Center for Nutritional Research - All about Colostrum

Doug and Kaye Wyatt’s story. From ‘Peptide immunotherapy, Colostrum: A physician’s Reference Guide’ By Andrew M Keech, PhD

Colostrum remained largely forgotten until 1994 when a man in Utah rediscovered its amazing qualities in his search for relief from his wife’s intolerable suffering.  That man was Doug Wyatt, and it was his efforts to find relief for his wife Kaye that opened the door to the rediscovery of the many health benefits of colostrum and began the nutraceutical revolution that continues today.  Here is Doug and Kaye’s story in Doug’s own words:

The beginning of the story of colostrum begins for us in 1994.  In 1994, my wife, Kaye, came to me and asked me to help her find a way to die.  It was the most shocking experience, the most emotional experience, that I had ever had up until had that point.  I’m a Vietnam veteran.  I’m a Marine pilot, and I flew helicopters in Vietnam.  That process, that emotional process for me was nothing compared to what happened that day when Kaye came to me with this startling request.

I have to be very honest with you about this.  At that point in time we had tried everything that the medical community had to offer, everything that the alternative community had to offer, every natural healing supplement, Chinese medicine, herbal products, homeopathic products, acupuncture…everything that you could imagine that was available up until that point in time, and nothing worked.  The problem was that Kaye, when she was an infant, had had her thymus gland irradiated by a medical doctor.  The thymus produces T cells, and if any of you have read any literature on AIDS, you understand what T cells are.  They are the thing that we measure as a component to see how well the immune system is functioning during the process of an onset of AIDS and other immune diseases, like Hepatitis C, etc.  If you can’t produce T cells, in essence, you cannot ward off infection because they are the backbone of this, the very cornerstone of our immune system and how well it functions.  So [it was] Kaye’s inability to produce [T cells], with her thymus gland mostly destroyed through this treatment process, that, by the way, happened to about a half a million Americans, most of which are not alive today, and it was one of the big medical mistakes that took place in the ‘50s.

So the only thing that we had left at that time was prayer, and that prayer was in earnest.  I have to tell you that we were honestly blessed out of that process because the very next morning I was working with a friend of mine who happened to have a couple of PhDs, and I didn’t know about one.  We were working on a financial issue for the State of Wyoming, and I found out during that process that he was also an MD, a naturopathic doctor, who had been trained in Europe.  We got into this because he said, “Doug, you’re not here with me this morning.  We’re not going anyplace, and I want you to talk about it.  I know that might be difficult, but something is really going on.”

So we started talking about the history of Kaye’s process.  Kaye’s a very private person, and we’d never shared this.  We hadn’t shared this with her family, so I had no reason to share it with anybody outside of our relationship other than the medical professionals we were working with to try and find a process to deal with it.  During that conversation he asked me if I had looked into bovine colostrum.  This was really not all that long of a conversation.  It was one of the first things that he actually went to, and it was something that I’d missed because it wasn’t sitting on the shelf of the health food stores and none of the practitioners in the United States at that time thought about it, and of course, most of them are vegans, so you couldn’t possibly get well from something that came from a cow.

It clicked with me, and I went, wait a minute, we’re a mammal, we’re not a plant.  Plant phytochemicals are basically what we continue to look for.  We look for those with drugs.  We’re down in the Brazilian rainforest and we’re hunting for everything in the world and we create plant phytochemicals and that’s what becomes our pharmaceuticals, but wait a minute, these are single action substances, and we’re talking about an immune system here that isn’t working, and I don’t believe there’s any one single substance on the planet that is going to replace Kaye’s immune system.  And I guarantee you there is not one single substance on the planet that will replace or provide a modulation for a human or a mammal’s immune system except one thing and that is the immune system’s components itself.

So when I was given this reward the next morning, which I felt was heaven sent, I immediately thought back to the time when I was a child when I worked on my grandfather’s ranch in Southern Idaho.  Every summer that was my summer experience.  I got sabbatical out to put up the hay and milk the cows and brand the cows and cut the cows and go combine wheat, and I knew the calves, the horses, the foals, that this baby calf would die if it didn’t get colostrum within 8 hours after birth.  That was the end of it.  That was how the immune system was passed on.  So colostrum was the immune system, and it came to me at that point in time.

