#244 From Stress Management to Nutrition: A Comprehensive Health Guide for Tech Professionals & Startup Founders With Christian Yordanov

0:00:02 - Mehmet
Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO show with Mehmet. Today, I'm very pleased to have with me Christian Yordanov. Christian, thank you very much for showing interest in being on the show, and the way I love to do it is I let my guests introduce themselves. 

0:00:16 - Christian
So the floor is yours. Thanks, mehmet. Yeah, my name is Christian Yordanov. I am a certified functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner, which basically means I am a health consultant. I help people with either improving their health and overcoming chronic health problems that are usually complex, or people that just want to be taken to the next level or the level above that, so people that want to optimize their health, longevity and, you know, mental performance. And I also have a couple of other aspects of things that I have of the health space that I have a big interest in. I've written one book on autism and children's health, and I have a couple of podcasts. One is about children's health and one is just my general Connective Minds podcast, where I interview awesome people, talk about health and all sorts of topics that interest me. So that's a little bit about me. 

0:01:16 - Mehmet
Great. Thank you again, christian, for being here and for the people who are now thinking I'm going to show with health. So I am a big believer in both physical and mental health, especially for tech people. By the way, christian has a background in tech, right, christian? Yeah? 

0:01:34 - Christian
Oh, yeah, yeah, so I've. Actually I've worked for multiple startups in various stages, from super early to, you know, pre-funding, to with another startup we worked I joined them before the seed round and I've also worked with another startup several years ago where the company was already doing 2 million euro in revenue monthly. So I've worked in various stages. I've worked as a information security, data protection and quality assurance consultant inside companies, as a contractor, as a full-time employee, you know, in telecoms, online gaming. So I've got quite a bit of experience in tech from my 10 years in the field. 

0:02:21 - Mehmet
Yeah, but you know, I think, christian, you did something which everyone who works in our space should do. You know like to go to this route sometime, because we discussed it one or two times, but I wanted again to have you with me today because I think it's something underrated when we talk about. You know health in general and then you know, of course, like mental health, physical health, well-being, all these things. Now, the first thing to start is because you have the background in tech and working in startups. What do you think are the major issues you know founders and you know technologists they face from health perspective when they work in these environments? 

0:03:17 - Christian
Oh, my God, such a good question. You know I was actually thinking about it this morning because if you didn't bring it up I was surely going to bring it up. I meant it's such an important topic. But the biggest issue is probably working too much, working too hard, which it's very difficult to tell a founder or, you know, an early-stage startup entrepreneur. You're working too much. You have to take better care of yourselves. They're up on the computer at 11 in the evening coding something or fixing something or doing something, but, yeah, definitely overworking too much. 

And what happens when you're at the computer a lot, working a lot? Well, you're sitting. That's sitting already is causing a lot of problems. More on the physical side of things, but, like you already said, it's mental health, physical health. These two are actually one thing. We just delineate them, as you know mental health, physical health, psychological stuff. It's convenient for academic purposes to compartmentalize things, but the body and mind are one body, mind and soul, as they say. So if you have already some type of impingement or imbalance in your physical body, it will translate into, for example, if I sit at the computer like I'm writing my next book right now, and I can easily sit at the computer for two hours straight just staring at it, writing or thinking or reading, and then I'm like two hours later oh wow, my back is really tight and stiff and sore. So you get up now. You're less mobile, you're more likely to be cranky if you're in pain. So that's one major thing. 

The other thing is we are staring at blue light all day long and that is actually quite bad for the eyes and in general for the circadian rhythm. So I always use blue blockers at the computer, the yellow lens ones. They really help to reduce most of that harmful blue light. So for 50, 60 dollars or euros or whatever, most of us can solve that problem in 10 minutes by buying a pair. And then in the evening time, if I have to work on the computer, I never go without my red blue blockers. So the red lens blocks most of the blue light. So you can actually be at a computer In the evening time when it's dark. With these blue blockers, with the red lenses, you're actually Disturbing your circadian rhythm a lot less than you would normally. If you're just staring this blue light, you know it's much easier to to fall asleep. So that's another thing. The other thing I am also seeing a lot of people making this mistake. 

