A Founder’s Journey to Colostrum (with CEO Dr. Sarah Rahal)

0:02When you are pioneering anything or introducing new ideas to the culture, you get criticized. You do? Yeah. Did you hear about that? I didn't find the one. I found someone I respected and we made it the one. In a sort of longing kind of view of love, people understand each other as if by magic. Nothing in itself is addictive on the one hand. On the other hand, everything could be addictive if there's an emptiness in that person that needs to be filled. I now know that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when you change your energy, you change your life. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. This is the Goop Podcast, bringing together thought leaders, culture changers, creatives, founders, and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers, and seekers here to start conversations because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world.

0:58Here we go. Gwyneth's guest today is Dr. Sarah Rahal, founder and CEO of Armra Colostrum. She is a double board certified pediatric neurologist trained by way of Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. Prior to founding Armra, she was assistant professor of neurology in pediatrics and the director of pediatric headache medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Today, Sarah joins Gwyneth to share her personal journey and how she came to found Armra, a company focused on colostrum products. Sarah explains the nutrient makeup of colostrum, the role of the body's mucosal barrier, how this barrier can be impaired, and what she does to bolster her gut health and overall health.

1:44Let's get to the conversation.

1:49I'm so curious about your background. You are obviously one of these physicians that are MDs that are, I love seeing out there in the world so much. When I started asking questions to MDs and talking about wellness and asking about gut health and mitochondrial health and all this stuff, all these years ago, they didn't believe in a gut brain access. They didn't believe in inflammatory diseases or downstream diseases from metabolic stuff. And everyone thought I was nuts. So I love, love, love getting to meet MDs like you who are, and by the way, there's a really a much broader trend of MDs who are thinking about health in such incredibly different ways and from such different angles.

2:39So I guess I would love to just start a little bit with, with your journey and then tell me about your unique approach. So I, I grew up in New York, but my came from immigrant parents. My parents are Lebanese. So I think part of the cultural trend is your child's going to become a doctor. That's the highest calling of profession. Right. I grew up very much with this in my mind, but I'm always drawn to science, specifically the brain, but found it very fascinating. And so I was on this very relegated path. You know, it's very carved out for you. you go to undergrad, then you go to medical school and you, and you get your training and become a resident, you become a fellow, you do more training, you kind of work your way up the hierarchy.

3:27And I've always been somebody, someone with a, quite a curious spirit, ask a lot of uncomfortable questions. I can relate. Yeah. And regardless of where you go, frankly, whether you are in an allopathic medicine route, which I was, I trained as a pediatric neurologist, had a background in specifically in chronic pain and headache in kids. So I ran a very busy practice out of Columbia and Mount Sinai in New York before I ultimately left. But any paradigm becomes dogmatic. So whether you're in an allopathic route, learning how to treat based on the Western model of medicine, or even as I turned to functional medicine training, which became part of my arsenal of how I was able to help patients, also very prescriptive.

4:14It also becomes dogmatic in its own way. There's just a way to do things. And I had a very holistic framework that I brought to my practice in environmental medicine, a lot of epigenetics and functional medicine lens and ancestral medicine lens, a quantum biology lens. My undergraduate background was in physics. I did a lot of nanotechnology research while I was and undergrad. So very interested really in the nature of reality and our experience of the world energetics. And so I really brought a, brought a full toolkit to my practice and was very frustrated with the barriers to delivering good care that I found in the hospital.

5:00Well, like such as what? You really, your hands are tied for doing what's in the patient's best interest. And in my case, I'm treating very young children, sometimes as young as three, four years old with chronic daily pain issues. You know, you have to be an investigator. You have to unearth what the underlying factors are to address them in the way that serves them long-term. And for all the reasons I went into medicine, which is to help people, not to just keep people in and out. And so I was really frustrated with my practice because I just couldn't deliver care from a place of integrity in the way I wanted to.

5:44But while I was in, while I was practicing, I got sick with my own pretty severe gut health issues, which had kind of been brewing for probably my whole life since teenage years. But I always chalked it up to stress. And then you're in medical school and you're in residency and you, you're not sleeping for 40 hours at a time. I mean, it's, it's abnormal to not be sick and suffering under those circumstances. So I really wrote things off, but I was suffering from these really intractable, unexplainable bouts of very severe abdominal pain that would leave me in the bathroom for hours, unable to move.

6:32Oh my gosh. And I was pretty written off when I went to seek care. Here I am with all my training, all my background, probably the best advocate I could be in medicine. And even my smartest doctor colleagues couldn't help me. So I already had this seed planted of all these other ways of approaching wellness from my professional training. But now here I am in my personal experience trying to help myself while I'm delivering care to these kids in my practice. So at a certain point, I just couldn't proceed in good conscience anymore, practicing medicine the way I had to practice and taking care of myself.