I bought a quarter pound of dried colostrum from this guy.  He was actually drying it in his kitchen, of all places.  He was getting it from a local dairy farmer.  You have to dry it, or you don’t have any shelf life.  You don’t want to throw colostrum away in two weeks because you only get it for one or two days out of the cow after birth, right after birth.  So I took this home, and Kaye said, “You paid what for what?  You take it back!”

I had a couple of abstracts that I’d been able to get out of him.  He had a little bit of information on anti-inflammatory action and pain relief in colostrum, gastrointestinal, immune support, etc., and the fact that it imparts immunity to everything that the mother had been exposed to in her life.  So this made sense, and I hid it and kept leaving these abstracts out.  It was like a day or two later that Kaye sprained her knee very, very badly, and she came home barely able to make it.  We go to the emergency room, she comes back, and it was a bad sprain, not a break, and she had a wrap-on cast on her leg, and she said, “OK, I’ll take some of your dang stuff.”  “Your dang medicine,” she called it.  Of course, it isn’t medicine, its natural food, but she took a couple of teaspoons of colostrum and went to bed in a lot of pain.  Of course, trying to roll over in the middle of the night, this thing gets in the way, so she unstrapped it and threw it off by the side of the bed.

The next morning I’m up having coffee and reading the paper, and she walked in the kitchen.  I went, “Kaye!”  And she goes, “What!”  It’s early—no coffee yet.  “Kaye!”  She says, “What?”  I said, “Your leg!”  And she pulled up her nightgown and was like, “Huh?”  All of the black and blue, all of the swelling, everything had gone virtually overnight.  We couldn’t believe it.

It was amazing, and it was so amazing that we were sitting back and saying, OK, maybe some of this other information that we were reading about colostrum is true too.  So she kept taking colostrum, and within a couple of days—Kaye had had an ongoing, low-grade fever because of her inability to rid her body of constant infectious processes, so she constantly had infections going on, growing into this or growing into that—colostrum for the first time in about 8–10 years broke that low-grade fever, and it was the most startling event that had happened in all the time that I’d known Kaye, 15 years.  And it changed her life.

I can honestly say this made the biggest and most important change in her life, in our lives, and in my life, in our family life, in giving us an ability to have hope for the future, to have an idea that maybe this request that she made to me could be set aside, that maybe we could think about having a life.  That change worked and worked and worked, and it was so startling.  What happened with her is that she didn’t need antibiotics every 3 months.  She didn’t get every cold and flu that came along.  In fact, if they came along, they were gone in an hour or two or overnight.  That never happened with Kaye.  Every time she got a cold it turned into flu, it turned into pneumonia; every time!

We were so startled by this that we were desperate to find out why. Now, at this time there was no web research for the public, in fact there was no internet except for those affiliated with Universities or the military. I knew some people that had talked about this internet and research data that was available but I was not allowed to get into this because it was not allowed expect for authorized personnel, and certainly not to the public. We lived at that time in Salt Lake City and we desperately needed to get on Pub Med (the medical researchers online research web that was only available to medical researchers and medical students). We found a friend through another divine intervention, another act of prayer and another gift the next day.  I met this lady while working out and took her home and introduced her to Kaye.  She became very good friends. But, what was interesting, and I don’t know why she was inclined, was that she was a stranger who came to me out of the blue and said tearfully, “What can I do?  My husband has been home and in bed for 2½, 3 weeks.  He’s on massive antihistamines, every drug that the doctors can find.  He has massive allergies.  He has hives all over his body, down his esophagus, inside and out, clear throughout him.  He can’t even stand to have a sheet touch him, can’t stand to have his clothes touch him, can’t eat because his whole mouth and all his insides are full of hives, and they itch and they’re painful and they’re killing him.  They’re driving him crazy.”   So I gave her some colostrum, Kaye and I did, and she took it home.  Within a day, day and a half, she came back and said they’d all disappeared.  All of these hives had disappeared that quickly.

