The Science of Goat Milk and Skin Care

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Description

Goat milk has been used for centuries to soothe and nourish skin—but now science is catching up to explain why it works so well. In this episode, Deborah Niemann is joined by Dr. Brent Ridge, physician and co-founder of Beekman 1802, to explore the research behind goat milk’s unique skin benefits. From maintaining the skin’s pH to supporting a healthy microbiome, Dr. Ridge shares insights from more than a decade of clinical studies and product development.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why goat milk’s pH is so important for protecting sensitive skin.
• How gentle cleansing with goat milk helps preserve the skin’s barrier.
• The role of oligosaccharides in nourishing beneficial bacteria on the skin.
• What the skin microbiome is—and why balance matters more than “good” or “bad” bacteria.
• How lactic acid in goat milk provides gentle daily exfoliation without irritation.
• The discovery of goat milk exosomes and their potential in advanced skin care.
• The science behind peptides in goat milk and how smaller fragments may deliver targeted benefits.
• Why Beekman 1802 lists “kindness” as an ingredient in every product—and how it’s linked to overall wellness and longevity.

Whether you make your own goat milk soap or simply want to understand the science behind it, this episode offers fascinating insights into how nature’s original moisturizer works at a cellular level.

Resources:

• Beekman 1802
• Goat Wisdom by Brent Ridge & Josh Kilmer-Purcell
  • Buy on Amazon
  • Buy on Bookshop

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Transcript

Intro  0:03  
For the love of goats, we are talking about everything goats, whether you're a goat owner, a breeder, or just a fan of these wonderful creatures. We've got you covered. And now here is Deborah Niemann.

Deborah Niemann  0:18  
Hello everyone, and welcome to today's episode. This is one that I know a lot of you are looking forward to because we got a lot of questions after the first episode that we did, where we were talking about the new book Goat Wisdom by Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer Purcell. I know a lot of you are looking forward to this because we got a lot of questions from people about the various aspects of goat milk and soap after it was mentioned in the last episode that the Beekman 1802 team had done a lot of research about the benefits of goat milk for your skin. So today we are joined by Dr Brent Ridge, half of the mastermind behind Beekman 1802 the nerdy science half, I guess because Josh is the marketing brain and so Brent is going to talk about all of the fabulous things that they learned from the research that they did for their goat milk soap. Welcome to the show today.

Brent Ridge  1:16  
Oh, great to be here. You know, I always love talking science, so hopefully we won't bore people, Deborah.

Deborah Niemann  1:22  
Oh no, we will not bore people. It's funny. I just finished up three weeks of talking to a number of my followers. I decided it was time to talk to them, and so a lot of them, very generously, signed up for those time slots and talked to me. And just about every single person told me the reason that they follow me and the reason that they love the podcast is because of the science. 

Brent Ridge  1:45  
Great.

Deborah Niemann  1:46  
Here we go. So I know you started with soap maker Deb, making the goat milk soap for you, and it was wonderful. You were doing a good business, but the nerdy side of your brain wanted to understand it a little more. So what happened?

Brent Ridge  2:03  
Well, you know, I am a physician, and so I always listened to my patients if they were telling me they were doing something that helped, whether it was something that I had researched, whether it was something that was folklore or a folk remedy, if my patients were telling me that something was working, I was always curious about it. And so when we started making the soaps with soap maker Deb and started selling them, you know, we first started out on our website. And so, you know, that was small numbers back in, you know, 16 years ago, you know, you weren't selling a lot of soap on your website back then. 

Brent Ridge  2:36  
And then, as we got into Henry Bindle and some other stores, and then ultimately, Anthropologie with the bars of soap, that's when we really started getting in a lot works about how people's skin was reacting to the goat milk soap, and particularly people who have very sensitive skin, or have problematic skin, for some reason, it was helping them so much that they just felt compelled to write these letters. A lot of them had written letters saying how much this soap had helped their skin. And that just fascinated me. And I think, as we had maybe said in our earlier conversation about the book, you know, we never thought that we were going to start a skin care company. You know, we were starting our company to survive, you know, to pay the mortgage on the farm. As you know, probably a lot of your listeners, you did at some point, but that just really piqued my curiosity. 

Brent Ridge  3:28  
And so we just started doing some very rudimentary studies on the goat milk and what and in the soap in particular – why could this be having an impact on people's skin? Well, I knew just from my, you know, medical school training, that a lot of the damage that is done to the skin, particularly if you're prone to inflammatory skin issues anyway, is done in the cleansing process, just because almost all of the cleansers, the commercial cleansers that are sold on the market, are very harsh and stripping to the skin. So I knew that that was a problem in general. 

