REAL Superfood: Using Colostrum for Strong Barriers – Sarah Rahal, MD | 1100 | Dave Asprey

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey formerly. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today's episode is one that's going to be really fun for years. And when I say years, you'll hear about this. Ten years ago, when I started Bulletproof, my first product was clearly the coffee. And then I added MCT Oil. But what you probably don't know unless you're a very, very early follower, is that I formulated what I still think was one of the world's best whey protein formulas on the market. Because it was whey protein from grass fed concentrate. Like all the stuff you'd want in a whey if you tolerate whey, which not everyone does. But it was 20% colostrum and most people didn't know what Colostrum was. But there were pro athletes going, what is in this? Like, it's working so well, like what's the magic? And then Colostrum became very hard to get. And then, and you guys are gonna learn what Colostrum is in in a minute here. If you don't know, it's, it's like the, the first stuff that comes out of either a cow or even a human. It's like the special stuff. And, and we're, we're going to interview about that. But it affects your immune system as well as your muscle growth and things like that healing. So I went on this quest to find Colostrum, including one Colostrum dealer who literally would only take bitcoin or cash and would give you Colostrum in like white powder packets that looked a lot like they weren't Colostrum. I'm not even kidding. And he was, you know, selling, you know, thousand dollar Colostrum because I had magic powers, okay? It didn't do anything special. In fact, it made me cough a little bit that, that version of it. But we'll just say I've been a Colostrum fan for a long time and there wasn't really a way that I could recommend getting it because I couldn't get the stuff that I was using. And then there was a lot of inactive stuff on the market. So I didn't really bring your attention to it for more than 10 years. But I think I found something that is, is a good answer for you. So let's get into the science about it. And to get into the science, I thought, hmm, who could I find? How about an adult and pediatric neurologist and headache medicine specialist trained in functional and environmental medicine that Sounds like a good fit for the show. And if you agree with me, then listen in to Dr. Sarah Rahal. We are going to go deep on colostrum and immune systems and all that kind of stuff. Sarah, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me excited to be here.

It's funny, we're talking about functional medicine night before last as we're recording this. I was with Dr. Jeff Bland, who is the guy who created functional medicine at JJ Virgin's Mindshare event where he was honored with a lifetime achievement award. And I donated 40 years of Zen and a few other things. And we ended up helping him to raise more than $300,000 to do functional medicine training for doctors working in disadvantaged areas like scholarships. So thanks, JJ Virgin, thanks Dr. Bland for your work in functional medicine. And as a result of your work in part, we have an expert here who knows about functional medicine because, well, the current creator of the field who's also been on the show was here. So just a little connection point here. So in your adult and pediatric set of data from all of your patients and all, what's going on now?

Well, I was trained allopathically as a pediatric neurologist and the conventional medical model, functional medical model, they all tend to get dogmatic in their own ways at a certain point. So it's really important to always be able to take a step back and think from first principles. And I was really struck in my practice by what is a very alarming boom in chronic disease in young kids. I was treating kids in a really busy hospital practice on the Upper east side of Manhattan with a four month long waiting list. Kids as young as 2, 3 years old with chronic daily headache and neurologic issues. Today, 54% of kids have a chronic disease diagnosis. And what's so alarming about that is that in the 1960s that number was 1.6. So we didn't undergo a genetic mutation in two two generations. These are all health issues being driven, as your listeners know, by the modern environment and a landscape that really rapidly changed post industrialization and post World War II complex with the Uprise of all these different factories and industrialization machinery that pivoted their attention to developing chemicals that are now rampant in our air supply, as chemicals and pesticides in our agriculture and things in our bath body home care, even toy furniture products that have never been tested for their safety or effects on human health. They kind of were grandfathered in in the 70s under some legislation and now they're just rampant in the air. We Breathe and in everything that we come in contact with in our food and in our environment. And these things are really detrimental to health. And we're starting to see the ramifications of this very early in life, earlier and earlier. And I myself was personally struck by some of this because I got very sick while I was practicing medicine with my own gut. Health issues that had kind of been brewing in the background for a long time, but really came to the surface and were getting worse and worse. And so I was just completely frustrated with the medical model that I was operating under. Really couldn't practice the way I thought was appropriate and do a deep dive into all the epigenetic factors that were. That were affecting these kids. You know, with five. Five to ten minutes to see a patient at a time. So I left.

