Sami Reiss on the Deep-Cut Health Books All the Influencers Steal Advice From

A chat with the Snake Super Health writer about leaving veganism, why we should eat organ meat, and the countercultural argument for getting strong.

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Sami Reiss is the source code for a lot of the weirdo health stuff that I love reading about. For a long time he was the pseudonymous writer “Snake” behind the best deep-cut furniture newsletter anywhere. And he’s someone who, behind the scenes, all the editors at GQ loved to work with, someone we would tap to profile the late Italian architect Gaetano Pesce, or write about why vintage IKEA was suddenly cool, or even help us figure out what the best supplements really are. Now he’s expanding the Snake fiefdom and launching a new Substack called Super Health that, if you’re into HEAVIES, I highly recommend following.

I met up with Sami a few weeks ago on a sweaty afternoon in Carroll Gardens. After grabbing coffee, we walked across the street to the park to chop it up about health while some pigeons tried to steal my cookie. 

Chris: So when did you start getting into health stuff? When did your curiosity begin?

Sami: In high school I went vegan because of hardcore shit. Once I started doing that, I remember reading A Diet For a New America, which contained a lot of the plant-based health stuff that vegetarian people still follow today. Then my friends and I started doing bodybuilding when I was around 18. I was still vegan so I didn't gain any weight at all. No one knew what macros or any of that shit was back then, but I was lean and I had a six pack. 

I was also trying to get big—but big back then was probably Fight Club Brad Pitt, you know what I mean? 

I feel like we all wanted to look like Fight Club Brad Pitt.

Yeah. I couldn’t get there. I ate a lot of soy veggie burgers, which kind of messed with my mind. This was two decades ago in Canada, and those were like the only protein sources. I was eating a hundred-something grams of soy protein a day, which fucked me up. It was really bad. I found out I had a soy allergy, so I went vegetarian.

What kind of symptoms were you showing?

All that soy kind of made me anemic. It's this thing through my mom, a Kurdish thing where I can't have fava beans and all this other shit: no quinine, but I'm resistant to malaria. Soy is a cousin. I was eating so much of it that it made me sleepy. I'd get red cheeks and fall asleep every day. I had like low thyroid energy.

When did you transition back into meat?

This was around ‘05. I was vegetarian by then, eating a lot of dairy. Then I moved back home with my parents. My mom had a kosher house, so I couldn’t get any of the shit I wanted for protein. One day I was hanging out with a friend. He had a McChicken and I had a bite. 

That’s funny.

The next day, I told my dad and he was like, “I have a son again!” And then he made steaks. 

But before 2010, New York City was kind of the only place you could be vegan easily. So I was like, if I ever move to NY, I'm going to go vegan again. During the pandemic, I tried not eating any meat. I was eating a lot of fish and sardines. After a month it got pretty tough. 

I feel like the pandemic was license to just try all sorts of weird shit you wouldn’t normally do. I was talking to Laura Reilly about eating during the pandemic and we both realized we were keeping spreadsheets of natural wines, drinking way more than normal. 

So, I had this really crazy back surgery eight years ago. And for the first six months after, I went organic vegan again to cut down the inflammation, and that helped.

What really got me on this specific path was writing health and nutrition stories and doing Q+As for Inverse and GQ. I read this book Deep Nutrition by Kate Shanahan, which is sort of a seminal text, and Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, which was written by this dentist in the 1930s. It’s a little sketchy but it’s the best. 

As I was reading, I realized all the trad and carnivore accounts were just tweeting everything from those books in bite-sized pieces without proper context. Some of the stuff in there could be super dangerous. Like, there’s a line where Shanahan is like, “Oh, I can tell if someone is going to be good looking based on what they eat.” Straight-up phrenology shit. 

The gnarly truth is when it comes to bodybuilding, when it comes to the edge of fitness, that’s when things get sketchy, but that's when it starts getting correct. That's just kind of the way it works.

Edge of fitness is a good phrase.

So good. The edge of health. And so I read those books while I was recovering from this surgery. I was getting this laser stem-cell shock treatment on my spine every two weeks and shit. 

What was the exact injury?

I had this crazy herniated disc in my spine eight years ago, but the injury was sort of an accumulation of a lot of things. I went to this PT and he did an adjustment on me; it got really bad and I couldn't walk for a month, six weeks.

Jesus dude.

They thought I was going to be super paralyzed. They gave me a 50-50 chance. My girlfriend at the time didn't think I was going to walk. It was really bad. 

And then basically I emailed all these people, and I found out where to get raw dairy in New York. I started eating more red meat and fermented foods—just simple low gastrointestinal diet shit. And then the laser therapy stopped at the same time that I started eating a ton of raw dairy. So I don't know which one actually helped me, probably both, but I just started feeling a lot better. 

Yeah. 

But working out was always an interest of mine, aesthetically and everything. Even the weird little lane of hardcore that I was into, everyone was lifting, everyone was in shape, people had haircuts. It wasn't really punky.

What were the bands in that lane? 

Youth of Today, Cro-Mags, all the New York hardcore bands. You see these guys and the way they look, and it's almost surprising to think that they made art. I remember reading this zine when I was in high school, this really anarchist punk zine called Inside Front. They had this short column about why if you're punk or countercultural, you should be in shape. Like look at the Cro-Mags. They were in shape, which is good for defending yourself against police and shit.

I remember reading that and getting chills. It was this tiiiiiny little thing, but it stayed with me.

Everyone just looked cool. Everyone was jacked. And I remember I was working out with one of my friends, Mike, who was sort of the only vegan at the time. He was also jacked. And I was like, “I think I want to get tattoos, but I want to look like Cro-Mags. How do I start looking like them?” And my friend was like, “You gotta start doing bench press, dude.” So I just went to the gym at my college.

