Carol Matts says, "Bovine colostrum from New Zealand cows.
Yea or nay for those with dairy sensitivities?
If nay, what would you recommend instead?"
Carol, what is your goal?
If you want to make this more specific in the chat, write a little about what you're
taking it for.
So, I don't know.
I mean, I would say it's suspect if you have—if you have a dairy sensitivity, if this is immunological
in nature, your problem could be with casein, it could be with the whey proteins, it could
be with something more specific, it could be with specific antibodies.
It's very complicated, and so you're less likely to tolerate colostrum if you have a
known dairy sensitivity, but you can't really know without testing the colostrum.
So, you test it.
And then, let's see.
Carol says in the chat, "to settle a client's overactive immune system down."
Well, Carol, how is the overactive—in the chat, or let me know if you'd rather come
onboard so we can talk about this back and forth, but what specifically about the overactive
immune system are we looking at?
So, I would think maybe this is chronic inflammation that's not resolving, and then I'm thinking
more about arachidonic acid, DHA.
So, this is food sensitivities?
“Client reacts to everything.”
Okay, so if that means like food sensitivities across the board, then I don't think of that
as an overactive—
"She can take a supplement one time and then the next time it throws her over.
Same with food."
Okay, I might be wrong, but that sounds to me like an oral tolerance issue.
So, you put something in your mouth, it goes to your gut, and then your immune system decides
whether it's safe or whether it's not safe.
And the way that it decides that—first of all, it doesn't know anything when you're
born.
Your immune system is more or less a blank slate when you're born.
Now, you do have predispositions because you have genetics that impact categories of protein
fragments that you have the potential to make a decision about, but you are not ever born
having a tolerance or intolerance to something.
You are born with very broad genetics that say, “I will make decisions about this category,
I can't recognize this category, I will make decisions about this category.”
So, you eat food or take supplements, you put something in your mouth, you swallow it.
In your gut, your immune system says, “This might be something important, I'm going to
take it back to my home base, and I'm going to decide what to do about it.”
So, that home base is called the gut-associated lymphoid tissue, or GALT.
And the immune system deliberately takes—this is the good kind of "leaky gut."
So, your immune system is deliberately taking things into that lymph tissue, purposefully
taking fragments that are not completely digested for the purpose of making decisions about
it.
In the gut, how does it make that decision?
Overwhelmingly there are two pro-tolerance factors.
They are prostaglandin E2, which is made from arachidonic acid, the omega-6 fatty acid that's
found most abundantly in egg yolks and liver, and that is the direct target of anti-inflammatory
drugs, as well as high doses of EPA from fish oil, and probably a lot of herbal anti-inflammatories.
I will have to research this more, but right now I would say herbal anti-inflammatories,
I would put as a potential, depending on their mechanism of action, I would put them as a
potential problem here.
But absolutely the NSAIDs, the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories and probably acetaminophen,
which technically is not an NSAID but does behave like this.
And possibly aspirin.
Aspirin is in a very gray area here because although aspirin does not share the properties
of other NSAIDs that would predispose to chronic inflammation, it will lower prostaglandin
E2, and prostaglandin E2 is critical for oral tolerance in the gut.
So, I would target any potential anti-inflammatory in there as a potential contributor to this.
So, you need prostaglandin E2, made from COX-2 from arachidonic acid, made from everything
that everyone believes is inflammatory.
All the anti-inflammatory drugs, the Zone diet, almost everything written about inflammation
says prostaglandin E2 is inflammatory.
It is one of the two central causes of oral tolerance, of the immune system recognizing
that something is safe.
The other is retinoic acid made from vitamin A. So, to create a pro-tolerance environment,
you want no COX inhibitors being taken, you want sufficient arachidonic acid in the diet,
and you want sufficient vitamin A in the diet.
Then what are the factors that tell the immune system, this is not safe, and that is tissue
damage.
So, the immune system is basically saying, "I will make a decision about this.
To make this decision, I need data."
So, what are the data that things are okay?
Retinoic acid, prostaglandin E2.
What are the data that say this is not okay?
All the factors released during tissue damage because tissue damage is the number one sign
that something is harmful.
You can relate to this, right?
If you see someone by your house that you don't know, and you see that the window is
broken, you're like, "That dude is probably a burglar.
I'm not going to go say hi.
I'm going to call the cops."
But if you see someone next to your house that you don't know, and they're wearing a
suit and tie, and they have pamphlets, you're probably going to say, "That person is a Jehovah's
Witness.
I don't know if I want to let them in, but I bet they're nice people," and you're probably
not going to be afraid.
Or, depending on your predisposition, you may say, "I want to become a Jehovah's Witness
today," or "I want to engage in a theological debate with the Jehovah's Witnesses and invite
them in for coffee," which is what my grandfather always did.
You make those decisions based on the symbols that you see around.
Your immune system does the exact same thing.
So, if someone is—you talk about this person, the thing comes in and they're fine, then
the next time they take it, they don't tolerate it.
That sounds like they are programmed to decide that everything that comes in is a threat.
And so they take it, and it gets into their system and it doesn't do anything, but meanwhile
the immune system took a piece of that into gut-associated lymphoid tissue, and said,
"We need to program to make an army against this threat," and so it's the second time
that they took it that they have the reaction.
And so that means—again, get the arachidonic acid, get rid of the anti-inflammatories,
get the retinoic acid from the vitamin A, and thoroughly investigate any possible sources
of tissue damage in the gut.
I don't know if it's necessarily the gut.
It could be tissue damage somewhere else that then the things circulate into the gut, but
it's probably the gut because that's what's closest to the situation.
So, those are the things that I would be looking at.