Were you in a hospital or private practice or what were you doing? Both.

So I was on a clinical faculty in the hospital, so I was doing rounds.

Unhealthy. Most unhealthy environments on earth. Right? Like you're breathing disinfectants all the time. Really positive circadian lighting, maybe a great sound environment without beeping and Turing and no pressure from insurance companies. Nothing. So, okay, so no wonder you got your gut health sick.

A lot of living in paradise in the hospital.

It's kind of miserable. So many of my really close friends are doctors, and the ones who've left hospital environments and just the allopathic, three minutes per patient, they're all so much happier. Like, what do you think made you sick from all that? Was it chemical exposures? Was it stress? What was the.

I think it was. I think it was a combination of all of the above. You know, my. My foundational health practices were so disrupted in terms of sleeping and eating patterns, exposure to sunlight, all the really core things that you need for a body to thrive. I was depriving myself of on a daily basis working these ridiculous shifts under ridiculous pressure. So I think that was certainly contributory.

Well, I'm glad you got out. And if you are a doctor on your way to the hospital listening to this, and I know there are many, thank you for continuing to take care of people after car accidents and when they. When they really need the care. Like it. It's. It's now kind of like combat duty, the way we're running it, especially in the US So appreciate those of you who are doing the hard work. And for those of you who are made unwell by it, there is another way. Or maybe you can make yourself well and still work in hospital. And if You're a hospital administrator. You probably aren't listening to the show, but if you are, we can do better.

Yes, we. We can do better.

Yeah.

So I left because I. I thought I would be moving into the infant formula space. I thought there was plenty of room for innovation there. There, there's. 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 colostrum is 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 quite literally the interface between everything we inhale and ingest from the environment and our bloodstream. Yes, and, yes. And 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 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 fatigue, all of these things can be traced back to the health of these mucosal barriers.

It's interesting, I did some genetic analysis and I tend to have leaky barriers. So just on average, I'm going to have a lower quality mucosal barrier in my sinuses, my blood, brain barrier in my gut, which means I'm probably like a third of people more susceptible to these things. And I went through the same stuff that you went through in my 20s. I was just absolutely wrecked. And if people are new to the show, know, you probably haven't heard, yes, I weighed 300 pounds, yes, I had chronic fatigue syndrome and toxin induced brain damage that Daniel Amen found and stuff that I've all been able to reverse. So I got obsessed with making my immune system work better because I was always sick. Like 15 years of antibiotics every month, like it was terrible. Maybe not every month for 15 years, but most months because of just chronic sinus infections and strep throat and all these things. And so colostrum has been like on my radar forever. But I am allergic to cow's milk, right? I can handle butter, most people do. And I can handle ghee. But if you give me a piece of cheese, it hits me like Casey morphine. And then I just get so tired. Like I'm unsafe to drive if you give me like a piece of mozzarella. And learning that was really useful because I'm also not employable if I eat cheese every day because I just fall asleep all the time. Like, it's gross. So not to mention farting. And so a lot of the colostrum that I tried was triggering dairy symptoms in me. But the colostrum that you invented, which is armor colostrum, I take that and my immune system works better, but I don't get any of the negative things I get from dairy. Why is it doing that?

It's such a great question. Because I too was in that position at this point in my life and I kind of uncovered this literature and I said, this is so. This is something that could be so beneficial for me. You know, these barriers are destroyed on a daily basis just by virtue of living in the modern world. And we can filter our air and eat organic food as much as we want, but at some point this is inevitable. So these barriers are under constant assault despite our best efforts. And when infants are born, they also have an issue with the barrier because when they're born, it's just leaky and immature. So colostrum evolved 300 million years ago specifically to be the first food that goes into an infant's body and seal up the barrier like glue to protect them. And it does that at any age. But here we are living in this modern era where everybody has an issue with dairy. And dairy intolerance is so rampant and myself included at this point, point in, in my journey of gut health, I was very sick. I had a very rare, strange complication. My entire colon collapsed in my abdomen. So I was in and out of the hospital with obstructions, unable to eat or drink for weeks and weeks at a time. I was very, very sick and close to death at a few stops along my journey.