Now there's this big trend of people eating low carb because we're we're at the computer, we're doing intellectual work. We think it's not energy intensive. We're at the computer all day. So we think. I remember. 

One friend of mine told me I'm so lazy, I'm at the computer all day. I'm like what are you doing at the computer? Well, reading, writing, interviewing people, being on interviews. I'm like you're doing hard mental labor all day long. And then he told me I'm suffering from brain fog Recently. I'm like what are you doing with your life, diet-wise or everything else? He's like, well, I'm, I'm low carb, I'm trying to get into ketosis. I'm like that's your problem, right there. And he could, he couldn't believe that Using your brain is actually quite an energy intensive process. 

We're talking the brain is 2%, roughly, of your whole body's weight, but at rest it consumes 20% of the calories. So 2% of the body disorgan consumes one fifth of the energy at rest. So even if you're sitting on the couch a normal person of regular size and everything if you're just sitting on the couch or sleeping, you're consuming about five, six grams of glucose just for the brain every hour. So that's. That's roughly, let's say, about a hundred and thirty five grams, a hundred and forty grams in a twenty four hour period. So if you go low carb let's say, 50 to 100 grams a day You're already not even getting enough glucose from your food To just to meet your brain's demands. So what happens then is the body will start making glucose on its own. 

It's very good at that, but that comes at the cost. It's it's an expensive process. It's much more expensive to convert something into another thing than to just take that thing in in its original form, right? It's like that with anything in the in the physical world. So to to do that, to to create this glucose, we actually get into a stress state. The body Increases stress hormones like cortisol, which everybody, I'm sure, has heard of, and this cortisol Breaks down our muscle tissue, our bones, our skin and even our organs to create this glucose. 

So when someone's coming to me and wants to optimize their brain function and their mental performance, one of the first things we look at is how much carbohydrate are you eating every day, and are you on one of these low carb diets? If they tell me yes, they are, then I was. If they're open to it. Of course I don't force anything on people, but I try to start in getting them to increase the carbohydrates and they generally tell me their libido improves, they have more energy for the gym, they sleep better, they're less strong out, strong up, you know, and Obviously their, their brain, their brain function improves because again, you're giving the fuel that your most energy hungry, energy intensive organ is craving. 

0:09:11 - Mehmet
Yeah, a lot of information. You provide a Christian to us now for some of the you know challenges you gave the you know the way, how, how we can fix it. So, for example, sitting you know they need to be moving more, like for the screen. You know you talked about the lances Diet. You know you mentioned couple. We'll come back, maybe also this. 

But I'm interested in stress, right, and the reason I'm interested in stress because, like, there is a miss or it's not a bit. Maybe it's a reality actually that everyone that works in tech and everyone's who walks in a in a startup, you know Stress is part of the formula, right. So, yeah now, but I look at some you know people who works in tech and I see them very happy. They are not stressed, you know so. And same for the founders. You see some founders, they take it in a more relaxed way. So how you advise to Fight against stress. So how? Of course, maybe we cannot Reduce it to zero, but we can reduce it, maybe from a scale of 10 to maybe two or three or, yeah, four, which is so what are some of the tactics that you can give to the audience regarding this? 

0:10:37 - Christian
Yeah, that's exactly right. So you, we will never escape stress. We will never. So many normal activities in life are actually stressful, right? So we, we have to think about how are we adding to our stress now If you, if you have a big project like a release coming up, let's say, in three months time or or in a month's time or a week's time Usually, the closer to that date, the higher the stress levels get, right. 

But If, if you already have this inescapable stress that you know it has to be done, this release must be done, this app must be released, or whatever. That is your, one of your main stressors. So the most important thing at that point is to not pile on Additional stressors, and by that I mean I already mentioned one. It's a huge one. It's Not doing crazy stuff like low carb diets or you know how some guys will. They work hard all day and then they'll. They'll maybe go to the gym or go run 10 kilometers or, you know, do a really crazy workout and it helps they say it helps to distress them, but actually what it's doing is it's adding more stress. And then you Things like if you have an argument with your significant other, if you have a small baby. These are additional stresses. So you have to think about what are the main stressors in your life. So for a startup founder, or from my experience I've been in a startup and you know I have a small child and then I have, like my company Accounts are due, so I have to get that done. Then I have the stress of the work and then you continue. You continue listing them off and you start thinking what can I reduce? So if you're going for a run, you may want to make that Just a walk. If you're going for a crossfit session, you may just want to do an hour of just weights without without really being it being a crushing workout. If you're doing intermittent fasting let's say eight hours feeding, 16 hours Not fasting you may want to reduce that to to maybe 12 and 12, because in that non non feeding time you are running Most of that time on cortisol. Again, you're running on stress hormones. So these are very Fundamental things that one must Take care of before doing more advanced stuff. 

