels. So comprehensive metabolic health panel from blood. I don't, I just really see any change in my blood work, but I see daily, weekly, monthly change in kind of how I feel, and then I adjust my rest and training accordingly.

Right, right. So you mentioned exogenous ketones. That's obviously something that is the relatively new craze in the supplement industry. Ketone esters and ketone salts. And I've done some podcasts on them in the past. But I'm curious, what's your experience with them?

Well, first of all, personally, I was just. I was just curious because now there is this quote unquote crazy ketogenic diet, which clearly is becoming the next fad. Or maybe it already is. I would say so. So of course, in America, everybody smells money and says, well, if it's about getting your ketones high, why don't you drink or eat them? That must be a great way to do that. So I've just experimented myself. Just out of curiosity, on a more objective level, I would say one, I think the claims are way ahead of any kind of published evidence of science. So what you might read from a company trying to sell this stuff, be aware, I would say that's one, and then two is from a more practical perspective, our liver can crank up, well, more than 100 grams of ketone bodies per day for free when you just eat the right stuff. And so if you look at from that perspective, you might need to pay, depending on what kind of supplements you might be using, several thousand dollars per month to get the same amount of ketone production that your body can literally do for you for free.

Right. Well, when you're saying several Thousand dollars per month. You're talking about, like, these. These ketone esters, like companies like Human and, you know, Dr. Veach's laboratory have come out with that are like $30 a serving. Is that what you're referring to?

Yeah. Some of these products that, you know, you can buy from Amazon or somewhere, when you just look at the price and how many grams of ketones you're getting when you Compare it to 100 or 100 plus plus plus cramps that your liver can crank out every day, right?

Oh, yeah. So you're saying not even like ketone, just like the regular ketone salts, like, even the less expensive products, your liver can make a copious amount of ketones compared to what's in those.

Massive, massive. So I think that's one thing. Just from a practical perspective, keeper of mind, and then from a health perspective, I think the area that is. It's worth remembering that we need to remember that if the body is in ketosis, yes, you can measure blood ketones of urine acetones, and that's just one thing to measure. But the fact that your body is in ketones, is in ketosis doesn't necessarily mean that that's the only thing that's happening that's giving you the health benefits. And so by just increasing your blood ketone levels by drinking or eating these ketone salts or esters doesn't necessarily mean that you're actually producing all the health effects, because body is a complex biological system. In order to get to ketosis, you have to lower glucose intake or carbohydrate intake, and that alone has a whole other set of pathways that are being affected in your body. So I'd just be very careful that since we don't have the evidence yet, don't just try to optimize one thing that can be measured, because that may be completely irrelevant or slightly irrelevant for the metabolic health effects that you get while you're in nutritional ketosis. And the example to think about is, you know, 30, 40 years ago, there was only one thing we could measure or one thing that we could easily measure in blood was cholesterol. So we said, wow, we can measure cholesterol, we can see cholesterol levels. And now we have this thing heart disease. And when cholesterol is high, people tend to get heart disease. So now let's jump from that and say we just need to get cholesterol down. So let's start eating food that doesn't have cholesterol. And obviously now we know that that is a completely wrong Hypothesis. Yeah. So I would just be careful about that. That you say, oh, I'm in ketosis, I have high ketone levels, so why don't I just drink more ketones so I get even higher levels? That's one little piece of the puzzle. And if you don't know the rest of the puzzle, you may really potentially even cause harm to yourself. Now, that being said, it's completely possible that there will be therapeutic use cases for exogenous ketones. I just don't think the science is there yet. Maybe it could be for medical use, maybe it could be for performance reasons, military, who knows? But I think it's pretty early innings.

Interesting. Do you take any supplements?

Honestly, I literally take nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Really? So you're not, you're not like, like via verta health? Like, you guys. Do you guys do any like, calorie restriction Mimedx, like metformin or anything like that?