7:19And so I left medicine. But my goal at the time was really to build something that could serve more kids than I ever could one-on-one in an office. that's really where I started. And I was researching at the time milk because I saw it as such a ripe area for disruption. 80 % of kids receive infant formula at some time in their development. And if you read the label on any of these formulas, it's regardless of the label on the front, it's the same recipe. And the ingredients are things like corn syrup solids and maltodextrin and a lot of seed oils. And we can do so much better than that. So I really thought there was an opportunity to disrupt that market.

8:09So I was doing a lot of research on milk and specifically colostrum, which is the first milk all mammals produce. Make it for about 48 to 72 hours after delivery. it's food, but it, it's so much more than that. It is chock full of all of these bioactive compounds, these micronutrients and antibodies and immunoglobulins and tissue growth factors and bioactive compounds and regenerative peptides that can't be found anywhere else in nature. and they work synergistically, almost like a blueprint for the body, the optimized development of all the different pathways very early in life. And what I was so struck by is as I'm combing through the literature, I wasn't just seeing studies saying, this is really helpful for babies, but there were over 5 ,000 research publications talking about its benefits at other ages.

9:11And I said, why have you never heard about this before? And why is this stuff for babies so helpful if you take it at other ages? And what I came to appreciate is that colostrum does something very specific in the body that nothing else does. It seals up all the barriers. And what that means is just like we have skin as this physical barrier on the outside, separates us from the outside world, protects us. We have a barrier that lines the entire inside of the body called the mucosal barrier. It lines our eyes, nose, mouth, sinuses, lungs, gut, urinary, reproductive tract. It's like skin on the inside.

9:55It's the interface between everything we inhale and ingest from the environment and our bloodstream. All these modern issues are driven by the environment that very rapidly changed post-industrialization with the introduction of all these new chemicals into circulation that were never tested for their safety or effects on human health. And they exist as pollutants in our air and pesticides in our agriculture. What do they do to that barrier? So all of these modern compounds, when they come into the body, they disrupt the integrity of the barrier. And that barrier has four layers to it. And when it becomes disrupted, it's more permeable than it's supposed to be.

10:47That allows things to get into the body that aren't supposed to be there. And what is like the action, what are the mechanics of how it disrupts it? It's because like the lining recognizes it as something potentially harmful. Is it an inflammatory response? It's multifaceted because the different kinds of compounds impair the barrier at different points of entry or in different ways. For example, gluten, for example, is very toxic to a specific protein called the zonulin protein. Zonulin protein, if you can think of your gut barrier as a lining of cells, and I'm just talking about the physical barrier now.

11:32There's three other layers we haven't talked about, but the gut barrier has a single layer of cells. And those cells are connected to one another like Legos with a little protein in the middle that connects one to the other. That's a zonulin protein that connects those. So when you have a compound like gluten come into the body and break down zonulin, you now have no connection between the cells of your gut. So those cells now separate and you have a porous barrier. I've always wanted to understand that. So thank you. That's one example. So that's one example for gluten in particular. Then you have different kinds of compounds.

12:18This is a perfect opportunity to talk about the four layers. So we just talked about one, which is a physical barrier. So if you can think of your barrier as a castle, right? It's like, how do you guard a castle? from entryway. Well, you have a castle wall, this physical barrier that keeps things out. So those are the cells that line up. You also have a moat. You have a moat. That's like the mucus layer that lines your barrier. And when I talk about a barrier, I'm not just talking about a barrier in your gut. Your barrier is at every interface in your body. And this is where the whole probiotic craze starts to fall apart in its impact because we think about it as just targeting the gut.

13:08Gut is very important, but you have barriers in your respiratory tract, in your sinus tract, in your urinary tract, in your reproductive tract. These are all portals of entry that can drive inflammation when the barrier is impaired. So we're talking about the mucus layer, we're talking about this sticky mucus stuff like a castle moat. And that's what it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be kind of sticky. And so things get stuck in it so they can't easily pass into the body. And it's also provides scaffolding for the microbiome. The microbiome is the population of beneficial bacteria, viruses, fungi, yeast that live along these barrier surfaces and have a whole host of roles that they are helpful with in helping us to generate certain hormones and chemical signals that drive metabolism and brain health and the like.

14:04So your microbiome is housed along this barrier. That's a third layer, your microbiome, but it lives there and it sticks to the barrier and it doesn't wash away because it gets to stick onto the sticky stuff like the mucus and the mucus layer. And it feeds off of food in the mucus layer that is made by fiber. So when we talk about prebiotics, we talk about fiber, we talk about how to maintain the population of helpful microbiome species. We're talking about how we seed fiber into this mucus layer along your barrier. And then the fourth layer to this barrier is your actual immune cells. So if you were guarding a castle, you would put most of your soldiers at the gates of entry, right?