Now, when it comes to the more advanced stuff, there are some supplements that can actually help to reduce Stress at the field, physiological level. For example, what I really like we were on a trip last week with my family and I always know it's gonna be a lot of driving, which is which can be stressful in a new city. In the in the place will be usually there's a lot of very bright LED lights. There's a lot of things that you're not used to. So there's a lot of stress and One of us my wife or myself, will have to sleep In the same bed as our child because you know we can't leave her on her own in in a new room that she's never been in, right. So there's a lot of stress, is there? So Before bed I like to take extra magnesium glycinate and the. 

The form of that form of magnesium has actually shown to be much better absorbed than most others and it actually helps with sleep. Now I also take Glycine separately. It's an amino acid found in meat and animal products generally and protein in general, and glycine has been shown in studies that about 3-4 grams of glycine before bed Helps to improve sleep. So I take that and I also take it to improve the toxification. It's also good for that right. So that's one of one of my favorite supplements in my arsenal and it also helps. It's basically an inhibitory amino acid. So when you're, when you're stressed, you have the more excitatory Aspect of the nervous system and, in general, of the nutrients, the more excitatory ones are dominant. So when it comes to bedtime, I like to add the inhibitory nutrients. So, like I already mentioned, glycine and magnesium. Another really good one you can get it's GABA, which is Also an amino acid. It's called. The full name is gamma amino butyric acid. The full name is gamma amino butyric acid, gaba for short. And GABA is again an inhibitory Amino acid and slash neurotransmitter. So I like, for example, now that I'm writing my next book, I wake up at four in the morning or in the middle of the night, bursting with ideas. 

I sometimes even dream of what I want to write about. So my problem is I wake up in the middle of the night and I have so many ideas I want to get up and capture them or go and write Uh, or scribble something. So my problem is I wake up at 4 am and I can't fall asleep because of all this sort of excitement. So when I take a gram of GABA just before bed I so I did that last night at about About 9 30 in the evening, by 10 o'clock I I had to go to sleep. I went to bed at 10 o'clock like a little baby almost, and I woke up at 7 am this morning, bursting with energy, super happy that I slept long enough. And then I actually found that I was I all of that writing that I would have done from 4 to 7. Not only did I do all of that, but I I feel like I have more in me. So later on today I'll be able to write more. 

So that's another thing that I probably should have said earlier is a lot of entrepreneurs and professionals in general, or technologists, they completely disregard sleep and from there a lot of problems start. So these couple of supplements I mentioned, you know you would think they're so the how can they make such a big impact? But if you try a bit of glycein with some magnesium in the evening, with with dinner, and then a one or two GABA of 500 to one, 500 milligrams to one gram, man like it's, it's like sometimes it's night if someone's not been sleeping well how it can improve their sleep, just those couple of things they wake up the next day like call. I wish I could see like that every day. 

0:16:56 - Mehmet
Wow, you know this are very useful, you know, I would say formulas that you are giving to us today, christian, so um, so, so you, you mentioned sleep, so Other, any other thing that we can do, like if, like someone say, okay, I don't want to use Supplements like there, any other way to to fix sleep, because I know that sleep is very important For both the brain and the body. 

0:17:28 - Christian
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Well, I already mentioned a couple of things that can really help with sleep. So actually I had one client. She came to me because her daughter couldn't fall asleep. And her daughter was very young and I'm like that's not normal for a child of that age to not be able to sleep. So I examined the diet, the first thing and the first thing. I told her let's try this. Let her have one tablespoon of honey before bed and she was out like a light sleeping, no problem sleeping through the night. So this is something I want to go back to because it's so important and, again, very often overlooked. 

