Conversation With Michael F Roizen, MD: Colostrum and Immunity

Integrative Medicine: A Clinician’s Journal (IMCJ): I’ve always thought of you has more of a Cardiovascular person, not has a immunity person. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that on your focus on immunity right now on this particular call.

Dr. Roizen: I look at myself has wellness practitioner in general. When we wrote the book What to Eat When: A Strategic Plan to Improve Your Health and Life Through Food and the What to Eat When cookbook, we have a section on the immune system because it’s so important in overall defense. It turns out that immunity is evident from the heart attacks and strokes and it is related to COVID-19 and related to Coronavirus, it’s important.

One of the interesting things is in both the Kaiser studies and the Canadian National Studies, if you got the flu shot for 10 years in a row, you decreased your heart attack risk by 50 percent and your death from heart attack and strokes by 25 percent over that 10 year period. That’s because when you get the flu and when you get an immune response like that, you have such a degree of increased inflammation that it breaks off plaques.

In addition, it has is shown in this situation with Coronavirus and I’ll go through that in a second, you have an increased clotting mechanism has you essentially rev up your liver to produce clotting factors. What that’s done recently is that’s increased the risk of strokes just because of this immune response from having a death rate of nine percent nationwide, to now if you get Coronavirus and a stroke together, it’s a 90 percent risk of dying. Again, that’s because when you break off a plaque, if you don’t have much clotting, you can limit the size of the stroke, where has you have a lot of clotting with it, you end up having a much bigger stroke.

The immune system is composed of what we call innate or immediate and then acquired. The acquired, if you will, produces the antibodies. What we know about the innate immunity system is that you have a series of things. The oil layer of your skin protects you. You’ve got some cilia – little brooms like – inside your nose and bronchial tubes that help beat things out. You want not to be exposed to particles like air pollution, smoking or vaping. Those things inhibit that first line of defense. Then if something gets in, you have a system that says, ‘Hey, there’s something foreign here.’ It signals to your other systems, which is an antibody-making system, and a hand-to-hand combat system. The two of those work together to try and kill the viruses. But it’s also composed in your intestine of a lot of barriers that stop, if you will, the things you eat from getting to the inside of you. That’s an intestinal barrier. The point of this is that one of the things that I’m bringing up is that one of the real benefits of Colostrum is that it stabilizes and intensifies that intestinal barrier. We don’t know what it is that does that but there is a series of articles in several journals that discuss this issue.(identify source). A lot of them are done by Ray Playford, who’s a Gastroenterologist in Great Britain, on the benefits of Colostrum and strengthening that immune barrier in the intestines. Essentially, leaky gut, which is often accompanied by or from either food or some drugs, such as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. There, if you look at the symptoms of it, 80 plus percent of those go away when someone takes Colostrum.

That is why for athletes Colostrum boosts the immune function, which typically dips after strenuous exercise, and again, that decreases the ability for viruses and bacteria to get across the intestinal barrier and cause disease. But one of the things and the reason that athletes often use Colostrum is because when you train hard, you break the intestinal barrier that is one of the things that happens after a marathon, is you have an increased risk of infections. Partially, we think, due to the breaking of this intestinal barrier, which is antagonized by the Colostrum. That is one of the uses of it and one of the strengths of this in helping with that innate immunity.

Some people say that because Colostrum comes when mom’s give it to babies, human moms give it to human babies, it is to pass on the immunity from and prevent, we think, that break down in the intestinal barrier. It was often thought that it was because they’re giving immunoglobulins, that is Colostrum is very rich in immunoglobulins and that process, so it was thought, that these are functional on the intestinal wall in helping prevent the invasion of viruses, etc … through the intestinal wall. They’re acting, we think, in the gut not in the body. So it’s not that you’re absorbing the immunoglobulins, it’s that those immunoglobulins are functioning has part of your innate immunity in prevent infections.

IMCJ: Are you saying that what they do is they sit in the gut and they prevent other things from permeating through the gut into your body?

