Foods high in lactoferrin
Milk, and the things made straight from it. That is the whole list.
Short answer
Milk, and almost nothing else. Colostrum, the first milk after birth, holds the most: 5 to 6 mg per mL in human colostrum and 1.5 to 5 mg per mL in cow colostrum. Mature cow's milk holds far less, 0.02 to 0.35 mg per mL. Heat then takes most of that away. In a 2026 comparison of processing temperatures, pasteurization at 75 °C for 15 seconds left about 65% of the lactoferrin in cow's milk, hotter pasteurization at 85 °C left 13%, and UHT milk held none the test could detect.
Milk. That is the answer, and the list barely goes past it. Mammals put lactoferrin into the milk they make, so every food source of it is a milk or something made directly from one. Plants do not make it, so no plant food is a source.
Within milk the amount swings by species, by how long after birth the milk was collected, and by how hot it got on the way to you. That last one does most of the work, and almost nobody mentions it.
Which milk holds the most
Colostrum, the thick first milk an animal produces in the days after giving birth. A 2021 review in Nutrients collects the measured concentrations:
| Milk | Lactoferrin |
|---|---|
| Human colostrum | 5 to 6 mg per mL |
| Cow colostrum | 1.5 to 5 mg per mL |
| Mature human milk | about 1 mg per mL |
| Mature cow's milk | 0.02 to 0.35 mg per mL |
Read the bottom two rows together, because that gap is the one people are usually surprised by. Breast milk carries somewhere around three to fifty times the lactoferrin of ordinary cow's milk, depending which end of the cow range you take. Lactoferrin is a much bigger deal in human milk than in the milk you buy.
Cow colostrum is the only one of the four sold as a food product, which makes it the highest source you can actually buy. What it is not is a lactoferrin product: by weight cow colostrum is mostly antibody, and the page on whether colostrum is the same as lactoferrin works through why that matters on a label.
What heat does to it
Lactoferrin is fragile in a way most milk proteins are not, and this is where the food question gets its real answer.
A 2026 study in Foods took raw milk from one farm, split it, and ran it through seven heat treatments, measuring what was left of each protein against the untouched control. Lactoferrin behaved worse than everything else in the study:
| Treatment | Lactoferrin remaining |
|---|---|
| Raw milk | 100% by definition |
| 75 °C for 15 seconds | about 65% |
| 85 °C for 15 seconds | 13% |
| 95 °C for 15 seconds | undetectable |
| UHT, 135 °C for 5 seconds | undetectable |
The first heated row is the one to anchor on. Standard US pasteurization runs 15 seconds at about 72 °C, which is the lower edge of what that study called its pasteurization step, so an ordinary refrigerated carton should sit near that 65% figure or a little above it. The shelf-stable boxes that need no refrigeration until opened are UHT, and after UHT the test found nothing.
Compare that to the other proteins in the same batch. Total native whey protein came through the 75 °C step at about 95%, and alpha-lactalbumin was barely touched. Lactoferrin lost a third at a temperature that left most of the milk's protein alone. Immunoglobulin G was the only other protein measured that fell away like this, running 75% at 75 °C and then 8% at 85 °C.
Two limits on the table. These were heat treatments applied in a lab to one farm's milk, so they are not measurements of cartons off a shelf, and four of the authors worked for the dairy company whose own new process the study was built to showcase. An independent group at Oregon State and UC Davis measured the same protein after commercial high-temperature short-time and UHT processing, and found that an ultraviolet dose strong enough to kill spores preserved lactoferrin and the immunoglobulins better than UHT did. Different question, same direction of travel.
Does that mean pasteurized milk is worse for you?
No, and this is where the lactoferrin argument gets stretched past what it can carry.
The FDA's position is that "pasteurization effectively kills raw milk pathogens without any significant impact on milk nutritional quality", and that "the protein quality of pasteurized milk is not different from that of raw milk". Both of those statements are about milk as nutrition: the amino acids your body breaks protein down into are the same either way, and a denatured protein feeds you exactly as well as a folded one.
Lactoferrin is a different kind of claim. Whatever it does, it does by staying in one piece long enough to bind iron or touch a bacterial surface, so for lactoferrin specifically the folded shape is the point, and heat takes it. Those two facts sit side by side without contradicting each other. Pasteurization costs you most of the milk's lactoferrin and costs you close to nothing nutritionally.
Which leaves raw milk, and the lactoferrin figures are not a reason to drink it. The FDA counts at least 133 raw-milk-linked outbreaks in the US between 1987 and September 2010 and names children and people with weakened immune systems as the most exposed. Trading a known pathogen risk for an unmeasured amount of one protein is a poor deal, and nobody has run a trial giving people raw milk to see whether its lactoferrin does anything.
Is there lactoferrin in yogurt or cheese?
Some, probably very little, and no honest number exists for it.