If you're doing intermittent fasting or you don't eat carbohydrates with dinner because you don't want to gain weight, you could be Doing yourself a disservice, because when you have your last meal, let's say an eight o'clock in the evening, for the next three or three, four hours You're processing those nutrients. Your liver will Fill up its glucose stores called glycogen. And then when you go to sleep, let's say 11, hopefully not, not much later than that Um, for the next couple of hours, the liver will keep your blood sugar stable by, by drip, feeding glucose into the bloodstream, but it will start running low. Not running low, but it will start getting depleted. When the glucose in the liver, the glycogen, starts to Go down that level, the body kicks into a process to create glucose called gluconeogenesis, and that's actually a stressful process. You need cortisol for that. That can actually mess up your sleep. So if, if someone is having trouble falling asleep or is waking up early in the morning or in the middle of the night and they can't fall back asleep things like that, usually it means it's it's either very high cortisol, or it could be parasites in some cases less often or bacterial sort of uh, dysbiosis. But um, with those people, one or two tablespoons of honey half an hour to an hour before bed can work wonders. So, uh, the most important thing is to make sure you're reading your carbohydrates in the evening, to not fear carbohydrates. 

Now I already touched on another thing is the blue blocker. So I I cannot go anywhere, like most of us. The first thing, one of the first things you do when you pack for a trip is, you know, your toothbrush, your phone, this kind of things right. So one of the first things on my list is to make sure I got my, my red blue blockers, because I always wear them one to two hours before sleep. The reason for that is, again, to not disrupt my melatonin production in the evening as much and to help me fall asleep. And I've done experiments when I was tracking my sleep with with a ring called the or ring. When I was wearing the blue blockers in the evening, my deep sleep was much better and I would sleep less and I would wake up. Uh, I'd sleep more and I would wake up less in the middle of the night. And then, if you like, traveling like you've been on a plane or somewhere in the city being exposed to blue lights, generally you will not sleep as well. So that that's a part of sleep hygiene. That's very important. And then the other, the other things that that I do, I like to do and I tell my clients or recommend to my clients to do, is the sleep environment. 

Before bed, I like to turn off all the normal lights around maybe 8 30 in the evening, and we have red light bulbs as well. So I turned the red led light bulbs which you can get for a few dollars off amazon right, they're super cheap and very easy to find. So we turned those on a couple of hours before bedtime to get the the ambient light level dark, right, I try to not use the phone. If I'm on the phone or the computer I always have the blue blockers. But that's another way to reduce because you have photo receptors in your skin, right. So that's another way to reduce the signal to your body that it's it's in daylight, because what, effectively, the problem we're trying to solve is that we are living in artificial conditions with, with a lot of light, so in the evening time the body is getting the signal that it's still daytime or the days are longer, like in the summer. So we want to be as close to to the the current rhythm of nature. 

So now it's getting to the winter time here in the northern hemisphere, so it's, you know, eight o'clock. We are starting to turn down the lights to mimic those conditions, right. So that's another thing I recommend to people. And then, of course, the other thing is just make sure that your room is nice and dark and nice and cool. You have comfortable, everything is comfortable. And you know, I always tell my clients if you can raise your bed, the head of your bed, by five centimeters or so, that actually helps with lymphatic drainage. So when you're sleeping, gravity helps to drain sort of this lymphatic and helps to enhance the glimphatic systems drainage, which is the lymphatic system of the brain, but that's a little bit more advanced. But just raising the head of the bed actually helps to allow gravity to to move all of this stuff that needs to get out more easily. 

0:22:42 - Mehmet
Great advice Again here, christian. Now the question that came to my mind I've been, you've been there, I've been there at some stage of my careers and there are still a lot of people who do it. So, technology, you know, professionals usually by nature of their world, sometimes they have to stay awake longer times and same for startup founders, by the way, but I mean the the thing because I work, as you know, a system engineer for for a couple of years. So sometimes we needed to do, for example, some maintenance for the system. You know you need to do down times and you know you need to spend like maybe 18, 19 hours without sleep. 

