“Colostrum supplements improve digestive symptoms in otherwise healthy adults.”
Colostrum supplements have not been shown to improve digestive symptoms in otherwise healthy adults.
If your digestion is basically fine, colostrum is unlikely to make it noticeably better, because it has not been shown to help healthy people's gut symptoms. Ongoing digestive problems are worth checking with a clinician rather than treating with a supplement.
Skip colostrum for everyday gut health, and see a clinician if you have ongoing symptoms like diarrhea or belly pain.
Safety note: Bovine colostrum is the first milk from cows, so it is not suitable for people with a cow's milk allergy.
Colostrum has been studied in many trials, but none has shown better everyday digestive symptoms in otherwise healthy adults; the clearer benefits were in people with gut diseases or infections, including healthy volunteers deliberately given a diarrhea germ. Confidence is limited because the everyday studies in healthy people were small and measured only lab markers of gut leakiness, with results that pointed in both directions.
Colostrum supplements have not been shown to improve digestive symptoms in otherwise healthy adults. Benefits were found mainly in people with gut diseases or infections, and results in healthy athletes were limited to lab markers that pointed both ways.
A 2024 review of 22 trials with 1,427 participants found colostrum often lowered how often people had diarrhea and cut stool frequency, but results for belly pain were mixed, and the authors called the evidence limited. Most of those trials were in people with digestive diseases or infections. The healthy-adult studies in the review were two small trials of special high-antibody (hyperimmune) colostrum in volunteers who were then deliberately given a germ that causes diarrhea: in one, fewer volunteers got diarrhea or belly pain; in the other, the difference was not clear. Those specialized infection-challenge studies do not show that ordinary colostrum supplements improve everyday digestion. A 2024 meta-analysis of 10 trials in athletes and patients found a small drop in a urine test of gut leakiness, with very mixed results between studies and no change in a blood marker of gut damage. In one small trial of eight healthy volunteers, colostrum blunted the rise in gut leakiness after hard exercise, while an earlier trial of 30 healthy men found colostrum during eight weeks of running training raised gut leakiness instead. None of these studies measured everyday digestive comfort in healthy adults.
- Hajihashemi P, Haghighatdoost F, Kassaian N, Rahim Khorasani M, Hoveida L, Nili H, Tamizifar B, Adibi P. Therapeutics effects of bovine colostrum applications on gastrointestinal diseases: a systematic review. Systematic Reviews. 2024;13(1):76. DOI: 10.1186/s13643-024-02489-1. PMID: 38409162. PMCID: PMC10898101
- Hajihashemi P, Haghighatdoost F, Kassaian N, Hoveida L, Tamizifar B, Nili H, Rahim Khorasani M, Adibi P. Bovine Colostrum in Increased Intestinal Permeability in Healthy Athletes and Patients: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Clinical Trials. Digestive Diseases and Sciences. 2024;69(4):1345-1360. DOI: 10.1007/s10620-023-08219-2. PMID: 38361147
- Davison G, Marchbank T, March DS, Thatcher R, Playford RJ. Zinc carnosine works with bovine colostrum in truncating heavy exercise-induced increase in gut permeability in healthy volunteers. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2016;104(2):526-536. DOI: 10.3945/ajcn.116.134403. PMID: 27357095
- Buckley JD, Butler RN, Southcott E, Brinkworth GD. Bovine colostrum supplementation during running training increases intestinal permeability. Nutrients. 2009;1(2):224-234. DOI: 10.3390/nu1020224. PMID: 22253980. PMCID: PMC3257608