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Why I Don't Recommend Curcumin | Detox 101
165 Plays1 month ago
Are you following health trends that actually harm your health? In my eye-opening masterclass "The 7 Popular But Deadly Health Fads," I reveal how common health practices promoted by influencers and gurus might be ravaging your gut, accelerating disease, and shaving years off your life.
Discover which popular diets, supplements, and health rituals are secretly sabotaging your health and learn what to do instead. I explain why these seemingly healthy habits are damaging your body and provide actionable alternatives for true longevity.
Register for free access to this essential health information at https://www.livelongerformula.com
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Check out the first volume in the How to Actually Live Longer book series on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4dDXjxc
How to Actually Live Longer is your go-to podcast for cutting through the noise and discovering practical, science-backed strategies to not just add years to your life, but to add life to your years. Hosted by longevity author and functional health practitioner Christian Yordanov, this podcast dives deep into the truths (and myths) behind longevity, health optimization, and addressing chronic health problems.
Each episode offers actionable insights drawn from the host's own research, clinical practice, and personal journey, helping you make informed decisions to restore and enhance your health. Whether you're interested in reducing stress, boosting your energy and mental performance, improving your gut health, or simply looking to optimize your diet and lifestyle, this podcast delivers the tools you need to live a healthier, longer life.
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Transcript
Introduction & Personal Health Journey
00:00:01
Christian Yordanov
Hey, so if you know, if you listen to my stuff or read my book or you're a subscriber to my email list, you, as you know, as I discover things, I like to share them with with a wider audience because one thing that has marked my journey as a health seeker and health practitioner is I went down the wrong a lot of wrong pathways, dead ends, and I was beating my head against the wall in many different ways.
00:00:34
Christian Yordanov
And i I kind of hate being duped. you know I feel stupid and silly and it kind of pisses me off a little bit. So i then, i i ah feel like I need to play ah ah play my role in warning other people.
Critique of Popular Diets & Trends
00:00:51
Christian Yordanov
So went after the plant-based BS journey, was pissed off about the lies and the scam that i was brainwashing myself with. so You know, I wasn't happy about that, but then also the keto and the low carb and the carnivore nonsense.
00:01:08
Christian Yordanov
And similarly, and so now nowadays what what my and MO is when something is popular,
00:01:19
Christian Yordanov
i so I start to question it almost by default. And that's not to say that everything that is popularized in our culture is necessarily bad, but I am a lot more wary and suspicious now that I'm a little bit older and a little bit wiser. And I've seen enough stuff over over the years that turned out to be a load of nonsense. you backing Back in like 2008,
00:01:49
Christian Yordanov
we were, was doing personal training, fitness instruction, certification.
Skepticism Towards Supplements
00:01:55
Christian Yordanov
And at that time, it was all about eating six times a day, six meals a day too boost to boost your metabolism.
00:02:02
Christian Yordanov
And where did we go over the last 15 plus years? Then it was one meal a day and the fasting. And so like all of these trends eventually that were big turned out to be just hype, a lot of hype.
00:02:20
Christian Yordanov
And when when I have clients coming to me, taking multiple types of curcumin and turmeric supplements and all the big podcasts and all the big companies are coming out with these liposomal curcumin,
00:02:38
Christian Yordanov
and all these other sort of delivery systems and the bioavailability enhancement matrix bollocks, like the bioperine, which we know the the black pepper that's added to some supplements and that's marketed to us that it increases bioavailability. But you know how it does that?
00:02:59
Christian Yordanov
It just... It just makes your gut leaky so the damn thing gets in more. But you have to think about if something is not very bioavailable, means the body is not allowing it in, the gut lining is not allowing it in.
00:03:15
Christian Yordanov
So could it be that that damn thing shouldn't be in the body, you know?
Issues with Curcumin
00:03:22
Christian Yordanov
So you kind of you learn these things over the years. And so naturally when curcumin started becoming big, i did use it for a while, but you know, that was like back in 2008, was taking this one supplement I remember with curcumin.
00:03:35
Christian Yordanov
And here's the thing, here is the thing. So curcumin does have some beneficial properties, right? Not everything is all bad. Not everything is all good. Well, certain things are pretty much all bad, you know, like mercury or toxic metals, plasticizers, you know, so some things that are all bad. But when it comes to plant compounds, they may have some beneficial effect. They may have some neutral and some negative effects. And here's the thing.