Brent Ridge  4:01  
So I thought, well, what could it be about the goat milk soap that is countering that or changing that for people who are switching from the commercial soaps to this bar of soap? And what we first discovered about, and this was just very basic science, was that not only does goat milk have the same pH as human skin, but our end product had a very similar pH to human skin as well. And that's very, very important, because once you change the pH of the skin, then you start a cascade of issues on the surface of your skin. You have a dysbiosis of the microbiome of the skin. You can start an inflammatory cascade that you're going to be constantly battling against. And you know, your skin is pretty resilient. 

Brent Ridge  4:46  
But the thing about cleansing is that you are doing it at least every day, thoroughly, sometimes multiple times a day, on certain parts of your body. So if you are constantly disturbing the barrier of your skin and constantly altering the pH of the surface of your skin and causing this inflammatory process to start, is going to lead to problem after problem after problem, particularly if you're someone who's already prone to sensitive skin, or you have some sort of other, you know, medication that you're using that makes you have sensitive skin, or, you know, you just have allergies in general, so it becomes a very important issue for people. And so that was really the first thing that we learned. You know, goat milk is really great because it doesn't disturb the pH barrier of the skin. And I would say for the first six years of the company, that's really basically all the science that we had. And we really sold not only the bar of soap, but all of the lotions and body creams and bath soaks that we were selling based on this idea that if you have sensitive skin, you don't want to do anything that's going to alter the pH of your skin. 

Brent Ridge  5:53  
And if you look back at the history of goat milk's use, you know it has been used for 1000s of years. You know, people have bathed in goat milk for, you know, a long time, particularly if they had really dry skin, or if they had problematic skin. You know, all the milk maidens in Europe when they would go out and milk the animal in the morning, then wash their face with the fresh milk. And people, obviously, back then, didn't understand why it was working, right. They just knew, Oh, my skin feels better, feels more moisturized, or, you know, so the biggest contributor there was the pH of the goat milk and not disturbing the pH of their skin. 

Brent Ridge  6:30  
And then as we got more interested in the goat milk and really started looking at developing more skin care and more clinical skin care, what really spurred that on was that I had always had an interest in the microbiome of the skin, because when I was on the wards at Mount Sinai Hospital, we would have to heal chronic wounds, you know, sometimes bed sores, you know, things people would come in with, things that just didn't heal and they were causing systemic infections. And so I was always interested in the wound healing process and how the act, the moisture level of the skin, contributes to granulation so new skin skin cell formulation, and also how the bacteria on the surface of the skin are helping or hindering healing of the wound. So I was interested in that naturally. 

Brent Ridge  7:17  
I was also interested in probiotics, because when patients would come into the hospital and we would have to put them on prolonged courses of antibiotics, intravenous antibiotics, it would completely wipe out their entire microbial ecosystem internally. And so we would start giving them yogurt with live probiotics to start repopulating the internal microbiome, the gut microbiome. So I was always fascinated by this role of microorganisms in human health. And so about, I would say, eight years ago now, the science behind skin microbiome really started to develop, and people really started looking at it, and research dollars and funding were going into understanding the skin microbiome, and even today, it's still a build of study. 

Brent Ridge  8:05  
This is in its infancy, it's, you know, in its beginnings, but I was very fascinated by this idea that if we could nourish the skin's natural microbiome, could we make it more resilient? Because obviously, in today's world, our skin is bombarded with so many things, right? Just the sun, all the products that we just in our skincare products, all the chemicals and natural skincare products and makeup, just the toxins in the air, the things that are sprayed on our clothes, the cleaning products that we use, like just our skin, is exposed to so many different chemicals, and while one of the any small level of any of those chemicals might not be deleterious to the skin microbiome, the totality of all of the chemicals that we are exposed to in the course of the day can have damage to the skin microbiome. 

Brent Ridge  8:54  
So my first line of question was, how could we build the resiliency of the skin microbiome at its natural state, the skin microbiome functions to keep our skin healthier. That's why we've evolved with this. Evolved with humans, and that's why it's the microbiome, both internally and externally, is so critical to human health. And so I said, Okay, what could we do that might improve the strength and resilience of the microbiome? And if you go to down the grocery store aisle and you look at any of the healthier yogurts, not the more sugar laden yogurts, but kind of in the healthier section of yogurts, you'll see all of them are touting how many live organisms there are in the yogurt, right, live probiotics. 

Brent Ridge  9:40  
And the way that that works is that the reason that those live probiotics, those live organisms, can survive on the grocery store shelf in the container of yogurt until they get inside your body, where they can start doing the work, is because they are feeding off of the natural sugars that are in the milk, the oligosaccharides that are in the milk. And so that for the last, I would say, six or seven years, that's we've really been looking at this and how the natural oligosaccharides in the milk are influencing the microbiome on the surface of the skin. And there are some really great studies. 