0:23:28 - Christian
So how they can recover and how they should recover actually, I was actually thinking you might ask me how do they, how do you keep yourself asleep from from falling asleep more, which actually I have some tricks for that. But yeah, please, yeah, feel free also to mention that Actually, in the evening time, if you want to stay awake instead of drinking coffee, taking creatine the supplement can actually help or branched chain amino acids they actually keep you, keep you awake. So if you can lower serotonin with, like, if you take L-tyrosine, which is an amino acid, again, that stimulates dopamine production Dopamine is like the motivation, your transmitter, as they say. So those amino acids, and creatine, which is kind of an amino acid as well, they can actually help to keep you more awake and alert for longer without disrupting you as much as caffeine or stimulants would do. Right, so that's, if you have to do the damage, which because at the end of the day it is a stress, it is a damage, and I actually like the direction you took it. How do we mitigate the damage? 

Well, the thing about sleep is sleep is you can't really. It's a debt you can't really repay so easily. It's like it's like when you sit at the computer they say, for every 30 minutes of the computer you need to do about four minutes of mobility exercises, like on a foam roller, some stretching. So for every 30 minutes, four minutes of mobility. You should offset that, but that doesn't mean that I can sit 40 hours a week at a computer and then do however many hours, however many minutes, and it won't offset all of that damage, right? So it's similar with sleep. 

If you have one sleepless night generally, or you know, one night you're awake all night generally. The next few nights you want to sleep longer, and the way to do that is, again so, focusing on make sure you're well fed before sleep, because you know I forgot to say, but you have a hungry belly doesn't sleep something like that in Bulgarian, I forget what it is, but it's very true. So if you're well fed and your sleep environment is good and your stress levels are low, that is one thing. So, and the way you actually, literally the way you can lower cortisol, the way you can lower stress levels, is by eating carbohydrates, funnily enough. So that's why you hear a lot of people that they stress eat. So they get stressed and they start eating like ice cream or or chocolate. It's, it's not. It actually makes sense, it's an, it's an instinctive thing people do to lower their stress. 

So if you had a tough night, make sure you know you're obviously all the all the basics like you're hydrated, you're well fed with plenty of carbohydrates, and in those instances I would definitely take extra magnesium, like I said earlier, and take the glycine with, you know, with the last meal of the day and the GABA again. That's. That's if you don't mind taking supplements. Of course, taking the GABA can really help if you, if you are against taking supplements, then you know, carbohydrates, sleep, environment, low, low blue light I think those would be probably the the the basics you would want to cover great advice again and thank you for bringing that also Christian now. 

0:27:14 - Mehmet
Um, so sometimes we say we need to do a detox, right, so how often we should do this and like how we how we actually do a detox? 

0:27:28 - Christian
well, you should be doing a detoxing constantly, right? Because we are constantly detoxing the body, the liver and the the body in general. It's constantly detoxing and uh, it's not. It's like it's like a lot of things. You cannot wait or at least you shouldn't wait for a debt to accrue before you start repaying. It's like with sleep or with with weight gain, stuff like that. You want to live a life where you don't build up. You don't allow like a sleep debt or a stress debt to build up. 

You're constantly ameliorating the damage caused by these things. You know by by the because when I say the damage, I'm talking about every day, no-transcript. Through the course of your day, you're getting exposed to dozens and dozens of different toxins in small amounts, usually in very small amounts. But the problem is that these things accumulate over a lifetime and over a few years or a couple of decades, these things really accumulate and what happens is, let's say, in a normal day I get exposed to air pollution from driving my car, touching plastics, touching receipts in the store, eating food that's not organically grown with the pesticides and herbicides. So that goes into the body and the body knows that it has to detoxify these things and it will do that and it uses the energy that you ingest. The fuel that you ingest is turning to energy, and the minerals, vitamins, the amino acids excuse me, they're used to detoxify these things, but they're used up along the way. 

So the best way to support your detoxification system is to ensure you're eating a very nutrient-dense diet. You want to eat plenty of protein, you want to eat plenty of carbohydrates, because the body, when insulin is increased because of carbohydrates, the body is being given the signal that it's in a state of abundance, it's not starving. And if it's not starving, the body says oh, I have energy, I have nutrients, I'm safe, I am going to do things that I wouldn't do if I was in an emergency state. Like, let's say, if you're very stressed and not eating much, not eating carbohydrates or dieting or something, the body will shut down the higher level things. It will do the very basics, like keeping you alive, just barely, you know, just the bare physiological things required for survival. It will shut down eventually. It will shut down fertility. It will shut down higher thought, higher cognition, you know spiritual sort of connection, all of these nice two halves. 