I’m circling some dudes in hardcore bands for potential HEAVIES interviews.

There's so much there. After college, I moved to Boston go to hardcore shows and hang out and sell “Yankees Suck” shirts. Everyone worked out like crazy. I went on tour with some of our friends in a band called Mental, and they brought a blender because you couldn't really buy protein shakes anywhere back then. You’d go to gas stations and you’d see like a PowerBar but those don't really have good macros. 

Walk me through the day of eating and working out for you now.

I get up around 8:30 or 9. I'll just have some water with some salt. It would be a lot better to get up earlier. There’s a thing where if you go to sleep too late, then you're sleeping when the light is out, and you get sort of less deep REM sleep. Like if you're camping and you go to sleep when it's dark out, you just get better sleep. That's the kind of thing I could improve on. 

After I drink water, I used to do the Ray Peat carrot salad, but now I do kind of a quick version of that, which is I have carrots in the fridge that are soaking. I'll have half of one or a bite of one. If there's pickle juice, I'll have a shot of pickle juice and then a shot of coconut oil, just 1-2-3 because I don't really like the apple cider vinegar taste. 

I have a courtyard in my building, so I go outside for a few minutes, touch grass or whatever. And then I’ll go lift.

Do you eat anything else for energy before the workout?

I'll intuitively eat whatever. I'll have some cottage cheese with some olives, usually five, six ounces. Maybe one of those Tate’s cookies to settle my stomach. There's no seed oils. 

Which Tate’s cookie do you get?

I just get the chocolate chip. They had a limited mint-chip one for a while. That was pretty fucking good, but I don't see it around anymore. I don't like the oatmeal ones as much, but if you look at the ingredients, it's just flour, sugar, eggs, oil, sugar. It's counterintuitive that they have them in bodegas and shit too. But I'll do that. I'll have a piece of cheese and a clementine, a little bit of coffee, and go to the gym.

What kind of workouts are you doing?

I started adding more calisthenics work, just to improve my full grip. I’d love to be able to get to a muscle up. And then I do stuff with a trainer. In the last six months, I've just started doing extra hamstring, Jefferson curl stuff, a lot of weird foot strengthening exercises. The trainer's more of a guy who programs stuff with my input. I don’t see him a lot. But I’ve started getting stronger again. I don’t do any spinal compression, there's no barbell work. Most of the stuff is unilateral. There’s some cable work, but it's everything just on one side. 

What do you eat after your workouts?

I'll have a shake. If I have raw milk in the house, I'll put that in there. If not, then kefir, Greek yogurt, berries, banana.

No protein powders? 

It's sort of this thing that I can't really do. I was doing eggs after the gym, but I don't do that anymore. I have a few hard-boiled eggs and other stuff like that a few hours later. If there's rice left over in the fridge, I'll have that. Or I'll have more cheese. 

What’s for dinner?

If it's just me at home, it's like ground beef with a little bit of rice, a little bit of kimchi or tomatoes or something, fruit on the side. And once a week, I'll get some organ meats and I'll just chop 'em up and I'll put that in there. I chop it up really fine. I don't get the ancestral blends or any of that. I'll buy half a pound of liver or heart, which I like a little better.

What’s the argument for including organ meat?

They're more nutrient dense. A lot more vitamins, a lot more copper. I think a lot more B-vitamins than there is in plain ground meat. Ground meat is also all muscle meat, which can affect your energy. Like after you eat a couple of burgers, you're just going to feel a little tired. Steaks are different because they have the connective tissues and they have all the fat. Organ meats just have a little bit more of all of that. 

Anyway, after dinner if I'm still kind of fixing, then maybe I'll have some ice cream, hit my protein macros. I don't know if I'm getting too deep here, but there's one argument that's like 150 grams of max daily protein for anybody. And that kind of works out to 0.8 for someone my body weight. 

We’ve been doing ice cream at my house too. My wife’s been making batches. 

It's the key to everything. I only buy the stuff without any emulsifiers or gums in it, like Haagen-Dazs, just the plain ones. There are a few new brands that don't have emulsifiers and are even kind of carnivore coded. But it's also a thing where I seem to only kind of go for it on really gnarly workout days or on days where I need extra calories and I'm just kind like I need to get more shit. Or in the winter I'll have it more. I know what, there's got to be some sort of explanation for it, but it's never even that much. It's literally a serving size. So one scoop.

So you have a hard time going to sleep early. What time are you usually getting to bed?

If it's a good day? Then 1 a.m. I'm like a night owl. I don't know. I just am. I like it. But all that stuff about sleep hygiene and shit, it's kind of true. I have the blue light blocker on my phone. 

Oh I do that too.

Yeah, it’s that accessibility thing where you turn on color filters. I did that to my laptop too. 

So tell me about Super Health and what you’re hoping to do with it.

I don't want it to be me talking to three other raw milk freaks. I think it's mainly just going to be: Yo, this is the way health works, and then just simple, simple shit. Like you need muscle, you need to move around. You need to move more than you need to lift, and you need to maybe eat more than you need to eat less. 

I don't want to write Super Health for, like, the elite. I want to write it for people who are already subscribing to Snake. A lot of fitness shit doesn't really work for people because everything that we get is from like bodybuilders. I see Super Health as something that could run in NY Mag and just maybe a few months ahead of a national newspaper. Very conversational.

Thanks as always for reading HEAVIES. Let me know who else I should talk to about their Feelgood Routine in the comments.