Hi, folks, I am Felicity Harley, host of this body and soul pod called Healthy Ish. Sipping and swallowing colostrum. Apparently it's what all the celebrities and health and wellness influences are doing right now, are you. It's a lettus wellness trend. But is the cow's variety really beneficial for our health? Especially as an adult? We know the colostrum is great for babies. Well Today, chef and food critic turned farmer and food activists Matthew Evans joins us from
his farm in Tazzy. He's written a new book called Milk, and he is here to discuss whether colostrums health claims are actually legit. Make sure you listening to Extra Healthy Ish as well, where we take a deep dive into the truth and lies about milk. You can grab that wherever you I podcasts. Matthew, thank you for joining us on Healthy Today. All the way from a beautiful Tasmania.
Well pleasure, the sun shining. It's glorious, but happy to be inside chatting to you.
Yeah, inside is good. Now I can talk about colostrum and your fabulous new book. You write a bit about this and obviously there's a lot of buzz about it. Celebrities are drinking the cow's variety, powders are selling out, and chemists or particularly in the US, the supplements. Now you've got a book about milk. What are your thoughts on this new wellness trend around colostrum.
Yeah, look, it's fascinating to me. I guess, colostrum to me, like milk is a miracle, Like it's an amazing product. It's nutrient dance. It's got so many things that when we're first born, it's colostrum that we get in that first day, And so I was pretty keen to discover that. I guess that colostrums like the milk of milk. It's like the nutrient dense version of the nutrient dense liquid. So yeah, look, I'm interested that people are taking it. It has the potential to do lots of things for us.
It has things like lactofer and Lactoferren's this sort of miracle ingredient that they're trying to work out how to recreate in labs that exists in really high quantities in human breast milk. It exists in milk, more generally in cow's milk, but it's much higher in col colostrum, and there's things that can feed our immune system. So the sugars in some of that early milk are really good at feeding our microbiome, the things that live in and
on us. So I guess colclostrum has that capacity. And look, it seems to be it has the potential to help a little bit with some of our immune system. It has the potential to help particular with things like diarrhea and where you've got a tummy bug, but it's not going to be it's not going to do that unless you're lacking probably somewhere else in your diet. You know, like it's only going to do that if potentially you need a little bit of extra help or because you're
lacking other stuff in your diet. So yes, I think it's probably valuable and useful. But you know, whether it's anytime anyone latches onto something and said it's the miracle product, then you've also got to realize that, well, it might be a miracle product for the cow when it's first born, but by the time it's pasteurized and dehydrated and put into a powder form and put into a capsule in a chemist, you know, are what has happened to that?
It's not. It doesn't have the beneficial bacteria anymore. Some of the proteins have been denatured. So yes, it may be doing you some good, but is it doing you as much good as you think? The jury is still out. Yeah.
Yeah, It's interesting, isn't it? How we we latch onto something like colostrum. As you said, it's got the nutritional benefits, particularly a human colostrum are you know, there's nothing else that compares to it in many ways. But then as soon as the celebrities put in start drinking it from the supplement form, they are like, oh quick, quick, We've got to get it.
Yeah. Yeah, And I think it's really fascinating. I mean, one of the things that that colostrum has in it and this is what is you know, we don't know why this happens, but this happens in mammals, don't We can't test that it happens in humans, but we presume because it happens in other mammals that happens in humans.
So the colostrum is producing that first day when when the mother's memory glands are really poorous, so big cells pass through much more easily, and the baby's gut is much more poorous, so big cells can go from the
milk into the baby. So one thing that happens in those first few hours after giving birth is that stem cells from the mother can enter the bloodstream of the baby and then get into the serahbrospinal fluid, the fluid that connects our spine and our brain, and those cells can then travel into the brain of the baby, and they then stem cells can become other things. They're like the origin of the origin cells. They can differentiate, they become neurons and gile cells. They become part of the
brain of the baby. Now that's wonderful when it happens, and we presume that there's a reason why that happens in mammals when they're firstborn. But do you want cows stem cells getting into your brain? You know you've got to question, Well, we think that our stomach's too close to that, that our digestive system will stop that happening. We can't test for that. So the reason why, you know, we want to be cautious.