How old were you? Were you still in like med school or your.

A few years ago, after I left, starting in 20. 19.

Okay, so if you don't mind talking about that a little bit, because were you like taking antibiotics? Is this exposure to E. Coli as a child?

I'm a child of immigrant parents who were very trusting of the medical system. And I was sick, sick all the time. I had a very dairy heavy diet here when I was young and I was getting sinus infections and strep throats all the time and rounds and rounds of antibiotics. Similar to you, perhaps on a monthly basis. It was that frequent. So I was definitely not in a position of robust health when I was faced with some of the stressors of my adult life, practicing medicine in this surrounding. But that was kind of where I found myself and I saw the evidence in the literature that this was something that could be so helpful to me to seal up my gut, to help me with nutrient absorption, to save a lot of the wasting away that was happening to me. But I was so afraid to take it because I could not tolerate dairy at that point. I was Having the same reactions that you were.

Let me ask you a question about that. So I've found that quite often when people have chronic strep and chronic sinus infections, in fact, almost always there's toxic mold in their home, and it's a trigger for it. Were you another mold person? It feels like mold is becoming more and more in our consciousness. Have you ever looked at that? Because I know people use colostrum to heal the immune damage from mold.

Absolutely.

Okay, so were you a mold person, too?

It's not something I explored, but I had. I have suspicions that was. That was the case. Yeah.

Anytime you see a kid with strep throat, every single month, you're like, look in the walls, look in the ceiling. Get a dust test. And what do you know? There's always mold. It's the thing that causes biofilms to form and makes strep more aggressive. And then strep can trigger pandas as well, which is an immune reaction to stress that makes you have OCD and odd and probably adhd. And I had those as a kid. Like, I would do the facial scrunching, a little bit of stuttering, and certainly the oppositional defiant disorder. I still have that. Anytime some regulatory agency douchebag says I'm not allowed to have access to peptides that are present in my own body, my oppositional defiance just gets triggered. I don't know why, but maybe that's a healthy thing that all free humans should have. I don't know. Anyway, I digress.

Back to colostrum, but like you, I was having reactions to conventional dairy, so I couldn't find a product on the market that I really felt would be safe to put in my body. I was in quite a fragile position at this point, but I wanted to try it. So I spent two years in R&D developing what is now Armra's proprietary technology. Call it cold chain biopotent technology. It's essentially a pasteurization technology that avoids the use of high temperatures so that all of those compounds retain the integrity of their raw form. Essentially, conventional dairy is an adulterated product. Once you pasteurize milk and you expose it to conventional methodology, which is very high temperatures, for a very short time, you change the shape of the peptides and you destroy some of the vitamins. And the way that bioactive things work in the body is they have a specific shape that fits a specific receptor. And when those match, like a lock and key, you activate a physiologic pathway in your cells. But once you expose that Peptide to high temperature and heat. It denatures, it unfolds, it changes shape. So once it goes into the body, the body doesn't recognize it anymore. The key doesn't fit the lock. In fact, it says, I don't know what this is, this is not a food. Right. It doesn't make sense that we would have a problem with dairy. Dairy is the first nutrition we all receive. It's a natural food for the body. Evolutionarily, it doesn't jive. It's the conventional milk that's an adulterated product that is no longer a food. And because the body doesn't recognize it, it triggers an inflammatory cascade and we have all sorts of intolerance reactions within the gut, the skin. There are several differences between the A1 beta casein and A2 beta casein proteins that are in milk in this country because of the breeding that was done on specific species of cattle that make the A1 casein highly inflammatory and also have some opiate like properties that can affect the brain as well as the gut. It's similar to gluten, it can be a very inflammatory particle.

I, I'm having a problem, a little bit of skepticism here. Like you've claimed that you're a medical doctor, right?