14:58Not walking around in the hallway of the castle, you put them at the gates of entry. And that's exactly what our immune system does. 80 % of your immune cells live at these barrier surfaces. We all became experts on IgG and IgM, you know, during the last few years of the pandemic. Those are antibodies that live in the bloodstream, but at these barrier surfaces, that's actually where most of your defense is. That's where most of your immune cells are housed, 80 % of them. And the predominant type of antibody or immunoglobulin that lives along these surfaces is something called IGA. And so there are some key host defenses that we put along these barriers because again, we are guarding the castle and this is where we want the most robust area of defense.

15:51It's not that these compounds are in and of themselves dangerous. It's that we did not co-evolve with them. So we don't have the system doesn't know how to exactly it doesn't know what to do so when they get into the body too our body doesn't recognize them and it triggers the immune system inappropriately and that's inflammation with which underlies almost every single modern chronic health complaint so why is it that these functions continue to fail and sort of become you know you would think if there's four steps to protection and they all fail, like, why does it lead to sort of permanent openings in the joint of this mucosal barrier that things can pass through?

16:41Is it because we keep bombarding our systems with all of these forever chemicals? It is by no mean permanent. Your barriers regenerate every two to three days for the entire barrier. If we keep eating and drinking and That's right. You can, you can filter your air and eat organic and buy the clean home products all you want, but there's so much that we encounter on an everyday basis that is just unavoidable. And so these barriers are under constant assault, despite our best efforts. And what's so remarkable about colostrum is that just like we live in this modern world where the barriers are constantly being subjected to these, you know, novel exposures in the forms of chemicals and toxins.

17:30So they're breaking down when babies are born. These barriers also have a problem because they're immature. So colostrum naturally evolved in mammals 300 million years ago, specifically to be the first thing that goes in to an infant's body after they're born and seal everything up like glue.

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19:01What percentage do you think of chronic disease comes from this chronic inflammatory state? almost every modern health complaint. And we're talking about big stuff all the way down to the everyday health complaints people have like unwanted weight gain, mental fog, bloating, acne, rashes, even aging, age-related changes have all been linked to integrity of this barrier and inflammation. And this research, thousands of studies are cropping up every year, making this link. And it's starting to make its way into mainstream because probiotics got really popular and we're starting to address cellular health in these other ways.

19:47But this is really the next chapter because once we understand at a fundamental level that what's happening at the barriers and in these cells is really a cellular health regeneration to regenerate and repair these cells. It's happening at this level of the mitochondria with mitochondrial regenerators and antioxidant protectors that are all fueling the natural cyclical repair and regenerative processes in ourselves, we're starting to get closer and closer to really the quantum underpinnings of us as a, as a physiologic being. Can we go back for a minute to your health crisis, this incredible abdominal pain?

20:38So here you are a doctor. You're also at this point, a functional medicine doctor as well. Yes. So I suppose when you're a doctor and it's your own health crisis, like there must be some obfuscation or clouding around your own, you know, trying to create your own or get to the bottom of your own diagnosis or underlying condition. But how did you come to figure out what was going on with you? Were you the person who figured it out? So, and what was it? What happened? Yeah. My health continued to deteriorate as I was doing this research to the point where my, my entire colon, my entire large intestine collapsed in my body and herniated outside.

21:23What is a very exceedingly rare complication that no doctor had ever seen before. And it was absolutely horrific. Holy shit. I lost almost half my body weight. I was like 55 pounds. I couldn't absorb any nutrition. I was too sick to have surgery that I needed. And my intestines were twisting on themselves. And so I couldn't eat or drink for long periods at a time. I was in and out of the hospital and I came across this research and I was so struck by what I was reading about colostrum because I said, I can't absorb any nutrition in my gut. I can't tolerate food. I really want to try this. I really just need to get strong.

22:17And I looked to the market to find some colostrum and I couldn't really find anything that was reliable. I couldn't tolerate dairy at that point. And so many people can't tolerate dairy, which as you and your listeners, I'm sure know that it doesn't make a whole lot of evolutionary sense. Dairy is the first natural nutrition for all of us. Why does everyone have so much intolerance nowadays? And what we now appreciate, it's not the dairy, it's the processing that's so problematic. Those high temperatures, when we talk about a bioactive food, all those molecules I was speaking of, they work in the body because they have a specific shape that fits a specific receptor in the cell.