I mean, can you talk a bit about breast milk made in labs? I mean, this is really interesting. You talk about this in your book that potentially, you know, we might be seeing this in that will we ultimately see this in our fridges.
Yeah, this is fascinating because breast milk is so such a wonderful thing. It's altered by the age of the baby, the status of the mother, the health status of the mother, but it's altered by the hour over which the baby's being fed. It gets tailored to the individual baby. So it's a beautiful thing. But there are parts of breast milk that we don't know how to make in the lab.
You know, there's milk sugars that feed the microbiome of the baby, the immune system of the baby, that we don't really know how to make, but they are what they're doing. Scientists are taking breast milk cells and then trying to get a form of breast milk crowded in a lab, in fermenting chambers in the lab. And what that would allow is because formula is a way of keeping babies alive but doesn't really feed the immune system
of the baby. It's not a complete food, it would allow us to, I guess, make formula more appropriate for human babies because at the moment it's good. It's great. It does amazing things for people who are unable to press feed for whatever reason. You know, and there are many reasons why it's hard to breastfeed. But it's not
the best foods. But if we could add leacto fair and that miracle ingredient, if we could add some of those immune boosting properties, wouldn't it be wonderful to see that added into formula to make formula a more complete and appropriate food for our tiny, vulnerable newborns.
Yeah, watch this space. Now you've written a whole book on milk, which is fascinating. Is there like one what is the healthiest milk we should all be drinking.
It? Wouldn't it be great if I could just name one place? Well, yeah, I'd love to. But the problem is, you know, some people are lactose intolerant, which means they can't consume much fresh dairy because lactose is a milks with it, some people can't digest very well, and it can give you bloating and diarrhea and gas and even constipation if you have too much of it. We can ferment milk, so we can get traditional dairy cow's milk and get rid of the sugar, so hard cheese doesn't
have the lactose. But then some people are allergic to the proteins and different proteins people that have different allergies or different reactions to so those people probably shouldn't eat
much dairy or any dairy, but there are. In terms of what actual cow's milk and goats milk and dairy from a mammal contains, it is by far the most nutrient dance product that we have, comparing it to plant milks or the current lab milks that they're making where they're taking genetically modified yeasts and creating some of the dairy proteins in a lab and then combining them with some bats and sugars and stuff. The milk that comes from cow is by far the most nutrient dance it has.
You know, some of these lab milks are going to have six, maybe ten proteins in them. Cow's milk can contain over the cow's lactation can contain four thousand, six hundred and fifty four proteins. So what we create in the lab is not equivalent. And one thing we do know is that the milks that people are choosing to drink, if they're replacing dairy with plant milks. Plant milks replace the color, maybe the textual appeal of the dairy in some ways, but they don't replace the nutrition. So I
forget the numbers off the top of my head. It's something like twenty for one glass of milk, you get the same amount of bioavailable calcium the cowsum your body. Or one glass of milk. It's something like seven glasses of oat milk and twenty two glasses of soy milk. Yeah, so you know, yes, you can get the nutrition, but who wants to have twenty two glasses of soy milk?
No? Thanks, thank you for coming on Healthy Pleasure, Thanks for having me, my friends. If you have more questions queries, if you do want to read more about milk, grab Matthew's new book. It is called Milk and it's out now. If you did enjoy this chat, jump on tell Us rate and review of this podcast. Of course, you can subscribe and then you will know exactly when we drop a new at which is normally every weekday Monday to Friday.
Anything else, head to bodyansoul dot com dot you grab our print edition which is out in your local Sunday paper and make sure you are following us across social media, and until tomorrow, we'll enjoy your milk, perhaps not your colostrum, and stay healthy is