Yes.

And you just talked about the importance of grass fed dairy. Can this happen in the same brain? No. Thank you. Yes. Everything you just said. Yes, yes, yes. There was a shortage globally of grass fed butter in 2014 that was caused by bulletproof coffee. And I've been such a fan of grass fed for the environmental things, for the animal quality things or the human health things. And we need more people with your credentials talking about the fact they are not the same. No, but okay, I have been teaching people a two grass fed dairy, raw. If you can get it in your state, if you can't get it in your state, it's because your government is fascist. They don't have the right to tell you what to eat. They never did. It's not in the constitution. It's not a right you've consented for them to have. So you can just stop paying attention to government food recommendations. It's not their job. Like you pay them so that people don't steal money from you and that they don't harm you. Like that's, that's what governments are for, is keep you safe from violence. Not safe from choosing to eat the foods you choose. That's not their job. So let's say that you can buy raw A two grass fed dairy. Like I can I think. But if I drink it, I still get snot and I still get tired. Why does my body still not handle raw A2 dairy?

Hmm, that's a good question. You may be intolerant to some of the other compounds in that, in that.

Product, but armor colostrum doesn't do that.

Yeah, that's why I like it. What we've done at Armor Colostrum to really make it a robust and safe and well tolerated product is in addition to this cold chain process, which basically allows it to mimic a raw dairy product, all of the integrity of the compounds exist with the full bioavailability that they do in, in nature. It's not an adulterated product. So it's a better physiologic match for the body. We've also done is taken out some of the risk. So there's no casein in armor colostrum and there's no fat in armor colostrum. As you know, hormones, pesticides, any potential exposures are stored in fat tissue and casein to buffer against any risk of A one coming into that product. We really removed what could any of the potential inflammatory components of colostrum from armor colostrum. And what that allows us to do is also amplify all of the concentrations of the bioactives that are so essential to the health of the human mucosal barrier. So a lot, there's so much talk about IgG in colostrum and igg is super important. Everybody became an immune system expert during COVID and we're all talking about IGG. IGG's prevalent in the blood and it has a very specific purpose. But at these mucosal barrier surfaces, which is where 80% of your immune system lives. Makes sense, right? If you were guarding a castle, you put all your soldiers at the gate, not patrolling on the inside, you'd arm the entry points to this castle. Iga, the secretory immunoglobulin A is the most prevalent antibody that patrols these mucosal surfaces. And we have a very high concentration of that, even though it's a product from bovine colostrum from cows, which is the conventional way that we source colostrum. Human colostrum has more IGA and that has to do with differences in the placenta between the two species. But our product is more physiologically similar to what human body needs versus what a cow body needs. And so when you combine all those forces together, you get something that's really a synergistic match for the needs of the body. And when we did third party research. The armor colostrum confers 32% stronger antibacterial immune protection than the other stuff on the market. And it largely has to do with all this technology.

It's really interesting. So you went down and you said, all right, we're going to test different sources of dairy. I'm assuming what happens if you take soy and corn and grain fed cow and you take the milk from that cow and try and make colostrum from it, what happens?

So you're going to get colostrum, you're going to get a different composition of omega fats in that fat, but there's.

No fat in colostrum the way you do it, so.

Oh, the way we, exactly the way we do it. There is no, there is no fat.

But regular colostrum does have fat in it. Right?

Regular colostrum. Right. Whole colostrum does have fat in it. And you won't get the same concentration of nutrients. It's going to be similar, but it, but it's not going to be the same. You're not going to have the same concentration and degree of bioactive compounds within that colostrum and you risk contamination. I mean one of the things that we take so much care in is making sure that our product is glyphosate free, even though it's a fat free product. We test every batch for glyphosate. Very important to understand what, what the animals are feeding on and the circumstances in which they are being raised. Because stress itself changes the composition of the molecules in the body.