So you want to give the body plenty of nutrients, whether that's through multivitamins or really trying hard to eat a very healthy, organic diet, plenty of energy, and giving it certain nutrients can actually kickstart the process or help to move it along. So the one I actually mentioned earlier, glycine, is my favorite one for detoxification because it is actually part of one of the main detoxification enzymes in the liver called glutathione. So giving glycine raises the levels, or taking glycine raises the levels of this master antioxidant, as it's called. So that's what I would say. You know, like we're constantly detoxing. So we should never, we should never just say, oh you know, I'll do my detox in the springtime and then I can just, you know, do whatever the rest of the year. 

We should, actually, if we're health conscious and we want to have longevity in our careers and be able to keep putting in the hours, you know, decades down the line, we have to take care of ourselves well, and because the modern world has so many modern challenges, like all the pollution and all the plastics and the chemicals in the food supply, we have to use modern solutions to those problems and we can't expect to live like our grandparents, just eat normal diet and expect things to work out well for us. 

In most cases they actually won't. That's why all the diseases are skyrocketing in the last couple of decades, right as we can see from the stats. So the modern solutions are you know, use the internet and find either very high quality food that gets delivered to you don't just rely on the grocery store because a lot of the stuff in the grocery store is the cheapest. They can produce with a lot of chemicals, so find the good food online if you can. Or find some really good supplements to support your diet if you feel like there's gaps in the diet. 

0:32:34 - Mehmet
Great advice again, christian. Now, one of the things as, again, entrepreneurs, founders, people in tech we do is we need to rely on our brains, right, whether it's solving problems, whether it's, you know, because we want to create, you know, the next big thing maybe. So, of course, like, the brain, even for any normal person, is working 24 by seven. I know this. But, you know, when we see, you know, people in tech, they have this never ending challenge of you know, either they are solving a solution or they are coming up with something different. The same thing for the entrepreneurs and for entrepreneurs, like it's more things to worry also about. Now, the question is how we can, you know, get, or, let's say in other way, boost our brain power and be able to, you know, perform, I would say, up to the level that we, you know, stay, keep doing what we are doing, at the same time, be able to handle the problem solving challenges that we might have and, at the same time, be creative. So how we can enhance the mental performance. 

0:34:04 - Christian
That's one of my favorite questions. So the you know I apologize for sounding like a broken record here, but the first thing, the most fundamental thing, is we need to give the fuel to the body. That is the preferred fuel source for the brain and when you look at it, when you actually look at the physiology, the brain prefers to use glucose as energy. It doesn't prefer to use fat. So it can use ketones if you're in a state of ketosis, but that is a state that mimics starvation. So if the body is in that state, it will start to shut down higher order functions like cognition, like higher order cognition and creativity and stuff like that. So, I excuse me, I don't care what anybody says that is a proponent of the low carb keto diet. It is not optimal for for optimal performance, whether that's physical or mental, because the two are very closely correlated. So eating I know it's very basic thing, but eating, getting enough glucose into the diet, whether that's through honey, maple syrup, fresh fruit, organic white rice, these are probably my favorite sources of clean carbohydrates. That's the first step. Now the other thing, because you, that's the fuel for the brain. The other thing that you need is the ability to turn that fuel into energy. It's not like we eat the thing, we eat the thing and it suddenly becomes energy. In the body. There's a conversion process and that conversion process is strongly dependent on a lot of B vitamins. So I really emphasize getting high quality sources of B vitamins. That's usually animal products. Egg yolks are a good source. Liver I like to eat liver every two days, roughly meat is a good source of some B vitamins as well, so those B vitamins will help you turn the glucose into energy Right. 

Next is another one I mentioned earlier. It's a very basic supplement, but it's actually. I'm going to include it in my next book. It's been shown in quite a few studies to help with cognitive function, and that is creatine. Now, most people think creatine is something sports people use, like guys that want to build muscle and stuff like that, but creatine it actually gives all of your cells an ability to have more energy, including the brain. So taking creatine five grams every day with food forever is what I recommend that most people should do Right, because you are literally giving every cell in the body an ability to make more energy. It's like you're giving it a little bit of extra stored up energy that it can use Right. So that's a very simple way to boost your not just your brain function, your cognition, but your overall energy levels. That could be your gut function, your ability to play your hobby, to do your hobbies, your sports, whatever you want to do. That's a very simple one that I also consider foundational. You shouldn't really think about more advanced supplements before you have the basics, like B vitamins, carbohydrates and and creatine, right? 