We found out she was a medical researcher, so she got us into the University of Utah Medical School.  We went online there, and we filled four file drawers full of research on colostrum that cost us thousands of dollars for.  We did this, and I have the receipts for it, and I can prove it.  We did this, Kaye and I, and we wrote a book out of this.  We wrote it with Dr. Daniel Clark out of Florida, who is a cancer and internal medicine specialist.  We felt that the information that we found was the most astounding information that we could possibly put together.  There weren’t any MDs, there were no healthcare specialists in our field, there were no wellness people that had ever seen any of this, it had not been published in the newspapers, it had not been published anyplace where the consumers could find it.  We’re talking thousands and thousands of clinical studies that had been published in peer review journals, and when I’m talking peer review, that means the kind of journals where the article is submitted and a group of doctors review the article for facts and for accuracy before it’s ever published.  We’re talking over 10,000 articles that were published, clinical work that had been done on colostrum, bovine colostrum, its components (when you research colostrum you have to research its components not just whole colostrum), and the information was absolutely startling. That information gave us a basis in compiling that to go out and start educating people about what colostrum would do colostrum’s overall benefits to a whole bunch of things besides Kaye’s immune system.

But I think it’s important to understand really what happened in this.  We were the pioneers of colostrum.  There were no others.

After discovering the amazing health benefits that colostrum provides, Doug decided he had to let others know about what he had discovered, and he had to find a way to mass produce the colostrum so that whoever needed it could get it.  He soon discovered that there were no sources for colostrum anywhere in the US that met the stringent standards set by the USDA for the handling of milk for human consumption.  Colostrum was considered a waste product by most dairy farmers.  What colostrum was sent to the processors was usually set aside in a can by the side of the road until someone came to collect it.  The only commercial sources for colostrum were animal feed companies who sold dehydrated colostrum in bags to dairy farmers who gave it to calves who needed more than their mothers could provide to survive.

Doug decided he needed to figure out a way to improve the collection, processing, and distribution of colostrum to meet standards for human consumption, and he needed to figure out a way to process the colostrum to give it a shelf life longer than two weeks, which is the approximate shelf life for whole liquid colostrum.  Initially he used colostrum from dairy farms where he talked the farmers into using a freezer to store the colostrum until it could be picked up rather than leaving it by the side of the road.  Then he worked on finding dairy companies who could process the colostrum using the same quality standards they employed for producing milk for human consumption. The FDA approves all dairies where milk is processed for humans, but colostrum processing at the time was only regulated by the USDA, and they regulated it as animal feed, which has much lower standards than human food.  But Doug persisted, and he got a few dairies to start using sterilized equipment for processing.

Then he worked on the drying process.  The traditional way of drying colostrum was spray drying.  The colostrum would be sprayed through hot air coming off a gas flame.  This worked to dry the colostrum, but the problem was the natural gas used for the heat.  Natural gas produces nitrates as a combustion product, so the colostrum would pick up nitrates in the drying process.  Nitrates can act as carcinogens, so a way had to be found to dry the colostrum without exposing it to natural gas.

Then Doug discovered New Zealand colostrum produced by the New Zealand Dairy Board.  Here colostrum was produced to human standards in a country well-known for the pristine state of its environment.  They have very strict environmental laws and no big pollution producing industry.  At the time, New Zealand was producing the highest quality colostrum available, so Doug entered into an agreement with them to produce colostrum for sale in the US and throughout the world through the company he started, Symbiotics. When colostrum became popular as a nutritional supplement in the US, however, conditions began to improve.  The demand for high quality colostrum gave dairy farmers an incentive to improve collection and handling techniques for colostrum.  In 2003, the only processing plant exclusively dedicated to colostrum was built in Phoenix, Arizona.  It draws colostrum from organic-like dairy farms located throughout the Southwest and produces the highest quality colostrum available anywhere.  We will discuss the process of colostrum production in the next chapter

Doug Wyatt is now focused on giving back to society as the Managing Research Director for the CNR, the Center for Nutritional Research a non profit research organization that has contributed millions of dollars for disease prevention research focusing on bovine colostrum and complimentary natural prevention and remedies. The CNR is located in America’s spiritual healing center the beautiful  Sedona, Arizona. For further information on colostrum’s extraordinary life sustaining and anti-aging abilities that the CNR is doing you can visit them at www.icnr.org.

© Doug’s story is offered here with copyright permission from the Center for Nutritional Research.