It's, it's interesting what happens when you just mistreat an animal. I think people are going to see coming up here a lot of people saying, oh, red meat's bad for you because of a combo called neu5gc. And it just so happens grass fed animals don't have that. It's just the grain fed animals. Bottom line is if you're feeding cows grains, it's bad for the cows, it's bad for the planet and it's bad for you. And that's just how it works, works. So I'm.

Yeah, healthy animals make healthy food for, for us to consume. It's really a beautiful circle.

Yeah, it's so it's pretty much. I almost feel like it's the food regulatory agencies that are allowing that kind of food, but not allowing us to have peptides like BPC157. Okay. I'm pretty sure that my interests weren't at heart there and I am looking to Create or to say, to continue to create this awareness in the world that says, wow. When I do it right, look how I feel. When I do it wrong, look how I feel. And that was why your stuff, the armor, caught my attention. And to be really clear, guys, I saw an ad from Sarah or from Sarah's team that said, you know, this is better than colostrum. And I'm thinking, yeah, right. I hear bullshit all the time. The time, Right. And people send me, like, pounds of whatever every month sometimes. Like, where did you get my address? Because I wouldn't try this product. I'm not here just to talk about everything out there. So I actually ordered your stuff under a fake name because.

Is that so?

Yeah. All right. Like, let's see if this is real. So then I tried it, and number one, it didn't cause dairy symptoms, which is different than most colostrum I've seen. Okay, there's something cool. And I looked at some of the results that you talked about online, and I said, okay, like, this has my attention. And I took it. And it's to the point that I'm leaving for Turkey. I'm doing an event there, like a small, intimate event where I'm spending five days teaching people biohacking. And then I'm going to Dubai. And I've also spent the last week in a hotel that had toxic molds. And my body is not that happy, and I'm very resilient to it, but I have, like. Like joint inflammation that is not native in my body anymore. So I'm out of armor. I took my last scoop when I left, and I had three packets left on my trip, and I took them, and now I need it because my barriers are compromised by mold. So we ordered. We spent 25 bucks on shipping to have the overnight thing so I can have a little. The canister of armor to take with me on this trip. And we'll see what they say when I cross the borders. But I'll smoke little packets taped to my ribs. I know it's going to come through.

But it saved my life. It saved my life, Dave. So I don't go a day without this stuff. My course kind of worsened. I ended up having to have a total colectomy a year ago. But on the road to recovery, I wouldn't be here without this product. And so my mission has always been to just educate as much as possible about this food from nature. Nature's first food. Because if I had this earlier in my course, it would have saved me a really difficult Road. And the benefits that I'm now appreciating and learning from my customers stem so far beyond just the kind of obvious immune and gut health benefits that you would expect with the product working at these areas. Because this is such a foundational pathway of the body and it's really combating the cycle of inflammation that so many people live under. The benefits are, I mean, knock on for the entire body. Almost sounds like snake oil. I mean, hair regrowth, skin rejuvenation, collagen reactivation in the skin, people's autoimmune conditions, disappearing allergies, never mind all of the fitness and performance benefits because of those growth factors and peptides. I mean, this stuff has traditionally been traded on the black market for that reason.

That was what I talked about earlier. Like the, the colostrum dealer, he was like getting it directly from Amish people with refrigerators. I gave. There was a whole story there. And by the way, the snake oil thing, the reason I laughed, the more foundational you go in biology. Like even if you go down to the mitochondrial layer, which is not that far down into the foundations, the effects are so widespread and so dramatic that people will say it's snake oil. But the reason that I really laughed is that back when Joe Rogan, I just on a show three times when he was trying to cancel me because he was an investor in a competing company. So he said overnight, like Dave's a snake oil guy without any evidence. But I did an April Fool's post and I said introducing at the time, it was when I was at bulletproof and it was introducing bulletproof snake oil. And our snake oil is better because it's grass fed and cold extracted and we spin the snakes at high speed to extract the oil and then release them into its snake sanctuary. Like all this stuff. And it was like a product launch for snake oil because yourselves, like this is helping people and that's how it is. And by the way, Joe, every time you say my name, I sell more coffee, even if you say, I'm a bad man. And it was so funny because every time someone says snake oil, it brings me joy. Because when you can affect broad spectrum immunity and tissue growth and tissue regeneration and your hair does grow back or your hair gets darker and your, your joints don't hurt and you stop farting or whatever things happen. In medical school, what did they teach you? If someone had all 10 of those symptoms, like, like, wouldn't that be a hypochondriac, right?