Brent Ridge  10:20  
And I would say again, it's still all in it. You know, there's still lots more study to happen. Because what we don't truly understand at this point, though, I think that AI is going to help us understand this. You know, there are 1000s, probably upwards of 8000 different types of organisms on the surface of the skin, yeast, fungi, viruses, bacteria, of course, and we don't know how they all interact. We just know that there is this ecosystem on the surface of the skin that is there for a reason. We don't understand completely how all of them interact, but there are some very interesting studies that have looked at particular skin conditions, acne, psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, which is, you know, some type of inflammatory going on, you know, some type of sensitivity on the surface of the skin. 

Brent Ridge  11:07  
And they have found that when the skin microbiome, at least the ones that we can readily plate and watch and culture and actually study, that when there's an imbalance in this microbiome, those conditions can be worse. And it happens not because there are good bacteria or bad bacteria in quotes. It happens because there's not a balance. Because just like in all ecosystems, in our natural ecosystem in the world around us, this is an ecosystem on the surface of the skin, and if one element of the ecosystem gets out of balance, then everything goes awry. And there were some really great studies looking at psoriasis in particular, and this lactobacteria, lactobacillus, and using lactobacillus to help control psoriasis. 

Brent Ridge  12:01  
Now, lactobacillus got its name because it feeds off of lactose, which is the sugar for milk and so and lactobacillus is a very, very small component of the skin microbiome. If you look at all the totality of the organisms, it's naturally on our skin, but usually is in a lower quantity than some of the other bacteria on the surface of the skin. And so my thought has been that if we can optimize the nourishment of lactobacillus on the surface of skin, the natural lactobacillus on the skin, can it really help people who are having some sort of inflammatory process on the surface of the skin. 

Brent Ridge  12:43  
So there are a lot of companies skin health companies out there now looking at putting live lactobacillus directly onto the skin. So like repopulating the skin with live bacteria, there's a lot of issues with that in terms of shelf stability and, you know, quantity and dosage of the bacteria. And so our approach is, hey, no, let's just optimize the nourishment for the natural lactobacillus on the skin, and let's see what it can do to make the skin healthier. So that's really what we've been working on over the past several years, trying to just do more research on that, and I'll stop there and see if you have any questions before I continue on. 

Deborah Niemann  13:22  
Okay, this is fascinating. One of the questions that one of our listeners asked after the last episode is she was wondering if when you add the lye to the mixture, when you're making soap, if that changes the pH of the milk.

Brent Ridge  13:41  
It does alter it slightly in the process, because the addition of the lye into the fat. Whatever fat you're using, you could be using an olive oil, and you could add lye, or use milk and add lye, because the soap, the saponification is the interaction. Saponification is making of soap that chemical reaction happens because of the interaction with the lye, the base and the fatty acids. And in that chemical reaction, all of the lye is consumed. It's completely used up in the chemical reaction. So there is some alteration in the pH of the goat milk. But depending on what other ingredients you're putting in your soap, you know, other oils and other ingredients, end product so can is, should still match that range of human skin if you want to use it as a, you know, to treat sensitive skin.

Deborah Niemann  14:33  
Okay, so then at what point did you decide that you wanted to dive in and do more research on the goat milk.

Brent Ridge  14:42  
Well, part of it was just my natural curiosity. Why is this working, you know? And so I just wanted to figure that out. I always say, you know, if there's been a folk remedy that is used around the world and has been used for hundreds and 1000s of years, there must be something to it. Maybe we haven't figured out what it was. Maybe the measurement test that we needed to be looking at had not been developed yet, you know, but there has to be something to it. Otherwise it doesn't persist, right, particularly in the face of all of the modern remedies that we have. And goat milk really is that, like you can go to virtually any country in the world into the farmers market, and someone will be selling goat milk soap. 

Brent Ridge  15:22  
Same in the US, if you go to any Farmers Market in any state in the US, somebody is going to be selling goat milk soap. And we say, Hooray for that, because everybody who picks up a bar of goat milk soap at a farmer's market and supports your local farm, you are learning the benefits of goat milk on your skin. And that just validates everything that we say and helps contribute to interest in goat milk for skin health. And so we applaud all of the small producers of goat milk soap out there. And then, when we launched on TV retail, which after we went through the indie channel and we launched on TV retail, that becomes a whole other beast of regulation, because TV retail requires, because it is governed by the FCC, it requires any claim that you are making to be substantiated by research, and so anything like if any of Your listeners or viewers watch us on QVC or HSN, any claim that we're making about any of our product has to have documentation from a lab that QVC or HSN has vetted. 

