Sarah Rahal, MD discusses colostrum, the first milk mammals produce, which contains antibodies and growth factors not found elsewhere. Studies show it prevented flu in elderly patients more than three times better than the vaccine. Compromised mucosal barriers let toxins into the bloodstream, triggering inflammation linked to autoimmune disease, cancer, and chronic fatigue.
I thought I would be moving into the infant formula space. I thought there was plenty of room for innovation. There's just a chemical brew that children with an infant formula are fed, and it really hasn't been updated for like 50 or 60 years, despite all the data, because of the way legislation works. So I was researching at the time Colostrum. Colostrum is the first milk that all mammals produce. It's also the first nutrition we all receive in life. So it contains all the nutrients that our bodies need. It acts like a food, but it does something so much more than that because it is chock full of all of these super interesting compounds, these antibodies and peptides and growth factors and micronutrients and prebiotics and bioactive molecules that cannot be found in any other natural source. They exist solely in colostrum, and they work synergistically in the body, almost like your body's blueprint. And they kind of optimize development of all the different systems early in life. And what I was so struck by is that as I'm combing through all the literature on this, I'm stumbling across not just studies saying how helpful this is for babies, but There are over 5,000 research publications on it saying that it's helpful at all ages, including two recent studies showing it's more than three times more effective than the flu vaccine at preventing flu in elderly patients. And I said, really? I never learned about this. And why isn't everybody talking about this? Here's a food that we're putting up against pharmaceutical products in research, and it's performing quite well. And what I came to appreciate is that cholesterol does something really unique in the body. It seals up all the barriers. And what that means is just like we have skin is this barrier on the outside separates us from the outside world. We have the same thing on the inside of the body. It's called the mucosal barrier. It lines everything from our nose, sinuses, mouth, lungs, gut, urinary, reproductive tract. It's like skin on the inside. So it's, it's quite literally the interface between everything we inhale and ingest from the environment and our bloodstream. Yes, and, yes, and what, what's, what's relevant about that is all these modern exposures we talked about, the pollutants and the chemicals and the pesticides. The first pathway they hit in your body is one of these barrier surfaces. They hit your skin or they hit your mucosal barrier when you ingest or you inhale them, and they break down the integrity of that barrier. They cause disruption at different parts of the layers of those barriers. And what that does is it makes the barrier more permeable than it's supposed to be. Things get into the bloodstream that aren't supposed to trigger the immune system inappropriately. And, and that's inflammation. And inflammation is what underpins almost every single modern chronic ailment that we see. The big things like autoimmune conditions, Crohn's, MS, some cancers, but also the day to day health issues that we take as normal and common. Now, the mental fog, the unwanted weight gain, the acne, the allergies, the bloating, the, the fatigue, all of these things can be traced back to the health of these mucosal barriers. You're listening to the human upgrade with Dave Asprey.