100%. Yeah, 100%.

And now, like, well, I have a product. You take this one thing and. And it's not a drug for one symptom. It's a. Not a drug, it's a food. And when it hits you, it affects everything. This is how it's supposed to be. Which is so cool.

Yeah.

All right.

None of this myopic. A pill for every part of the body the western model operates under. It's such a disservice to the orchestra of the body that's really just working in harmony.

It's a broken way of thinking. And the idea that one thing is the cause. Well, it's like if you punch yourself with your right fist, in your left fist. Well, which fist was the cause of pain? I don't know. Maybe you have to stop holding fists for it. Now you make that claim, though, that colostrum is better than collagen. And I kind of made collagen into a billion dollar industry category. So we gotta have a little throwdown here, Sarah. So why is barm. Colostrum better than collagen?

Well, they su. They serve different purposes. I take issue with the claims around collagen being specific, of specific benefit for hair, skin and nails. This kind of marketing association that's been created around what is essentially a raw ingredient. Collagen is what most of your body tissue is made up of. It is essential. It is the most important protein structure in your body, 100%. And I think that to extract specific benefits for hair, skin and nails in a targeted way, Colostrum is much better suited to the task because of its benefits at the cellular level for reactivating collagen stem cell. It reactivates your body's own stem cell collagen production, in addition to helping to heal that skin barrier against inflammation, pollutants, toxins, UV light, and then in terms of nail growth, hair regeneration for the follicles and the scalp micronutrient. These are all very specific and targeted ways that colostrum really confers far greater benefit for those use cases than collagen. Colostrum is not meant to be a protein supplement. It's meant to not meant to be a protein replacement. It's meant to restore and help you revive this foundational pathway in the body that so many people have, you know, disruption of just by virtue of living in the modern world. So they're different products.

So you're getting into something that is so important and something I. I mentioned a lot in my last book, the Smarter, not Harder book about biohacking. It's that the big Food industry used to say, oh, it's about calories. Like all calories are the same. So you could cancel out a Snickers bar with a Diet Coke, which is nonsense. So now though, they're like, oh, it's about protein, how much protein you're getting. By the way, here's an all protein gluten cookie. It's just gluten, protein and nothing else. And it's the same as a steak or a cricket or whatever nonsense fake world they're in. And it turns out, at least in the way I'm, I see things. And I think the way you see things, protein is a building block ingredient made out of amino acids. Right. And protein is also a signaling molecule because the way you assemble the amino acids, they go into words which are basically peptides, small peptides, and then you have polypeptides or bigger peptides, which are like sentences that are spelled out with amino acids. And then a complete protein would be like a paragraph made out of letters that are individual amino acids. And a sentence has different meaning. And to that point, there are a lot of different sentences in colostrum. Like these are the, you know, rebuild, regrow, hey baby, you gotta be strong kind of thing. So there's a lot of wisdom in that protein. The reason that I'm, I remain a fan of collagen peptides, which is what I've always sold, versus gelatin. Gelatin's a raw ingredient, useful for the body. But collagen peptides, especially the die in tripeptides. So these are two and three letter words like ifs, ands, and buts and thes. They're just useful. Those can signal because when they're floating around, the body goes, something must have injured my skin. Therefore, let me turn on more collagen production. So it's the signaling mechanism plus the presence of the raw ingredient where I've found studies that show those help. Now, is that going to be more powerful than a colostrum that doesn't trigger all the weird stuff that the old colostrum and that I don't use anymore did? So armor colostrum is going to say, hey, skin, you need to robustly heal. And if you have the raw ingredients present, it helps. So I agree with you.

Yeah, you need the raw ingredients.