00:04:06
Christian Yordanov
So the anti-inflammatory effect of curcumin I teach my clients how to get that without taking curcumin, right?
00:04:18
Christian Yordanov
So if that's the reason a person is taking it, there better ways. But here's, I'm going to give you a little bit of a ah ah quick one-on-one on detoxification. And I'll explain to you why curcumin is actually, this is not the kind of thing you want to take long-term, right? Or personally at all, right? I mean, I have turmeric once in a while.
00:04:38
Christian Yordanov
I'll have it in in a dish I'm making, you know? but that's turmeric. That's not extracted stuff from, from turmeric, you know, that's then concentrated in very high amounts that you wouldn't really get that amount from a meal or even like several meals of the contained
Detoxification Process Explained
00:04:56
Christian Yordanov
turmeric. Right.
00:04:57
Christian Yordanov
So I'll give you a quick rundown of the various phases of detoxification and I'll explain why. you don't want to actually take curcumin because it actually inhibits one of these phases of detoxification, which is, as you can probably tell, is not a good thing. We don't want to inhibit detoxification because we are so overburdened with a lot of tiny, but just constant toxic exposures from the car seats and the flame retardants and all the furniture and,
00:05:33
Christian Yordanov
the indoor air and the outdoor air and the pollution and the plasticizers. You know the story. I don't need to, I don't need to like list out the dozens of different ways we can get exposed, but normally,
00:05:45
Christian Yordanov
at a very basic level, when someone learns about detoxification, how it happens, you learn about phase one detoxification, right? So, you know, if you've ever done and some kind of certification in health, this is what you're told, you know, phase one takes a toxin and it attaches something to the toxin, right?
00:06:03
Christian Yordanov
And that toxin at that point can actually become more toxic until phase two, where you attach another thing could be an amino acid, could be some glucuronic acid, could be an acetyl group, it could be glutathione, the master quote unquote, an antioxidant of our cells, could be a methyl group, right? So there's various conjugation pathways in phase two, detoxification, methylation, sulfation, glutathione conjugation, and so on. And you can also attach amino acids, taurine, and so on.
00:06:38
Christian Yordanov
All right, so these are the basic phase one, phase two detoxification processes. But what when you actually kind of look at detoxification at a deeper level, there's actually what are called phase zero and phase three, right? So this is kind of when you get a little bit more into the nitty gritty, you learn about these things. So quickly, very quickly, phase zero, this is basically the transportation of toxins across cellular membranes, right? So in and out of the the cells in the liver, for example, right?
00:07:17
Christian Yordanov
So there's certain, there's certain, processes there that that can get a toxin in get a toxin out right so there's a lot of stuff that can happen here and certain toxins metals plant compounds can actually inhibit this phase this is why this is relevant to the curcumin discussion not not not specifically phase zero but just this this entire discussion of certain compounds can inhibit certain phases of detoxification, right?
00:07:52
Christian Yordanov
So you have phase zero, you know, you you transform the toxin, add something to it, like an OH group or hydroxyl group, it can become at this point, it can actually become more toxic. So you you want to quickly go to the next phase when conjugated. So you transform it, conjugated.
00:08:12
Christian Yordanov
And then it usually becomes more water soluble. So at this point it's easier to excrete. And here is where phase three, detoxification comes into the picture.
00:08:25
Christian Yordanov
So this is the phase of basically excretion. Okay, so this is transport elimination. And we have a couple of major routes of excretion here, as you can intuit, we pee stuff out and we poop stuff out. but These are major excretory pathways, right? And there's there's other like subtle ones, like you can cry some toxins out and sweat toxins out and stuff like that. But this is
00:08:59
Christian Yordanov
this this is where the toxin from the liver cell goes into the bile right so we make bio in our in in certain liver cells and that bile is where the toxin gets pushed into and then it travels down little tiny bile ducts and then bigger bile ducts and eventually it goes into the small intestine and the bile is used to basically emulsify digest fat right so it's it's beneficial in that way
00:09:34
Christian Yordanov
and The idea is as you kind of, as the bile goes down the the intestine, eventually it becomes part of the poop and you poop it out, right?
