Hello and welcome back to the Consistency Project podcast. My name is Patrick Cummings. As always, I'm here with E.C. Sinkowski. Every week on the show, we aim to simplify the science of nutrition, health, and fitness, cutting through the noise to focus on the principles and practices that will help you perform better, feel better, and live better. Thank you so much for tuning into the show. Hello, we see. Hey, what's up?

Greetings to you.

We're going to talk about, I'm excited about this. I've, I've hoped we would cover this in an episode soon. So we're going to talk about colostrum today. We're going to talk about the science and skepticism surrounding colostrum supplementation. some things we're going to cover what colostrum is and how it differs between humans and bovines.

The current state of research on colostrum's health and performance benefits and how to critically evaluate supplement marketing claims because, of course, we have to do it on that every time

we talk about the supplements.

The big thing that we're going to try to answer, the big question is does colostrum supplementation, live up to its health and performance claims, or is it just another overhyped trend? Let us begin at the beginning. What the heck is colostrum for folks who maybe haven't heard of it or don't know why the heck we're talking about it? Colostrum. Yeah, I've actually gotten a bunch of questions on this. I'm like, okay, it's time. It is time. Colostrum is the first milk produced after pregnancy. And then after a couple of days, colostrum becomes transitional milk, and then eventually mature milk starts about 10 to 15 days after pregnancy. Now, the different milks, colostrum, transitional, mature, they each have different nutritional

characteristics.

Colostrum tends to be higher in many of the nutrients, specifically protein and vitamins and

antibodies compared to mature milk.

And of course, the antibodies are what helped develop the baby's immune system.

Even some of the proteins,

lactoferrin gets a lot of attention, appear to have health effects beyond just supplying

protein to the body. It looks to be involved with, you know, the immune system. But so all of this

has led to this general interest in using colostrum for various ailments and, of course,

everyday supplementation for general health. Now, the colostrum that is

trending in our supplements is bovine colostrum, so the substance that is produced naturally by

cows, about 24 to 72 hours after giving birth. And no surprise, bovine colostrum does not have the same exact composition as human

colostrum. Compared to human colostrum, bovine colostrum contains less lactose, but more protein,

more vitamins and minerals and a wider range of kind of these antibodies and growth factors.

But I think it's important to understand that the composition, even between

different cows or different breeds of cattle, is going to be different because of the genetic

differences, because of the different nutrition that they might be given at different farms and all

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