Is Cow Colostrum Safe to Take?

Interviewer:     When it comes to supplemental colostrum, you said predominantly that comes from cows?

Dr. Keech:  Yes.

Interviewer:     Correct? Does the body recognize that as the same as a human colostrum?

Dr. Keech:  Well, cow colostrum and human colostrum are very similar, but very different.

Interviewer:     Okay.

Dr. Keech:  The difference between the cow colostrum and the human colostrum, primarily the IgGs. We have bovine IgG and we have human IgG. They are different. That's why you can never take bovine IgG and intravenously inject that into the body, because the body will go into anaphylactic shock. So why am I taking cow colostrum in the form of human? Well, you take it to you put it orally in the gut, because technically the gut is still small intestine that too but it's outside of the body.

Now, you are going to have issues if your gut is very poor. So and those bovine IgGs into the body, you are going to cause an innate immune response. However, if you take colostrum with the peptides and that the peptides like I said before, if that happens, the peptides are going to modulate that Th2 immune response.

As long as your cow colostrum has the peptides in it and now the same peptides in all mammals, like I said at the beginning, then the body is not going to trigger innate immune response. So and we choose to, I mean, if we could get it from humans we would. But I don't think they are going to like me hanging outside of maternity hospitals with you know, "Hey want to collect the colostrum." That's not ethical.

Interviewer:     No.

Dr. Keech:  And you can't get enough. So the industry made a decision few years ago. Well, where can we get colostrum from? And the most abandoned source is from cows. And over the 30 years longer of people taking cow colostrum as a supplement where have you seen adverse side effects. You know, we just did a, there is a panel on, I'm on colostrum panel and we just recently did a huge literature survey on the safety aspects of cow colostrum.

And we've really, they've really had a hard time trying to find any negative contraindications of taking colostrum from cows to humans. They really looked and we have two companies that did it and concluded that basically it seems safe.