00:09:47
Christian Yordanov
So there's an issue here is because the body, the way it was designed, it was in an environment of a lot less toxic exposure. So we are designed to recycle a lot of our bile every day, right? Just happens many times in a day.
00:10:06
Christian Yordanov
So the problem here is that a lot of these toxins that we're dealing with today are difficult to make water soluble, right? So they're lipophilic toxins, which means that they have this affinity to lipids, right?
00:10:21
Christian Yordanov
but Compounds that are like made of fats, right? And bio is actually made of like, it's ah it's a lipid based, product so these things really have a good affinity to it and because we're recirculating the bile so it goes from the small so from the liver down the bile duct down the small intestine and then from the small intestine through what is known as enterohepatic recirculation we actually this is this is where we get messed up in the modern world where people's livers are shot and people are just developing just horrific diseases that ah yeah new diseases yeah are basically appearing constantly
00:10:56
Christian Yordanov
thousands of them classified by now is because there's just so much of this stuff, these toxins recirculating back to the liver causing all manner of havoc there that, you know, you you're going to have a lot of problems, right?
Body's Natural Response to Inflammation
00:11:11
Christian Yordanov
But here is where taking curcumin, right? You may get an immediate inflammation lowering effect, which can actually be very,
00:11:23
Christian Yordanov
in in the immediate term can be very sort of positive but in terms of how you perceive it, right? So I remember ah ah couple of years ago, we were out at the playground and my daughter was, I think, just starting to walk.
00:11:37
Christian Yordanov
So there was some kids there playing soccer and I played soccer with those kids for 10 minutes. And I was like, I'm gonna show these guys what it's all about. i was like Cristiano Ronaldo, you know, just they were like, whoa, this guy is good. There was a dad there. He's like, oh my God, you you must have played like at a high level when you were younger.
00:12:00
Christian Yordanov
I'm like, no, not really, you know, just like super talented and all that good stuff, you know, whatever, BSing around. But the next day i was, my legs and even like parts of my like abdomen, you know, because I was having a kid, you know, you your gym routine, your exercise routine goes down, you know, like at least for us, it was hard because just me and my wife.
00:12:25
Christian Yordanov
But yeah, The next day was in so much pain, man. I was in like my legs. It's like I hadn't used them in like a year. and i And then I did heel sprints.
00:12:36
Christian Yordanov
It was that kind of pain. I couldn't like bend down to tie my shoes. So i don't I don't think it was that next day, but I think the day after it was even probably even worse because you know, we had the delayed onset of muscle soreness, the domes that sometimes can take 48 hours to fully manifest. That's why it's called delayed onset of muscle soreness.
00:12:56
Christian Yordanov
So i was like hot diggity daffodil. The second day was even worse. and But what happened is I was craving turmeric.
00:13:06
Christian Yordanov
So i we had this organic turmeric. So i'm like, I'm going to make some chicken curry with turmeric chicken breast organic and some organic coconut milk. And it was super awesome, tasty.
00:13:21
Christian Yordanov
And then I think a couple of hours later, i noticed I'm moving a lot more freely. I'm walking, I'm getting off the couch and I'm doing stuff, picking up my daughter. Wow. wow my pain is less.
00:13:34
Christian Yordanov
So then then I, it came to me, I said to my wife, oh my God, how intelligent is the human body? So it made me crave turmeric because it knew it would lower an inflammation and my pain and all that good stuff would would would be less. And to me, it's like, this is absolutely just how incredibly intelligent the body is that we don't give it credit for, you know?
00:14:01
Christian Yordanov
I remember this one. My dad was telling me the story back when he was the military. he was a fighter pilot, you know, and they would be playing cards with the other guys.
00:14:17
Christian Yordanov
And there was one dude, so they'd be playing cards and whatever, having beers or whatever they were allowed to. And this dude would just turn every once in a while to the wall. He would just lick the wall, just like really like in a very exaggerated way. He just like run his tongue down from like a lower to a higher position on the wall. Just like, uh, you know, it's hard to explain, just lick the damn wall every like 10, 15, 20 minutes or whatever.
00:14:45
Christian Yordanov
And, My dad was just sharing that as a funny anecdote. But then, you know, when I was doing my research on autism for my autism book back in like 2019, early 2020, I was reading some some papers on pi people and just children with pica. So pica is basically where you eat.