Dr. Roizen: Right. This is often referred to as leaky gut. One of the strongest treatments, if you will, or preventions of leaky gut is in fact Colostrum because it helps with this immune barrier. It helps with preventing bacteria from getting in because of the immunoglobulins but it also does something directly in strengthening that barrier and whether it’s the growth factors of the immunoglobulins, etc in Colostrum but nevertheless, in the pill form of Colostrum, so even in the area of Colostrum which has very little fat, the de-fatted components of it, it prevents that barrier from breakdown, from either exercise or from non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen or from aspirin. Those are the real studies that have been done on this. Yes, there also are a series of studies, really two studies from Italy where they looked at it as just taking it also prevents upper respiratory infection and decreases URIs by about 50 percent and since I thought you asked about the immunity, I thought that’s one of the interesting things that Colostrum does.

IMCJ: It’s very interesting that you talk about Colostrum because when you see most of the press about immunity, they talk about Vitamin C and Zinc being the two big components for fighting immunity. Do you think Colostrum ranks right with these two?

Dr. Roizen: What we know about Vitamin C and Zinc lozenges is that if they are taken in high doses after you get an infection, they shorten the duration of the common cold. They don’t shorten the duration of flu. They don’t shorten the duration, as far as we know of the other Corona viruses but they do of the common cold. What Colostrum is different in that it prevents infection and it prevents the break-down of the gut in form leaky gut. I look at them as different and complimentary. Meaning, you can have chicken soup or you can have zinc lozenges or you can have vitamin C and they all seem to do the same thing in shortening the duration of the common cold. Colostrum isn’t one of the ors on that, meaning you can have chicken soup or Colostrum.

IMCJ: What can people do to boost their immunity during this crisis?

Dr. Roizen: What we know about immunity is that you have a series of things. The oil layer of your skin protects you. You’ve got some cilia – little brooms like – inside your nose and bronchial tubes that help beat things out. You want not to be exposed to particles like air pollution, smoking or vaping. Those things inhibit that first line of defense. Then if something gets in, you have a system that says, ‘Hey, there’s something foreign here.’ It signals to your other systems, which is an antibody-making system, and a hand-to-hand combat system. The two of those work together to try and kill the viruses. What helps? Sleep, a little exercise, good nutrition, a multivitamin. … Stress management.”

There are a lot of things that boost immunity. Vitamin D is one of those reported to boost immunity. Curcumin is reported to boost it. … You want more fruits and vegetables on your plate. That’s tough at this time because we aren’t going out for fresh fruits and vegetables, so use the frozen ones. They usually have as much nutrients as the fresh ones. If you can’t get those, you do want to make sure you take a mutlivitamin morning and night.

Colostrum actually has a different mechanism of action and prevents the infections in the first place, both upper respiratory infections and it prevents the break down of the gut barrier and GI infections.

IMCJ: Along with it, do you recommend a probiotic or a prebiotic?

Dr. Roizen: Yeah. In other words, they’re different. In fact, if you look at the data and, has you know, I speak and write about the values of a probiotic and a prebiotic but if you look at the data, this is a much better prevention strategy than that. Not that that isn’t good, this would be an and to that.

IMCJ: Do you find it more helpful for people who are just normal, healthy adults versus people who are compromised for one reason or another with some type of chronic health issue like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or something like that?

Dr. Roizen: Let me tell you how I got to research this the first time. My sister has arthritis, she’s an older sister. She has knee arthritis. Her orthopedic or knee doctor was warning her against ibuprofen because of its GI effect, the fact that it broke down the GI barrier and often caused gastrointestinal problems. So he was saying, “I’d rather you take just Tylenol, even though it isn’t quite has effective at pain relief.” So she was on a maximum dose of Tylenol and asked me how serious is the problem with Ibuprofen. So, I looked on the data on Ibuprofen and it’s a fairly significant cause of both gastrointestinal distress, GI bleeding, as well as a breakdown of that or cause of leaky gut. When I was researching that I came across this set of articles and there are seven articles I came across. The best one in my opinion is titled “Bovine colostrum is a health food supplement which prevents NSAID induced gut damage” that was published in the May 1999 BMJ Gut issue.