23:05And that fits like a lock and key and triggers a cascade of physiologic activity. And when you expose this food to very high temperatures, as is done with conventional pasteurization, all these proteins change shape. They unfold. They denature. The fats get oxidized and some of the vitamins get destroyed and all the enzymes that help you digest the dairy get destroyed. So what you're left with is a very adulterated product that no longer fits the lock and key mechanism anymore. In fact, the body sees this as, I don't know what this is, and triggers an inflammatory reaction. So I spent two years almost in R &D developing what is ARMRA's proprietary cold chain biopotent pasteurization technology.

23:58I was doing this for myself right now because nobody's coming in. I learned Gwyneth that nobody's coming to save you. You have to figure it out for yourself, right? You got to pick yourself up and you got to figure it out at the end of the day. You make it work. And so with the intestinal fortitude that I had last at that point, I was, I was creating something for myself. So I did, I created this technology so that I could try colostrum. I created this technology so that I could create a colostrum product that mimicked raw dairy, retained the biointegrity of these nutrients, didn't have casein in it or fat or any of the properties of dairy that could confer exposure to anything I didn't want.

24:49It was just pure potent bioactive nutrition. Just like for my own edification, how do you go about this? It's like you're at home, you're trying to solve a problem for yourself. I mean, mostly I'm in the hospital on the floor, making calls, taking meetings with IVs in my arm, just trying to figure it out. Hmm. What is the current state of research on, on colostrum? And are there like certain, have there been double blind, you know, placebo studies on it? Like how, how much is this kind of like, you know, a validated nutrient? Well, there are over 5 ,000 research publications that already exist on colostrum.

25:36And there's a lot of new research coming out and a lot of meta-analyses. Meta-analyses are studies that look at composites of studies. So we can pool a lot of patients together and make greater findings about the efficacy of certain products. So we, there is a lot of existing research and it's been leveraged for thousands of years, dating back to Ayurvedic medicine for its healing properties in the body. It's got a very long, well-vetted history of use. The dawn of man, it's been around and honed by evolution. We've also done third-party research on our product because armor colostrum is its own thing.

26:15It's really a pure and bioavailable colostrum concentrate, and it's because of the technology that we use. So there's quite a lot of research, but again, a lot of the kind of very formal studies that are done on products are sponsored by pharmaceutical companies and there's financial interests and colostrum is a natural product. So the, the kind of research that exists is not necessarily with that pharma lens of the double blind placebo control long-term studies. So who is a candidate to take arm rot? It is a natural food for humans though. Like for example, I have, you know, leaky gut, I have inflammation stuff I've been dealing with forever.

27:06I have breastfeeding women who take it to, to, to let it pass through milk all the way up to 95 year old women on 17 medications. It's a food. So it, and it's very safe. That said, And it does have lactose in it. So it's not vegan. So it's not, it's certainly not vegan, but there is a small amount of lactose in it. So the serving size is so small. It's just half a teaspoon, one gram. So I have a lot of lactose intolerant patients and a ton of dairy intolerant customers who take it and thrive, do really well with it.

27:52So how does it work with other supplements that, you know, aren't sponsored by pharmaceutical companies like, you know, magnesium, because there aren't double blind placebo back studies on those things either are there, but there's less likely to be for natural products. There are some, but, you know, even some, even you think of some of the most widely used and kind of accepted supplements like collagen, for example, those studies don't exist. But we also, we have to take a step back. And I'm a scientist and I'm a researcher and I've been in the lab in my hooded white suit so as to not get dust on anything.

28:36I've been part of this process of really grounding and vetting in the research that we can do. The hubris of us as humans sometimes to think that we can very myopically look at a substance, break it into its constituent parts and say that we fundamentally understand all the reasons why it's helpful. And if we can't replicate it in a lab, it doesn't exist. I look to so much of the research that interests me right now, which is a lot about light and sunlight and its impact on the mitochondria and structured water within our bodies and how that can never be replicated in a lab. And the interplay of us as living beings interacting with the natural world, which we evolved into and are very much a part of, you can't kind of tease one apart from the other, measure it in isolation, and make sweeping generalizations about it.

29:45We have to be really thoughtful and humble about how we approach a lot of the scientific work that we do. Is this something just in terms of wanting to really scale the company and is it, is it, would you participate kind of in more research study like that around colostrum? Sure. We've done our own bench research and clinical clinical research, and we have some really compelling outcomes for those. Like what tell, give me some bullet points. One of my favorite, because it had just so close to my heart, but on the, on the bloating front, on the gut front, just in two months, taking two scoops.

30:26So what, so what, one, one teaspoon of Armra a day, 86 % of customers relieve their bloating, 89 % improve their muscle building, endurance and recovery. Muscle is an interesting one because what I found out is colostrum has actually been traded on the black market for decades because it is well known for those growth factors and peptides are exceptional at accelerating lean muscle building and tissue recovery and repair for after intense exercise. So I think that's really remarkable as part of a performance routine, especially as we think more about the, the importance of maintaining muscle mass as we age.