00:15:09
Christian Yordanov
You eat stuff that's not food. So sand and soil and... various other things. So it kind of, to me, i think a lot of these autistic kids are so deficient in in these minerals that are they're probably,
00:15:27
Christian Yordanov
instinctively their body is telling them to eat those things because there'd be some minerals in there because a lot of them are so malnourished because you know their guts are in a really rough shape they're inflamed and they're they have very selective diets so a lot of them will only eat like bread or just some junky stuff or a lot of them just you know have one or two foods that eat and the rest they won't necessarily eat so that's a you know imagine you're trying to grow an organism the demands on it in terms of nutrients, vitamins, minerals and and stuff.
00:15:58
Christian Yordanov
And if you don't have that, the body is is able to, you know, make you crave eating dirt and sand and stuff like that. You we have a family member that they were visiting us here and the little dude is autistic and he was like eating sand at the at the beach when when we're at the beach and stuff. so So it just amazed me how my body knew. So my point there was, that was a frigging long ass tangent, but my point there was, there are benefits to taking curcumin in terms of the the near term and inflammatory in inflammation lowering effect.
00:16:39
Christian Yordanov
But the problem is the longterm effect is that it actually inhibits this phase three of of the detoxification pathways, right?
00:16:51
Christian Yordanov
So technicalities here aside, you know, it actually just as a in there's a few mechanisms so it can ah ah disrupt bio acid transport via inhibition of the bio salt export pump.
00:17:06
Christian Yordanov
It down regulates MRP2 and PGP expression in hepatocytes and may compete for efflux transporter binding. Right. So this is not some sort of some guy came up with this on ah on a blog.
00:17:19
Christian Yordanov
Like there's actually studies that have seen this. Right. So this is from a very famous functional medicine expert who is the who who is the functional medicine practitioners practitioner type thing. of He educates functional medicine and and functional practitioners, doctors and naturopaths and and medical doctors and stuff who want to learn the functional stuff.
00:17:46
Christian Yordanov
And so he has done a to ton of research on this kind of stuff on detox. And it's very clear that a lot of things that we think are good, some of the, that are even like considered good for detoxification are actually inhibiting some phase of the detoxification pathways and curcumin inhibits phase three, which is the, like I said earlier, the transport elimination, the excretion. So you have this toxin you've, you know, and it's entered the hepatocyte, the liver cell it's been transformed with, you know, attaching some kind of
00:18:23
Christian Yordanov
OH hydroxyl group or something else in the phase one detox pathway. It's been conjugated in the second phase, attached to some kind of amino acid or glutathione or a methyl group or glucuronic acid.
00:18:35
Christian Yordanov
Now it's ah ah it's more water-soluble. It's less toxic than in the first phase, right? It's less dangerous, but it still has to get excreted, right? And imagine now you take curcumin and it's actually inhibiting the next phase, which it is to get it out of the damn thing, out of the cell and out of the body, right?
00:18:58
Christian Yordanov
That's the end goal here. So what can happen, especially with, like ah like I said, I don't know if I said it here, but I have some clients come to me with, they're taking multiple supplements that have curcumin in it. One would be a liposomal,
00:19:13
Christian Yordanov
La-di-da and another one will be like the bioparine for higher bioavailability and whatnot. And this curcumin is patented and trademarked. And oh my God, you know, like just the marketing on some of these supplements is just really nauseating.
00:19:30
Christian Yordanov
But so imagine you're taking one, two of these or even just one regular one daily for two years. What does that mean? It means that you likely have an accumulation of these toxins that have, again, they've been conjugated and somewhat their toxicity has been reduced, but there's still, there's still, it's like you have all your, your, your trash cans, you know, you, you have all the trash in the trash can, but then you don't actually throw the, the, the, the trash bag out. So you have like in your, in your kitchen,
00:20:10
Christian Yordanov
You have a bunch of trash bags full of trash, but they're they're closed up so they're not stinking up the house yet. But you know sooner or later that's a disaster waiting to happen in your kitchen. So this is kind of an accumulation of these toxins in our liver cells.