But if you want to take it to the next level, my two favorite brain boosting supplements are called alpha GPC and CDP choline, and both of these are based on on choline, which is a. It's actually a b-vite. Choline is a b-vitamin, but most people don't get enough of it. So the best sources of choline are liver, which most people don't eat nowadays, and egg yolks, which you can, which I guess people don't eat enough, in order to get enough choline, right, we're talking, you have to eat maybe four or five egg yolks every day to get a good amount of choline in the diet, and this choline is used to make, basically to make certain neurotransmitters that are involved in in cognition and to repair brain cells, right. So these supplement CDP choline and alpha GPC. They're a form of choline that is very readily absorbable in front by the body and it goes into the nervous system, into the brain and the brain uses it however it pleases or uses them however it pleases. Usually that is to repair something like in the neurons, in the brain cells. 

So they've done quite a bit of research for people that have had traumatic brain injuries, stroke. I think there was studies in Alzheimer's disease. So a lot of it's, these two supplements, are showing a lot of promise in quite serious conditions that are related to some type of pathology with the brain, right, alzheimer's, obviously very serious condition, stroke. So people are improving with these supplements from such serious conditions. So you know it's a testament to how powerful these nutrients are. They are nutrients because they do. They are found in food but to a very small, small degree, right, unless you're reading brain on a regular basis, which I don't think anybody is right. So these two nutrients I and I'll tell you when I take alpha GPC I actually have a whole half kilogram of it. I bought it in bulk. That's how much I love this stuff. So when I take it in the morning, about three, three to 500 milligrams, in the afternoon I am at the computer and I I'm still craving to work, to read more, to look at, look for more studies, to write or to record something. So it's one of these things. 

Where it's it's it's a new tropic. These are new tropic supplements and a new what? That, by definition, what a new tropic is? It's something like a vitamin, mineral, herb, whatever amino acid. When you that, when you take it, it improves your, your mental function, cognition, without a negative trade off. So if you can take a lot of stimulants like Adderall or amphetamine or caffeine or even cocaine, there's a lot of different stimulants you can take that can enhance your cognition for a set amount of time. But when they excuse me, when they wear off, there's usually some some, some price you have to pay. But with a new tropic is you? There's no side effects, there's no negative effects, they don't affect your sleep, usually, unless you probably take too much in the evening or something like that. Then you'll be stimulated, but in a good way. Again, it's not like you'll be stimulated shaking in better, something like that. So I love these supplements and definitely that's another. That's another two, two supplements that I'll be talking about in my next book. That's how much I love them. 

0:41:31 - Mehmet
great now now, if, if you, we want to give you know final advice is Christian, for again, like people in tech, whether they are executives or whether they are, like you know, professionals and start off founders. Final final thoughts, especially because I know also you like to talk about longevity, right? So so what word of wisdom? And you would leave us with this today thank you, man. 

0:42:03 - Christian
This, this was, this was fun. What I would say is very this is very important. Probably the most important thing is we have to, because I know a lot, of, a lot of folks that are working hard in startups. They don't have that much time or motivation to take good care of themselves, like to cook, cook their own meals every time, and so we we tend to rely on, on convenience foods right for the mall, for for for many people at least, which is actually not not really good. Everybody knows it's not optimal, but I'll tell you why it's not good and what the biggest problem is. 