But there are literally a series of them. Another one, “Zinc carnosine works with bovine colostrum in truncating heavy exercise-induced increase in gut permeability in healthy volunteers” was published in the August 2016 issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. And another one “Co-administration of the health food supplement, bovine colostrum, reduces the acute non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug-induced increase in intestinal permeability” But anyway there are a series of these, including one in the New England Journal on both treatment of Ulcerative Colitis and more series GI diseases, Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis with this.

So, when I thought about this and I wrote a column for a hundred newspapers, a daily column. So I started to write about this now and one of the fears Docs have about giving aspirin has a preventive against heart attacks and strokes and cancer is that aspirin causes GI bleeding. This actually looks like it, but there haven’t been randomized studies with this, just with NSAIDs, but aspirin is a prototypical NSAID. That it looks like this would be a great way relatively inexpensive as well as prevents that GI problem from Aspirin or Ibuprofen. I would say for all the people who want to take aspirin to prevent cancer, it decreases, for example, breast cancer by about 30 percent with just baby aspirin twice a day. It decreases 11 cancers. Baby aspirin does but people don’t take it and doctor’s don’t advice it as much as they probably would if they knew the data on this.

It’s almost crazy because if you will, when I stumbled across these articles, I then tried to find out how you get Colostrum and I couldn’t find that out until I got called about joining the scientific advisory board of PanTheryx of Boulder, Colorado and all of a sudden I found out you don’t have to have Colostrum right from the cow, you can get it in capsule form this way and get the same benefits. It was crazy that it was through synchronicity that I found out these two things happened at the same time.

IMCJ: I think that’s amazing. Good. Do you think that as far as fighting COVID-19, it’s viable?

Dr. Roizen: I don’t, there is no data on it for fighting COVID-19 that I know of. No ones done that study.

When I went to a seminar, we had a mandatory seminar at the Cleveland Clinic yesterday at noon for all, I’m a primary car doc and for all of us primary care docs, an update from our hospitalist group on the treatments for COVID-19, we have 26 protocols in place at the Cleveland Clinic on it. But you know there are 23 hundred articles written, scientific publications on COVID-19 in the last two months. There are 11 hundred plus treatments now in some form of study for Coronavirus. So, I haven’t seen any on Bovine Colostrum. I checked clinicaltrials.gov, which is a site that you register all the clinical trials on, there are over 11 hundred trials of drugs registered on clinicaltrials.gov and not one involving Bovine Colostrum. I don’t know that we can say it’s a treatment at all.

But the interesting thing I learned when I talked to George Stagnitti last week to ask him that very question. He said that cows from different parts of the country, this is Bovine Colostrum from cows from the entire country but in different parts of the country, he said cows get exposed to different corona viruses and probably form some intestinal antibody against it. But he didn’t know whether any were against the spike protein or this virus directly, nor did he know of any studies relating to that. So, I can’t, I don’t feel comfortable.

IMCJ: Going back to what you originally talked about the Colostrum for newborns that they’re getting from their mothers helps the babies build their immunity system.

Dr. Roizen: Oh, yeah. That’s definitely true.

IMCJ: Reasonably you would think that if you were taking it, you would help your immunity system and you’d be able to fight a virus like the Coronavirus?

Dr. Roizen: That’s a very logical statement and absolutely what I would say but the problem in medicine is we try and disprove all of our logical statements and many of them we’re able to disprove. But I would say what we do know about this is it does prevent intestinal breakdown for some of the drugs that help control fever, such as the ibuprofen and aspirin. We do know it decreases upper respiratory infection in general and we do know, so if you’re worried about having to fight two things at once, the worse situation. Having to fight Coronavirus and a common cold at once, this will help decrease that risk, so it’s not a treatment, it’s a preventive in that sense.

IMCJ: It would also assist in making sure that those drugs that you’re taking are going to get into your system.

Dr. Roizen: Yes. That’s exactly right. That is one of the ways that Coronavirus, we think, attacks us. Because the Coronavirus does get in some how through our intestine, that is GI symptoms are present in over 90 percent of people with Coronavirus.