00:20:25
Christian Yordanov
if This over time can cause injury to the liver. And think about this. something like a third, like the numbers constantly seem to change and different sources would tell you different numbers, but a third of US adults have at least have some kind of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease,
00:20:48
Christian Yordanov
And then it's it's a higher number of how many have like overall liver disease in terms of non-alcoholic steatohepatosis, hepatitis, and so
Curcumin & Liver Health Concerns
00:20:57
Christian Yordanov
on and so forth, right? There's a few different ones, NASH and stuff like that. So do you think do you think with so many people whose livers are in such a precarious state that This would be a good idea taking something like curcumin, which inhibits phase three, uh, detoxification long-term.
00:21:19
Christian Yordanov
I, I would pause it not. Right. So that that's, that's why I don't take curcumin. I haven't in a long time since 2018 and all my clients that come to me,
00:21:37
Christian Yordanov
i Basically, when I look over their existing supplement stack, I tell them what to stop immediately, like something that's truly just harmful.
00:21:50
Christian Yordanov
I just tell them, please stop this. omega-3s, like my fish oil immediately. I just tell them you can just bin that, right?
00:21:59
Christian Yordanov
then certain things, I tell them just pause this. Like I don't, not everything is bad all the time. Like certain certain things can be taken once in a while, right? But you don't want to take them once in a while. So I'll tell them either to pause it and later we can reintroduce it Or I can tell them you can cycle this on and off, let's say two days on, five days off, and then take a like a longer period of time off every once in a while. So year know you're taking, for example you know for example, the adaptogens, like people are taking an adaptogen every single day for like two years, three years. It's like, that's that's really not going to,
00:22:39
Christian Yordanov
it's not going to give you the desired result. There's this very quick sort of adaptation by the body. And then at that point, you're you be you're either wasting money or or at best, it's just the you're not getting the desired result because of the down-regulation of whatever is being down-regulated.
00:22:59
Christian Yordanov
So there's certain things that can be cycled in and out, especially from the plant kingdom. There's certain plant compounds that are beneficial, right? But usually when when i someone has curcumin, I don't tell them throw it out, but I definitely to pause it until I let you know for the notes.
00:23:18
Christian Yordanov
And usually what happens is they just, it's we all have the the supplement graveyards, like a drawer somewhere where supplements go to die. And actually just this morning, I was cleaning out here a little bit in my office and I had like these things that I'm, oh my God, I used to take this. Oh Jesus.
00:23:38
Christian Yordanov
And then another thing, oh my God, I'm never taking this. And I'm i'm just like throwing a bunch of stuff out because, but it it was a great reminder of just the journey over the last seven, eight years of how much I've learned and how how differently I think about all these things,
Misconceptions About Milk Thistle
00:23:55
Christian Yordanov
right? So that's why in a nutshell, quick little,
00:24:00
Christian Yordanov
detoxification primer there for you. But this is why in a nutshell, I don't recommend curcumin because it does affect phase three, right, of detoxification.
00:24:11
Christian Yordanov
And there's other there's other compounds, right? So you you you may have heard of milk thistle. But you know that one can also inhibit phase three detoxification. So it while it may boost the other phases, right, phase one, phase two, whatever, if it if it inhibits the third one, that's not really gonna be beneficial, right? and That's why i had a bunch of milk thistle. I had the Silmarin extract of milk thistle. had like about like 100 pounds of the stuff or something. Or I had like a a big pack of of milk thistle and then the extract in a supplement, something like that, like ah a bunch bunch of different things. Like you just buy random things from the from the internet and like a lot of people and you just throw throw things into a cobbled together protocol and
00:25:08
Christian Yordanov
At one point, this was me like back in like, you know, years and years ago, you just like take 20 things and you hope for the best. But nowadays we have a a much more sniper approach where everything we add to the protocol is there to serve a purpose.
00:25:24
Christian Yordanov
And I see a lot of clients and I know I've done the episodes about this and, you know, I don't want to go on a rant about the old different herbs, but, you know, I see some clients with like these herbal,
00:25:37
Christian Yordanov
product that might have like five, seven, 10 different plant compounds in the supplement and they're small amounts and they're really not not even sure what what benefits, if any, they feel.