No source this site has read measures lactoferrin in retail yogurt or cheese, so anyone quoting you a figure for a cup of yogurt is guessing. What transfers from the table above is the direction. Those products start from milk that was already heated, they then spend time warm while cultures work, and nothing in the process puts lactoferrin back. Whatever survived the heating is the ceiling.
The same reasoning covers butter, cream and milk powder. Whether a food has had purified lactoferrin added to it on purpose is a different question, and there the ingredient list will tell you, because added lactoferrin has to be declared like any other ingredient.
Could you get a supplement dose from milk?
Not reliably, and the arithmetic shows why.
Take the mature cow's milk range above, 0.02 to 0.35 mg per mL, and multiply it out across an 8 oz glass of about 240 mL. Raw, that glass carries roughly 5 to 85 mg of lactoferrin. Apply the 65% that survived 75 °C and an ordinary pasteurized glass lands somewhere around 3 to 55 mg. From a UHT box, nothing the assay could find.
Those are two sourced ranges multiplied together, not something anyone measured in a glass of milk, and the spread is the finding. The high end is seventeen times the low end before heat enters it, and no carton states which end its milk sits at. Against that, the trials on how much lactoferrin per day mostly used 100 to 200 mg of purified lactoferrin, given at a known amount every day. Milk cannot deliver a known amount at that scale, which is what a purified lactoferrin supplement is for.
That is a statement about dose, not about milk being worth drinking. It also says nothing about whether 100 to 200 mg a day does what the bottle implies.
Why it is in you as well as your food
Lactoferrin is not only something you eat. Your own body makes it, in tears, in saliva and in your white blood cells, and that last one is why the protein turns up in a stool test at all.
When white blood cells travel to an inflamed gut lining, they carry lactoferrin with them and leave it behind in stool, which is what a lab is measuring when it reports a result. That is a completely separate meaning of the word from the one on this page, and people searching for food sources sometimes arrive holding a lab report instead. If that is you, the page on lactoferrin in stool covers what the test measures and what the numbers mean, and dietary bovine lactoferrin does not register on the assay in any case.
Where this comes from
- Sangild PT, Vonderohe C, Melendez Hebib V, Burrin DG. Potential Benefits of Bovine Colostrum in Pediatric Nutrition and Health. Nutrients 2021;13(8):2551 — review: lactoferrin measures 1.5 to 5 mg/mL in cow colostrum and 0.02 to 0.35 mg/mL in mature cow's milk; 5 to 6 mg/mL in human colostrum falling to about 1 mg/mL in mature human milk. The University of Copenhagen holds a patent on bovine colostrum for pediatric patients and the first author is named as its inventor, which the paper discloses
- Li J, Kang Z, Sheng N, et al. The Impact of Instantaneous Ultra-High Temperature (INF) Versus Conventional Thermal Processing on Bovine Milk: Nutritional and Physicochemical Perspectives. Foods 2026;15(5):959 — laboratory study, one farm's raw milk put through seven heat treatments and measured by ELISA against the unheated control. Native lactoferrin retention was 65% at 75 °C for 15 seconds, 13% at 85 °C for 15 seconds, undetectable at 95 °C and after UHT at 135 °C for 5 seconds, and about 30% after the instantaneous process the study was built to test. Immunoglobulin G ran 75% then 8% over the same two steps. Total native whey protein held at about 95% at 75 °C. The paper gives high-temperature short-time pasteurization as 72 to 75 °C for 15 seconds. Four of the authors were employed by Junlebao Dairy Group, which developed the instantaneous process
- Barman B, Sykora R, Mohamed H, et al. UV-C processing of bovine milk: Dosage requirements for 5-log bacterial reductions and impact on the bioactive proteins. Food Res Int 2026;233(Pt 2):119023 — Oregon State and UC Davis, no industry funding declared: measured lactoferrin and immunoglobulins by ELISA after ultraviolet treatment and after commercial high-temperature short-time and UHT processing. The spore-killing ultraviolet dose preserved every protein tested better than UHT did
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Raw Milk Misconceptions and the Danger of Raw Milk Consumption — states that "pasteurization effectively kills raw milk pathogens without any significant impact on milk nutritional quality" and that "the protein quality of pasteurized milk is not different from that of raw milk", and counts at least 133 raw-milk-linked US outbreaks between 1987 and September 2010
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Food Allergies — milk is one of nine major food allergens, and allergen labeling covers dietary supplements as well as foods
- Labcorp test directory: Lactoferrin, Fecal, Quantitative (test 123016) — the stool assay does not detect dietary bovine lactoferrin, so eating any of the foods on this page does not move a result. A supplement containing human lactoferrin carries a false-positive risk, as do samples from nursing infants
This page is general information, not medical advice, and not a recommendation to take anything. It cannot interpret your test result. Lactoferrin supplements are made from cow's milk and are unsuitable if you have a milk protein allergy. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, giving anything to an infant, or being treated for a health condition, talk to a doctor or pharmacist first.