A lot of the prepared foods, like in restaurants, in take takeaways and processed foods, a lot of them contain these vegetable or seed oils, as they're known. So canola, rapeseed oil, sunflower oil, corn oil, soybean oil, these ones. The problem with these is they have permeated the food supply to a great extent since, you know, in the last 60 years or so, and they're highly unstable and fragile fats, these, these seed oils, and when you eat them they get incorporated into your brain cells, into your cell membranes in the, or they get stored and they're highly, like I said, reactive or unstable or fragile, so they get damaged very easily and that process, where they get damaged, causes a lot of damage to everything else around them. So it's a very pro inflammatory type of fat. So we have to remove these from our diet as much as humanly possible, like this is the one area that we have to take care of. This is the one area where I'm actually very strict. Now I don't even eat nuts and seeds because they contain these polyunsaturated fats, right. So I pretty much try to not eat nuts or seeds because they're not as bad as the seed oils, like sunflower oil. But 100 grams of pistachios or sunflower seeds it could still have 3040 50 grams of these again, very pro inflammatory fatty acids. 

So you definitely want to minimize taking those into the diet and one way to do that is to just not trust the restaurant food, not trust to take away food because you know they're using it. It's the cheapest thing, it's an easy way to add calories and texture and whatever else to food and flavor, I guess if you find that flavor nice. So if you're eating takeout or restaurant food, try to figure out what are the foods that will have the least amount of these fat. So if I, if I go to the. I never ordered fried potatoes because you know they're getting fried in that. I order something on the grill, something that is cooked on a pan, and I will always say cook it in butter, if you have it, or in olive oil. 

Try to negotiate with the person serving you to tell the chef or the whoever was preparing the food to use something less you know inflammatory that's a big one and then to protect yourself from the ones that you've already ingested, because these things stay in your body for years after you ingest them. 

You want to get a full spectrum, high quality vitamin E. 

This is something I recommend to everybody, and this is this is the nutrient that helps to protect these fats from getting damaged and causing further damage in the body. So, taking a high quality and I mean high quality like you have to really spend a few, a few bucks to get a high quality vitamin E, because, unfortunately, the best source of vitamin E is the seed oils, so it's kind of ironic that they're the best source of. So when you remove them from your diet which hopefully everybody listening to this will will understand the importance of that when you remove the seed oils from the diet, you're actually removing most of the vitamin, vitamin E that you're taking in, but they remain in your body, like I said, for like something like up to four years, so that can actually cause a lot of damage down the line. So adding the vitamin E back into the diet through a supplement, I think, is very much essential in today's world. Like I said already, we're facing modern challenges, so we have to have a modern approach to to to addressing these challenges. 

0:46:40 - Mehmet
Again, thank you for all this information. Christian, where can people find more about you? 

0:46:45 - Christian
My website is Christian Yordanovcom. It has all my links there to my book, to my health consulting services and courses and everything else, yeah, great. 

0:46:55 - Mehmet
Christian any anything like you wish? I had to ask you. 

0:47:00 - Christian
No, I think you really touched on the most important things are we have to figure out how to reduce stresses and not pile on new stresses. But to do that we have to recognize that a lot of quote unquote healthy things in today's world are actually stresses, and the reason there are stresses is because we're already under a lot of stress. So taking up a serious exercise routine or dieting things like that, these things become stresses because we're already under stress. So recognize the stresses, reduce them, get the seed oils out of your diet and you know. Look after your sleep, your sleep environment. Protect your eyes when you're at the computer, protect your circadian rhythm in your melatonin production with blue blockers. I think you asked all the important questions and I think anybody listening, even if they implemented half of the things that we talked about today, their future self excuse me would thank them because they will be younger, stronger and better looking, probably, and feeling much better in 1020 years time. 

0:48:11 - Mehmet
Yeah, great and thank you for sharing all your knowledge with us today. Christian, like, and again, maybe people will now understand by the end of the episode hopefully you listen, or what's still the end there isn't. I wanted to discuss this topic on the show because it's underrated in my opinion. Yeah, everyone talks. We see some posts on social media here and there we see people talking about you know all this, but we never at least myself, I can say I never saw someone you know really discussing it on a show specifically for tech and, you know, start up founders and entrepreneurs. So thank you again, christian, for sharing all this knowledge with us today. 

And guys, as usual, this is you know how we end every episode. Please keep the feedback coming. I would love to hear you know what do you think. If there's something you didn't like, also share it with me. Like, I would love to listen to constructive feedback. If something I need to fix, something I need to, you know, modify or change, just let me know. And also, if you're interested to be on the show, don't be shy. Reach out to me and I will try to arrange for that to us. And, as usual, thank you for tuning in. We'll meet again in the next episode. Thank you, bye, bye. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page