We don't. In fact, all our patients, like I said, one big focus is that we want to reverse type 2 diabetes for good, and it has to be sustainable. So we. One of the things we measure is hunger, and we want to make sure that people are. They may feel hungry, hungry, but then we encourage them to eat. So we try to avoid situation where people are actually hungry for sustained periods of time. I think the only thing I can think about that I've taken over the last, say, six months is magnesium. And I only take that if I've experienced any cramps, which really means that I haven't eaten the stuff I should have eaten. In terms of real foods, that probably happens once in three months, four months, five months. But that's the only thing I can think about other than that. And I would say caffeine is, is a. The only thing that I can think that I. I take on on an almost daily basis, and sometimes I have like a week.

I'm pretty sure caffeine doesn't count as a supplement. I think it's just considered like a part of the human bloodstream at this point. I'm pretty sure humans have evolved to where we just basically are considered to have caffeine as a permanent part of our cellular makeup. What about your diet? Like, I'm just curious, you know, for. For a guy like you, who's combining, you know, staying in good shape, doing a lot of these events, you know, rowing to freaking Hawaii, does your diet still look kind of similar to what you were doing when you rode to Hawaii? Like, lots of seeds and nuts and, and plants or I guess actually Sammy, what would be really interesting for folks is if you could walk us through if there is a typical day for you, like a typical day of eating for you.

Yeah. You know, Ben, this is the most dangerous question ever in the world. You go on record what exactly you eat. People think they eat a copy.

You can always make stuff up. You can be like, yeah, I have like a heirloom kale blended up with some kind of fancy organic tomato for breakfast. I mean, yeah. But no, seriously, what do you eat?

Well, first of all, on a high level, I, yes, I pretty much eat the same way as I've done for the last several years. But I would say on a high level, I just try to eat real food. And I eat when I'm hungry. I try not to. Well, I snack if I'm hungry in between meals, but I try not to get into the mode of snacking all the time because that's really a symptom of not eating something during the meal times. I guess, broadly speaking, I'd say breakfast. I'm not a heavy breakfast eater, but since I do all my workouts in the morning, I try to make sure that I always get something soon after the workout. And typically that is eggs or something like that that has some amount of protein. And then if I happen to have butter, I might put a little bit more that I'm not hungry immediately, so that's kind of breakfast. If I have a massive workout coming up, which is rarely, but I might do a long weekend ride, then I might have heavier breakfast of frittata, eggs and bacon, something like that. Lunch is typically, it's pretty vegetable heavy. Maybe there's some protein, so that might be like a salad, maybe there's a little bit salmon or something like that. But my lunch is usually pretty light. And then I'm probably a little bit hungry in the afternoon, so I might have a snack that could be almonds, macadamia nuts, some sort of a salami stick or something like that. And then dinner is definitely my largest meal and I get great majority of my calories from the dinner, I would say. And so it's pretty sad. Heavy. I love spinach, my saute. Mix it with, you know, parmesan cheese, some butter. And then my favorite protein is really it's either fish or eggs. I'm not a huge fan of red meat just for whatever personal taste reasons, but I like ground beef, so sometimes I mix that and then I might be. Might want something later in the evening, so I might have like full fat yogurt with Some macadamia nuts or coconut cream and coconut flakes mixed with some berries or something like that. That's kind of example of what I might eat. And it depends on if I exercise a lot. Then of course you're much more hungry and then you end up eating more. But I try to keep it as simple as possible and not really eat any kind of total packaged crap. I would say my only vice is I do drink protein drinks here and there. It's just so convenient, especially morning if I'm in a rasa after workout. I might just drink sort of a protein drink. Yeah, but that's probably the only. I don't eat any bars.

Yeah, man, protein drinks, it's like a fart in a can. Well, there's a lot of them that aren't that bad these days. But I used to do bodybuilding way even. I don't know if I ever told you this. Like, back before I did Ironman triathlon, I weighed like 40 pounds more, but it was just pure muscle. And I was sponsored by this protein shake company called abb and they would just send me these big aluminum cans full of protein, and I would basically eat those and canned tuna fish all day long. And I still cannot do a shaker cup and protein. It just brings me back to those disgustingly, literally just constipated, nasty gut bodybuilding days. So anyways, though, thethe other thing I was gonna ask you about was fasting. I mean, obviously, like I mentioned, we see intermittent fasting or fasting protocols is something associated with pancreatic cell regeneration in diabetes. Is that something for those reasons that you incorporate at all? Do you do any, like, weekly fasts or monthly fasts or yearly fasts or intermittent fasts or anything like that?

