4. Discussion
URTIs
The popularity of bovine colostrum as a health supplement has substantially grown in the recent years, urging the need for more credible proofs of its effectiveness. Various aspects of its supposed advantageous influence on human health have been tested in numerous laboratory and clinical experiments, the results of which mostly confirmed these claims [Our results come from the first ever DBPC trial with such large, highly uniform adult non-athletic population, performed in one location, and within the same timeframe to produce most coherent epidemiological conditions. All previous trials testing the influence of colostrum the on development of URTIs differed from our work in regard to some of these experimental design characteristics [An additional factor that differs our study from previous trials is that we used much lower doses of colostrum. Most of the other experiments of similar design used daily doses of 10–60 g per day, whereas our doses were 500 mg twice daily followed by 500 mg once daily. Such low doses were previously tested in our two trials and were aimed at downregulating intestinal permeability in athletes and they turned out to be highly effective in this regard [An additional exclusive feature of our study is that the observation period was longer than in other trials and lasted for more than 15 weeks (107 days). In other trials of the same type the participants were monitored for 8 to 14 weeks [