00:25:55
Christian Yordanov
It's more really, and you look at these the marketing pages of these supplements and each one of those compounds, they start rattling off all the benefits and any sort of research that is usually done in either tiny human studies or it's like animal studies or, you know, sometimes you'd be like this thing stops cancer. Yeah. In a, in a Petri dish and and ah ah a dose that kills not just cancer, but any cell that it's is exposed to it. So a lot of stuff like that. So, you know, you really, you really need,
00:26:27
Christian Yordanov
ah ah much more sort of sniper approach to supplementation because first of all you don't want to waste money second of all there are unintended consequences that can happen with some of these supplements free and another example and I should probably do a whole episode on this but it's Quircetine you know that's another one when people come to me i didn't get them to pause that and Although it has some benefits, it does actually inhibit phase one
00:27:01
Christian Yordanov
and phase three of detoxification, right? So that ain't good and case yeah in case you were wondering, is that good? No, it's not good. Of course you know that, you know so good. So it's there's a lot of stuff there' is a lot of stuff that will inhibit one or more of these phases of detox, right? So acetaminophen, right?
00:27:24
Christian Yordanov
think a lot of people know that that can cause liver failure. that inhibits phase two, right? So that can deplete glutathione and that can be, you know, really bad. So I have like, remember my daughter was like not feeling well, a year year and a half ago. And we're just doing the normal things we do, which is, you know, I actually have some herbal things in those instances that work really well.
00:27:54
Christian Yordanov
But remember one of the neighbors here was like, oh, you should, oh, she was already well by then. But we were just saying, oh, we were like, she was sick for quite a while last week. It was the first time. I said, oh, you should have said, you should have said something.
00:28:08
Christian Yordanov
i would have given you some some of my remedy. I'm like, I know this dude doesn't know shit about health, you know? But anyway, I was like,
00:28:19
Christian Yordanov
What was your remedy? I'm curious. And he's like, acetaminophen.
00:28:24
Christian Yordanov
Yeah, it's like, okay, yeah. And acetaminophen, when you're sick and you have a fever, that is a healing response by the body.
00:28:37
Christian Yordanov
And honestly, I believe ah ah a lot of these things that lower fever, it's because It's toxic. Literally, that's the reason why it actually lowers the fever is because you need to be able to master an energetic response, right? You need a certain level of energy. That's why, you know, kids who have a fever,
00:28:59
Christian Yordanov
for let's say half a day and then the next day they're like raging and running around again because they have so much vitality and vital reserve. They can muster up the fever response, get you know deal with the issue and then off on their merry way. So what what what do we do as adults, at least what we're taught? And I'm sure most of my listeners do not do this sort of nonsense, but back when I was a kid,
00:29:22
Christian Yordanov
you know i would be offered acetaminophen or paracetamol or you know later on ibuprofen now is a is the rage but i think a lot of the reason why ah ah something like paracetamol acetaminophen is actually lowers the fever it's likely just because the point when you're poisoned the body's dealing with the poisoning and it doesn't have the energy, those resources are diverted from the fever response because that is very expensive, energetically speaking, to raise temperature, right?
00:29:57
Christian Yordanov
It needs, like you need to burn stuff too. It's like you need to put more fuel on the fire to to raise the temperature kind of thing. So it's adding more fuel to the fire is energetically resource expensive, intensive.
00:30:10
Christian Yordanov
So the by virtue of poisoning yourself, you you lower your fever taking set of minofil. Anyway, that was a little bit of a tangent, but and So that that inhibits phase two, we know that alcohol can inhibit phase one and phase two, right?
00:30:26
Christian Yordanov
So not good long term, heavy metals can do it, right? So lead and mercury cadmium, they can inhibit phase two, plasticizers can actually inhibit phase two and phase three, they can disrupt certain enzymes and transporters, right?
00:30:43
Christian Yordanov
They can also, they have hormonal effects, which can also mess mess mess up in many other ways, you know, especially BPA. There is virtual. That's another way that actually blocks phase one detoxification.
00:30:57
Christian Yordanov
And. the Another one that's kind of but sort of popular is berberine that can actually inhibit phase three. So that's another one I used to take back in 2008.
00:31:10
Christian Yordanov
And, you know, some doctors that go, quote unquote, the functional direction, they, what a lot of what they, a lot did and this I've seen this with my clients that go to these, these, ah some of the best, quote unquote, functional integrated doctors in the States. They have access to the best.