Yep, they're. They're different things. And neither collagen peptides or armor colostrum is a complete protein source. They're signaling sources that also contain some protein, if that makes sense. And I think the armor is stronger. It's. It's because it, you're, you're dealing with all barriers and lots of people have experienced the hair, especially the speed of hair growth. And that may be a raw material or it may be a signaling thing from collagen. But I want to see what you think you everyone listening. If you try armor with or without having collagen present, I think you'll probably get the best benefit if you have about 20 grams a day of collagen as a building block so that when you get the signal from armor, then your body can most effectively use the signal, right?

Absolutely. The signal is no good if you don't have building blocks to put it into effect. So the combination is important. You know, it's important to have a whole food based diet with clean animal protein as your base. You want that foundation of healthy building blocks upon which you can supplement something like collagen peptides that you reference so that colostrum can do its work. Can't do its work if it doesn't have any concrete and cinder blocks to build. Anything new with. Just doesn't make sense.

Okay, so we have two people present. One of them eats grass fed steak and low inflammation vegetables, and the other one and takes armor and the other one eats fake burgers and a whole foods plant based diet with no saturated fat except from coconuts. And they take armor colostrum. Which one's gonna be healthier?

I would argue the first. I think the latter is starting at a huge disadvantage.

Wait a minute here. You're a medical doctor who's recommending steak and you know about grass fed dairy. I mean, where did you go to medical school?

This is crazy, Dave. I was excommunicated a while ago. So like all the good doctors, it's okay.

Yeah. I do think that having adequate animal protein and taking colostrum is a really good idea. But if you are plant based, you can't take colostrum because it is animal based. Or you could say, well, wait a minute, is armor colostrum within my ethical framework? If you are vegan, by the way, I was a raw vegan, so it's not like I'm not talking about myself here. There's one of three reasons. Or maybe all three. You think it's good for animals even though you're killing more animals. You're fake burgers. You think it's good for you, it's not. And you think it's good for the environment. The data is in. Rotting grass releases as much CO2 and methane as rotting grass inside a cow's stomach. It is not the cow's fault. It is the grass's fault. So if you continue that line of thinking, we should actually just spray glyphosate on everything because we can't have grass or cows in order to save the environment. So maybe there's a flaw in your logic. You'll have to deal with that one later and maybe sell your shares in Bayer Monsanto. But let's go back to what you're doing. Armor and grass fed and cows. Because one of the arguments that vegetarians will make, because vegetarians are okay with eggs and dairy. Right. And by the way, you can be a healthy vegetarian. It's harder, but you can do it. So what about stealing colostrum? This is like mother's milk. This is stuff that goes into making calves healthy. So aren't you taking away a vitamin vital nutrient from baby cows, you mean? Dr. U.

So no, the colostrum that we source for armor colostrum is strictly from grass fed cows and family owned dairy farms here in the US we have relationship with, with different dairy co ops and the, the interesting thing is that colostrum is produced in surplus. It's actually considered a waste product in the dairy industry because of the FDA's wisdom. You're not allowed to sell it to into the milk industry. It's considered a separate product, it's illegal, it's not part of this industry. So baby calves only consume about 50% at most of the colostrum that's produced. So we take the surplus after baby calves have fully fed, they're done receiving colostrum.

It would have been thrown away or fed to pigs if it was a regenerative farm. That's all that would've happened.

Yeah. So it's either repurposed for other veterinary use, it's discarded or the more lucrative thing that most conventional farms do now is they just ship it to China. There's a much larger colostrum market in China. They've been on this, onto this stuff for a very long time.

Traditional Chinese medicine knows a thing or two, don't they?

They do. So instead we take this surplus, we buy it from farmers, we upcycle it to produce our more colostrum. So baby calves, their needs get met first before anything is produced.

There's something else. And a lot of times the climate extremists will literally say farming needs to end for the sake of the planet. Which is one of the most insane things I've ever heard. But people believe that or somehow that animal farming will be nice to animals if you get rid of animal farming, we will have a sterilized Earth, no animals. There's a bit of an issue there that I think would cause the end of all, all of these larger life on Earth. But as a small farmer myself, I built a regenerative farm on Vancouver island with cows and sheep and pigs and chickens and eggs and.