Well, I'll answer this tongue in cheek. I say I always fast between meals. Sometimes that's one hour, sometimes that's six hours, seven hours, eight hours. I never fast. Well, one should always ask the question, what does fasting mean? If it means fasting more than 24 hours, the answer is absolutely, I never fast. If it's. And, you know, I rarely. 24 hours goes between my meals, so I really never fast. And this is something that we have to address with a lot of our patients, vertahelp 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, 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 I like 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.

Really? Is that available online?

Yeah, yeah, it's online. I can, I can, we can make sure to put it into the show notes.

Yeah, if you send it to me, I'll put it in the show notes. So. So Dr. Steve Phinney is concerned about fasting.

Yes.

Interesting. Well, I, you know, I personally have noticed a lot of, a lot of positive benefits in terms of my hemoglobin A1C, my fasted glucose, my inflammatory markers and also even my, my gut health by doing what I do now, which is a weekly 24 hour fast, meaning from, and honestly that could be because it also forces me to have a really good day of rest and recovery. But from Saturday night at dinner until Sunday night at dinner, I fast. I don't eat anything aside from I'll do some bone broth and a little bit of coffee and tea. But I really feel fantastic. And also I think there's a spiritual aspect to it that a lot of people neglect because I'm not exercising because I just, I'm not comfortable exercising in a fasted state like that. I, I do a lot more like meditation and a lot more kind of like intro, introspective thought. You know, I'll go down to the sauna and I'll sit and do like candlestick meditation or I'll go for kind of a quiet walk outside in the snow. And you know, I kind of dig, I kind of dig having that weekly period of time where you like deny the body. Right?

Yeah. And so, and you know, one needs to always remember that if you're very healthy, you have a very good electrolyte balance, you are well fed and fueled and you don't have major metabolic health issues. Not eating for 23 hours or whatever that might be from one meal to another is probably, or very, very likely it's very, very healthy and safe. For someone like you. And then you take someone else who is metabolic, is not eating very well and magnesium is low and potassium is low and this and that and is on hypoglycemic drugs and hypertensive drugs and you do that exact thing that you said, which might be not just good, but it may be health improving for you. It may be very, very dangerous. So it's always good to remember these things. It's like you and me, we could probably just walk out of our house and run 26 miles today, although that's not how much I run typically. And it would be healthy. But you put someone else and say you have to run 26 miles, they might need knee surgery the next day. Right. So you always have to remember that.

Yeah, exercise. A lot of athletes forget this. Like, you know, crossfitters and people who listen to podcasts like this who are very physically active, like you and me, forget that exercise is a calorie restriction mimetic. Right. Just like ketones and metformin and fasting are all either calorie restriction or calorie restriction memetics. Exercise is too. And so athletes are already getting a lot of cellular apoptosis and a lot of the benefits of fasting without fasting. And of course we all know that you could take that to the extreme and just exercise too much. And like I mentioned, I've found benefit by forcing myself into at least one day a week of not exercising and also not eating that much. And it works out pretty well. But you know, fasting for the general population is different than fasting for a pretty serious athlete, which is what a lot of people listen to this show are.

Yeah, yeah. And so, and you know, it's also the alternative. What do you compare if you have a person who eats, you know, five bowls of Captain Crunch a day, five times a day, and then we would say, let's take one day a week. When you eat nothing for 24 hours, it's pretty easy case to make that blood sugar would probably come down, a 1C would probably come down and there would be some at least short term metabolic health benefits. If you take that message, five times a day, sugar load out of your body. The challenge is that something could go really badly wrong short term. And then for most people, fasting is a more of a. It leads more into a yo yo issues from a eating perspective, from a metabolic health perspective. For very few people it's a sort of sustainable approach. But again, this could be another two hour podcast with, with someone perhaps my scientific co Founder Steve Finney would love to have an entire podcast about fasting.

