Colostrum Supplement Sales Are Booming, But the Science Is Thin

Celebrities are known to take questionable measures to maintain their exceptional hotness. Gwyneth Paltrow intentionally subjected herself to bee stings. Victoria Beckham smeared her face with a cream made from her own blood. Demi Moore used “highly trained medical leeches” for some purported detoxification effect.

The latest celebrity-backed beauty secret, though, is a product anyone can buy off the web or at a Target: powderized cow colostrum from the brand Armra. Jennifer Aniston takes a scoop with “room temperature water and a whole lemon squeezed into it” each morning, she told People in January 2025. In April, Selling Sunset star Chelsea Lazkani showed her hundreds of thousands of TikTok followers how she takes her Armra, which she called “the secret to my healthy glowy skin,” in a video viewed more than 100,000 times. In June, Vogue published singer Dua Lipa’s pre-yoga routine of sipping Armra’s Immune Revival powder mixed with water and electrolytes. And lest anyone think Paltrow wasn’t in on this trend, she was in fact ahead of it: She interviewed Armra’s chief executive officer on the Goop podcast in August 2024.

If you’ve ever breastfed a child, you probably just did a double take: They’re drinking what?! Colostrum is the first milk from a breastfeeding mammal, also known by human mothers as the first important thing to deliver to your newborn infant. The benefits for newborns are well established: The nutrients and antibodies that strengthen the infant’s immunity are so key that the yellowish substance is often called “liquid gold.”

So, after an initial moment of surprise, and maybe a little disgust, you may have thought, “Oh, now that’s interesting.” You wouldn’t be alone. US consumers spent more than $19 million on colostrum supplements in the 52 weeks ended Jan. 3, 2026, a more than 3,000 percent increase from the just over $612,000 two years prior, NielsenIQ data shows. An additional $3 million was spent in the 52 weeks ended Jan. 3 on supplements that contain colostrum as just one ingredient, marking a similar jump over the same period. Armra Colostrum, which costs about $110 per month for four scoops a day, promising better skin and hair, stronger immunity and a healthier microbiome, is now one of many companies making similar claims. Tucker Carlson shills for the brand Cowboy Colostrum, Kourtney Kardashian Barker sells it in gummy and liquid form through her supplement company, Lemme, and wellness influencer Mari Llewellyn and her husband’s supplements brand, Bloom Nutrition, sells a version mixed with collagen and probiotics.

The US colostrum market is still tiny compared with, say, that for melatonin supplements, which brought in more than $1 billion in sales in 2025, according to NielsenIQ. But sales of that supplement have largely levelled off, showing about a 1 percent decline over those same two years. Colostrum, on the other hand, is just getting started—Kardashian Barker didn’t launch her brand until November.

Armra, which put its first products online in 2021, was one of the earliest to market. “We pioneered the category,” says founder and CEO Sarah Rahal, a licensed doctor who’s described on Armra’s website as “a double board-certified pediatric neurologist.” (Her certification with the American Board of Medical Specialties lapsed in 2024, according to the group, and a spokesperson for Rahal declined to provide any other board certifications.) She says she noticed that more kids in her practice were coming in with chronic health conditions, then began having her own digestive health problems. The experience led her “to face a greater truth about the human body as truly a finely tuned instrument, a biological symphony of energy, magnetism and light,” she says. It was then that she began to look into colostrum, unearthing, she says, thousands of research papers on its capabilities. “And it turns out that it confers those same benefits to restore the body back to that original intelligence no matter what age you take it.”

Rahal spent two years developing Armra Colostrum, including sourcing ingredients from US grass-fed cows and creating a proprietary pasteurization technique to preserve more of the colostrum’s nutrients. She takes the product herself and credits it with curing her illness, which was never diagnosed. Rahal has since dedicated herself to spreading the word about colostrum “in a very credible, science-backed way,” she says. Her products are stocked by national retailers including Target Corp. and Ulta Beauty Inc.

Backing up the benefits

But the “very credible” science remains elusive. Timothy Caulfield, a professor at the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health, says colostrum has been studied for decades, long enough that if there were real benefits, larger studies would have documented them. Instead he sees a cycle playing out that he’s seen with many other supplements. “There’s immediate interest, a huge amount of hype,” Caulfield says. “The supplement is portrayed as having benefits for a whole host of ailments and health-optimisation strategies.” But eventually, upon closer examination, any positive effects “become small or nonexistent.”

Armra’s website says more than 5,000 studies show colostrum’s benefits, and it lists about 60. But many of them are small or rely on trials done with animals rather than humans; some are funded by colostrum manufacturers or the dairy industry; and at least 10 don’t even mention colostrum and instead are more broadly about the gut.

Supplements aren’t tightly regulated the way pharmaceuticals are, so their effectiveness is less scrutinised and the potential for contamination is much higher. That’s why health professionals can be suspicious of them. But even advocates for functional medicine, which often embraces supplements, say colostrum is not a supplement for everyone. “My take on the clinical proof is that it is very limited to build a legitimate mass-market product,” says Jeffrey Bland, co-founder of the Institute for Functional Medicine and founder of the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute, who recommends patients consult their doctor to find the right supplements for their health goals. Bland says that while it may be helpful for some people with specific gastrointestinal problems, there are plenty of other, lower-priced options, such as the fibre supplement Metamucil. For those who’d rather consume food, millet and the harder-to-find Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat have also been proven to help boost gut health, Bland says.

Nisha Chellam, an internal medicine physician at functional health provider Parsley Health—which in 2024 joined with Armra to offer its new patients discounts on the supplements, while Armra subscribers got discounts at Parsley—is also circumspect on the benefits of colostrum, particularly since it can cause problems for people with allergies to milk. “I rarely use colostrum in my practice.”

Supplements like colostrum can play into a sense among consumers “that if a little bit of a substance is good, a lot of it is better,” says Caulfield, author of The Cure for Everything: Untangling Twisted Messages About Health, Fitness and Happiness. That “more is more” attitude was on display in Lazkani’s video, in which she dumps a scoop of the powder right into her mouth in the morning, another in her water bottle before Pilates, another scoop after dinner and then a final serving blended until it foams in a cup of water. “I’m loving the results,” she wrote in the caption. But the changes users report could be the result of a placebo effect, Caulfield says: “Expensive placebos work better.”

Asked about the dearth of scientific evidence supporting Armra’s claims, Rahal notes that research is ongoing and that her products have garnered more than 20,000 five-star reviews on the company’s website. “Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack,” she says.

By Deena Shanker

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