00:31:29
Christian Yordanov
And what I've seen is that they've swapped a drug out for another compound which is more natural which still has a similar mechanism so it's still just ah just ah ah a symptom suppression tactic.
00:31:49
Christian Yordanov
So that's to me that's not being a functional practitioner, it's just being you know these integrative people where you swap out the metformin for berberine because berberine lowers the the blood glucose the blood sugar you know in this not mechanistically it's not the same mechanism from what i understand but it the the effect is you were just lowering the blood sugar in an artificial way instead of figuring out why is that blood sugar high because it there could be
00:32:22
Christian Yordanov
at least a half dozen factors that are well within our control that we can address relatively quickly in those instances.
Critique of Functional Medicine
00:32:29
Christian Yordanov
Instead of, oh, your cholesterol is high, I won't give you a statin, but I'm gonna give you red yeast rice.
00:32:36
Christian Yordanov
So, but like, that's not the problem. The cholesterol being high is not the problem. And the blood sugar being high, if you just lower it artificially,
00:32:47
Christian Yordanov
is with berberine instead of metformin, you're not resolving the underlying problem or set of issues that are causing the blood sugar or the blood glucose level being elevated, you know?
00:32:59
Christian Yordanov
So, and then of ah we're you're also getting a lot of strings attached with some, again, like something like berberine, which will can cause you know this phase three inhibition of detox.
00:33:13
Christian Yordanov
And although berberine does have some some antibacterial properties, so it's not all bad, but again, this is what i i always caution people is with the plant compounds, you have to be really careful because they're so...
00:33:29
Christian Yordanov
they're so poorly studied, we don't really know all the different ways. right So that's why I use a lot more of the natural things. So more, like I said, like a sniper approach where we know a specific thing has you know various effects and we're getting those effects based on that. Whereas with a lot, like especially like with something like has three different, five different plant compounds in there, it's a little bit like a shotgun.
00:33:55
Christian Yordanov
spray and pray approach and yeah a lot of that is based just on us believing the marketing copy on these supplement websites which is i have to admit very well written it's very convincing sometimes i'm reading this thing like oh my god i need to get this thing right now a hundred dollars a month I need to get this thing, subscribe and say 5% because it this is going to be the cure to all my problems.
00:34:22
Christian Yordanov
So I ah ah completely understand how and why people sort of get into these, get into a bunch of different supplements and just start taking a bunch of different things because that was me back in, like i said, 2018. tried many things and tried so many things and I got excited about so many things. It just, the the the longer I do this, the more I realize is the key to health restoration, health optimization, and maintaining our longevity is doing the fundamentals well.
00:34:58
Christian Yordanov
Teach my clients what are the fundamentals and then helping them ingrain those into their daily life. Because once you do that, yeah you're you're basically 89% of the way there.
00:35:11
Christian Yordanov
And then you can get a little bit fancier. It's like, you can't, you know, you can't do just from a sport sort of perspective. perspective You can't do like all the, let's say Cristiano Ronaldo, like that guy, he can do a lot of cool tricks and stuff and and all sorts of really fancy moves.
00:35:29
Christian Yordanov
But what did he build his skill base on for you know the first one, two decades of his career was just doing a lot of very basic things every single day, a lot of fundamental moves and and and skills.
00:35:44
Christian Yordanov
And this is like any other endeavor. Health is like any other endeavor, be that the sport, be that any skill, be that business, the best businesses.
Focus on Health Fundamentals
00:35:56
Christian Yordanov
They do the the very basic fundamentals really, really well. So, you know, customer service fulfillment, the sales process, you know, getting the sales, hiring, just all all those things.
00:36:09
Christian Yordanov
They just do them really well. And they do them for a long time and that's how they become mainstays in in our you know you know or culture, like Amazon, like look how well they do stuff. you know And they're they're not getting super fancy. I mean, now they're getting fancy. They have all these like devices and Prime and just this huge sort of network of products and services.
00:36:33
Christian Yordanov
But at the beginning, they were just like getting making sure anything you wanted, You could get it quickly without issues. And if you want to return it, it was as easy as buy, that kind of way. So similarly with health, you want to learn the fundamentals and you want to execute the fundamentals. And the big issue, i think for many people, is they're not that interesting.
