How to drink disgusting yellow colostrum

"What's old is new again" — wellness influencers resuscitate yet another worthless fad

I last did a Skeptoid episode on the fad of drinking colostrum in 2007 — that’s 19 years ago for those of you avoiding doing your own math. At the time, the fad was fading — the product was expensive, sometimes hard to find, and entirely worthless. Perhaps enough hapless users discovered this.

Well, thanks to our old friends the wellness influencers, this fad is back!

Colostrum is the extra-rich, thick, gooey milk that mammalian mothers produce for the first few days after giving birth. Its purpose is to deliver a big dose of nutrients, antibodies, protein, and lots and lots of fats to this growing infant who finds itself outside of a warm, sterile environment for the first time in its young life.

Decades ago, some wooists decided that if milk is healthy to drink, colostrum must be even healthier. Their logic often centers around the “boosting your immune system” mythology, which consists entirely of bullshit.¹²³ It was sold mainly by supplement charlatans, people who sell unregulated and unapproved compounds that they claim (without evidence) will improve your health in some way, making you “healthier than healthy” as if that was a thing.

Now with the advent of channels like TikTok, a new generation of “wellness influencers” have fast, easy access to hundreds of millions of rubes all around the world, enough of whom will eagerly click the Buy Now button to achieve this miraculous new superpower that “their doctor doesn’t want them to know.” It should tell you a lot that the only place colostrum is found in hospitals is in the maternity wards.

This describes the entire “wellness” industry. Note that wellness is a marketing term, not a medical term. If you’re well, all that means is that you’re not ill. But wellness influencers don’t (usually) claim to treat disease; they promise a sort of “super health” — make yourself healthier than you already are.⁴ Due to this constant yammering by the influencers, the term wellness has become so popular among consumers that demand has driven many insurance companies, employers, and even doctors’ offices to offer “wellness” programs — usually exercise, regular checkups, and such — things that influencers can’t sell and so rarely advocate.

Anyway, I digress from colostrum. So yeah, it’s back. What’s pitched is almost always bovine colostrum (from cows) as it’s much more widely available than human colostrum. It’s typically sold as a powder, and since it does not treat any disease, it is unapproved by the FDA and so sold as an unregulated supplement free from any meaningful testing for purity or safety. “What’s best for a baby cow is what’s best for a human” is probably not taught in most medical schools; yet nevertheless, here we are.

In order to save you some painful time searching, I’ve assembled a few of the most often proclaimed (fake) benefits of taking bovine colostrum supplements:

1. Prevents leaky gut syndrome. This is a nonexistent disease (ask any gastroenterologist), but has long been popular in the wellness and SCAM⁵ communities.

2. Boosts your immune system. As previously discussed.

3. Improves general gut health. A lot of people have some minor annoyance in the gut — a tendency toward loose stool, constipation, gas, etc. Colostrum has been most studied for treating diarrhea, and no evidence has ever been found that it’s helpful, nor even a credible hypothesis for why it might be.

4. Promotes hair growth. This was news to me. A deep dive into the literature produced no evidence of this, though I did come across a minority fringe claim that it promoted hair growth in mice. I’ve found that reminding people that humans and mice are not the same communicates exactly nothing.

5. Helps you lose weight. Of course there is no evidence for this — the whole point of colostrum is to help newborns gain weight fast.

6. Boosts athletic performance and recovery. Having a healthy overall diet means your body has all the nutrients it needs on reserve. If you’re going to run a marathon, eat lots of carbs to make sure those reserves are topped up. If you’re bodybuilding, eat lots of protein to make sure those reserves are topped up. Colostrum is far from the best source for either.

That’s about it. Obviously there are countless more — influencers have little else to do all day but make shit up — but these are the ones I found the found the most.

If you buy colostrum, just stop it. Stop giving your money to unqualified online personalities. Just eat a decent overall diet.⁶

1. A “boosted immune system” would mean one that is more active then normal; i.e., attacking the body’s own healthy tissue — a condition we term an autoimmune disease. You don’t want that.

2. The only way to improve your body’s ability to resist an anticipated infection is to vaccinate for that particular pathogen (if a vaccine for it exists). This challenges your body to produce the correct antibodies for that pathogen.

3. A body’s immune system cannot be extra-super-duper “boosted” to improve general health — that’s not what immune systems do. They fight infections. Health simply means the absence of disease.

4. In an actual universe you can’t have fewer than zero illnesses, in case that needs to be said.

5. SCAM - Supplemental, Complementary, and Alternative Medicine.

6. And when you do, remember to just Relax and Enjoy Your Food.