Yeah. Send me what he wrote on and I'll put a link to it in the show notes. I'm sure some other people have interviewed him about it too. I actually think my friend Jimmy Moore may have talked to him about it. So I'll hunt down some resources for people listening in and put them over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Sammy too. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Sammy the number two Sammy I also speaking of exercise as a calorie restriction mimetic, what does your fitness routine look like right now? Are you still doing the kind of minimalist fitness routine? Are you training for any competitions?

Good question. I was actually going to do an event or two this year. In fact, one is I'm doing ran so Race Across America in June in a four person team. So that's riding about 3,000 miles. That's probably going to take six to seven days from our 4% team. So I'm doing that and I'll I was going to do a couple of triathlons as well. So doing a little bit endurance racing this year. So that's my plan for the year. And so in terms of training, well, first I always try to think about what's my goal. And in this case I actually want to get into some sort of a endurance racing shape. And so I think about two things mainly. So one, and the most important thing for me is sort of the foundation of health. And to me the key things are sleep and nutrition. And a lot of people forget that when they're like oh, I want to exercise instead, do a marathon, do a triathlon. It's all about the exercise piece. But you know Ben very well this, that if you don't have a foundation of health, you just don't get that super compensation. So you need that sleep and right nutrition. So that's big part of my training that I get that Right. But then the second piece is the actual workouts. I really only have about hour and 50, 15 minutes each day between sort of 6 and 7:30 each day.

That's funny. That's like about what I've identified also for me is I've got about typically only 60 to 80 minutes a day that I can train.

Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of my time and within that window I do everything that I do. And it's pretty similar to our last conversation a couple of years ago that I do a couple of days of high intensity, one day of Sort of lifting, stretching, recovery. And then maybe there's one day a week, Saturday usually, which is sort of a long day. But the long day these days to me is two to maybe three, three and a half hour bike ride. It's not a six hour bike ride. So that's really my approach. And like this morning actually I run to pool. I swam less than 20 minutes and then I ran back to my house and did a couple of run intervals while I was running. So that was all in 70 minutes. So that's my typical kind of mid week workout.

Now what I've found though for me personally is like I've got a bunch of stuff going on in my office. Like I use like you know, standing workstation and a treadmill workstation and I've got like a kettlebell sitting here. And every time right now, because I'm training for the RKC kettlebell certification, every time I walk out of my office I gotta stop and do 10 kettlebell swings on each side. And you know, so I work little things like that and throughout the day. Are you using that type of approach as well?

I don't unfortunately. I do stand. I've become a standing desk advocate by accident, but that's pretty much the only thing I don't. We used to do some push ups before we started a meeting just for fun. Those who wanted to be participate. But now that we've grown a little bit more, I've become conscious that I don't want to be the crazy CEO who makes everyone feel offended. So less so. But that's a good idea. Maybe I should get the kettlebell or at least a pull up bar.

Yeah, yeah, word. It works well. It works out pretty well for me. You talked about strength training and how, how it really kept you in shape for rowing like that. I do a great majority of my strength training not as like a, a traditional strength training routine, but a lot of it's just like at little points throughout the day I'll lift. So it works out pretty well. So Sammy Virta Health is the name of the organization that you have founded. Dr. Steven Phinney is on your board. We'll link to some of his thoughts on the dangers of fasting. Maybe get him on the podcast at some point. I'll also link to our previous podcast about how to maximize triathlon success with minimal training time. Your website, which always has an interesting post here and there. And then for all of you listening in, it's going to be all@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Sammy2. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Sammy, the number two. So, Sammy, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show, man, and sharing all this stuff with us. I love what you're doing, your approach. I like that you're a badass athlete, but also a businessman who manages to juggle the two and do both very successfully. So good on you, as they say. As they say down under.

Well, thank you. Thank you. Too kind. And thanks for having me. And really enjoyed.

Awesome. All right, folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Sammy Incinen of Samiinkinen.com and Virtahealth.com signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

You'Ve been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.