00:37:01
Christian Yordanov
You know, after a while, it can get a little bit boring, but you know, when you think about it, breathing is boring, right? sleeping Not exactly super exciting, but the things that our health, the pillars upon which our health lies are those things, they're fundamental things, how you breathe, what you eat, the the environment around you, how clean it is, and your hormone balance in the body, making sure you know your cortisol, your stress hormones aren't elevated and doing those, like getting those fundamentals
00:37:37
Christian Yordanov
dialed in is actually pretty damn easy pretty simple so you just have to really you have to be content with the fact that you you will be doing a lot of fundamentals for the rest of your life and then get your entertainment elsewhere so it's like it's like even with me like hey i still buy a lot of supplements and experiment with supplements because i have to it's my job but If you were to ask me what what kind of supplements I'm taking, it's it's mostly like vitamins and minerals and you know amino acids and stuff. And they'd be like, what, you don't take resveratrol? And what about this other herb? And one client yesterday, you client, she she shes oh was talking about this PEA phenylethanolamide and ethanolamine and just all of these things is like a hundred bucks for a month's supply.
00:38:29
Christian Yordanov
And, you know, big celebrity, celebrity health influencers endorsing it. And I'm like, nope, this is, I would not, I would not buy this if I had a $10,000 supplement budget per month, I wouldn't spend a hundred dollars on this, you know, that kind of way.
00:38:46
Christian Yordanov
Because, because I now know that it's the fundamentals is what, you know, moves the needle. whether that's restoring health from a health set of health issues or maintaining health, optimizing health, mental performance, physical performance, it's always the fundamentals that, yeah and just just a a simple example is like, you know, my my client that's a starting pitcher in a major league baseball team, with him, we were very constrained
00:39:20
Christian Yordanov
in terms of the supplements he could use. So every every supplement that I recommended to him had to be and nsf certified for sport. So there's not like we couldn't use like hormones and just kind of some of these like more interesting compounds that I have a repertoire of that we can get a lot of cool, cool progress and effects and recovery and performance and all kinds of increases. So with him, we had to just use basics.
00:39:51
Christian Yordanov
We had to do diet. We had to do vitamins, minerals and and use those to address all of the things that we uncovered on the lab testing.
00:40:03
Christian Yordanov
rights So when you do a lab test, like something like a metabolomics test, which is a urine test we run with a lot of my clients, and you can see things like oxidative stress, you can see DNA damage, you can see the detoxification issues, right? You can see toxicity in terms of metals and can see deficiencies in terms of b vitamins and minerals, right? So but you can see you can see, for example, low dopamine, neuroinflammation, various digestive issues. So when when we see ah a bunch of imbalances there, you know, you never you never see a marker
00:40:41
Christian Yordanov
on a test like that for your curcumin level. Like you're never gonna see, oh, you're deficient in curcumin. You need to add more curcumin or there's some resveratrol marker here that's gonna
Targeted Health Interventions
00:40:52
Christian Yordanov
help. And you need to add 200 milligrams of resveratrol once a day for three months to resolve.
00:40:59
Christian Yordanov
None of those markers ever tell us, oh, you need more of this fancy thing. It's usually those those are addressed with diet supplementation, hormone balancing, and and like detox stuff, detox support, gut health stuff protocols, you know.
00:41:15
Christian Yordanov
And yes, some of the herbs and stuff, they do come handy when it comes to gut cleansing, rebalancing, microbiome rebalancing, that is for sure. But again, we're using a sniper approach as opposed to, oh, let me throw this in because, you know, apparently, you know, Cidemarin is going to detox me and Vesveretro is going to activate my sirtuins and the Berberine is going to lower my blood sugar.
00:41:41
Christian Yordanov
But why was your blood sugar high? If you're stressed every day, artificially lowering your blood sugar, It's not going to help you because your stress, your cord is always driving up your blood sugar, right? So we need to work on the stress, not on lowering a marker on a piece of paper.
Conclusion & Future Insights
00:41:59
Christian Yordanov
Anyway, as you if you if you follow me for a while, you know I could probably rant on for another hour or two. This was supposed to be a short thing about another thing. Now I'm talking about a different thing, but I hope you found it educational illuminating interesting.
00:42:13
Christian Yordanov
And thanks for listening, and I will see you on the next episode.