Brent Ridge  16:33  
So anything that we say has to have the clinical proof to it. So then it became a matter of not just satisfying my own curiosity, but also meeting the standards of our major retailer at the time. And so that's really what ramped up our research in goat milk, because we wanted to continue innovating on our products, and we wanted to continue to solve problems for people's skin before we could have that product and sell it on QVC or HSN, we had to have the clinical proof that it was working. And so now we probably have done close to 400 clinical studies on various components of goat milk, on our products, on the clinical claims of our products. And it's, you know, the, I would say, one of the biggest portions of our total company budget is spent on the clinical research. 

Brent Ridge  17:27  
And I think that's a really clear distinction that people have to understand, is that even, like, certainly, if you're watching Tiktok shop and somebody is saying something about a product, I mean, it's just whatever goes, you know, people can say whatever. And even if you go into a lot of major retail stores, they're not governed by anybody. So if you could see a claim in a major retail store or even at your doctor's office, and there's no substantiation on that claim, right, they could be saying whatever, but because we are on TV, and they are governed by a very specific set of laws about what can be claimed in a commercial. We are governed very strictly from most skin care companies out there, and we take it very seriously because, you know, we don't want to be kicked off the channels. And so that's really where a lot of our research has come from, is because we needed to substantiate that. 

Deborah Niemann  18:23  
That is really interesting, because I wrote, a long time ago, I wrote an article about mouthwash. Does anybody really need mouthwash? And got into the history of Listerine, which was originally sold as a surgical antiseptic. And as you know, you're a doctor, like there's not that big of a market for surgical antiseptics, so they were trying to figure out how they could sell more of it. So they invented this condition called halitosis, which was supposed to be a big, fancy name for bad breath, and and then they just kept pushing the limit. And I saw all these crazy ads from magazines in the early 1900s and the only time they got stopped, and that just clicked now it wasn't the FDA that stopped them, it was the FCC that stopped them, and they were running ads on TV in the 1970s telling you that you could prevent a cold by using Listerine. Oh,

Brent Ridge  19:20  
Oh, interesting.

Deborah Niemann  19:23  
Yeah, like, that was the thing that stopped him. It's like, Yo, this is false advertising. You cannot prevent a cold by gargling with Listerine when you come inside from the cold.

Brent Ridge  19:33  
Interesting. They could have had a study for that. That would have been something fairly easy to study at the time. But they must not have,

Deborah Niemann  19:40  
Right? Yeah, they didn't. That is really interesting. 

Brent Ridge  19:43  
But to your point, like, if you look at all of the ads like you see in magazines and things like that, because there's no governance of, you know those, yeah, you can look back through history. You can see the things from Listerine, or you can see the things from cigarettes, where cigarettes were healthy.

Deborah Niemann  19:56  
Yeah, more doctors smoke Camel than any other brand. And like the ads, the magazine ads from the mid 1900s were just out of this world. But that is very interesting. So I never thought about the fact that if you're on TV, that you're governed by the FCC, the Federal Communication Commission. This is sad. They care more than the FDA does.

Brent Ridge  20:22  
Yes. Well, the FDA is busy.

Deborah Niemann  20:25  
Yes, they are. I guess the FDA is busy with drugs and food, so they figure that something you put on top of your body is not that important, as long as it doesn't blind someone or, you know, eat through their skin. I've written about the FDA's lack of regulations on the cosmetic industry before.

Brent Ridge  20:45  
Even worse with the supplements industry, even less. 

Deborah Niemann  20:47  
Yeah. 

Brent Ridge  20:48  
But anyway, that's how our interest in the science developed, and it was just fortunate that I had this background in science. I understood how we needed to structure the research and could find the appropriate labs to work with to do it, and we was really propelled by who our distribution partner was with the time.

Deborah Niemann  21:08  
That is fascinating. So what were some of the earliest studies that you did then? 

Brent Ridge  21:12  
We're always looking at different things. So because, if we want to make a claim like, say, we're coming out with a new cream, right? So we want to first think about, okay, what is the component of goat milk that is critical here to what we're the issue that we're trying to solve, and then we have to break down the study to be very specific about what type of claim we want to make, because you could easily go bankrupt doing studies right? And some of them are not important to the consumer. Some of them are not important for convincing the consumer to buy the product. 

Brent Ridge  21:44  
So you have to be very judicious about what you want to do. We just start with looking at the various components of goat milk and then saying, Okay, here's the problem we're trying to solve. How can we prove that this is solving the issue? I would say that after the pH and then after looking at the oligosaccharides in the milk and how that could be influencing the overall health of microbiome, the next thing that we did was we wanted to look at every single component that makes up a drop of goat milk. So we wanted to identify every single structure that was in that goat milk, because we knew that was where the future of the science would have to take us. 

Brent Ridge  22:29  
We would have to say, okay, how can we take this portion of the goat milk, and how can that influence the surface, and how can we take this and how can that do it? And interestingly, what set us down that path was we knew that the consumer, some small portion of the consumer population, was very interested in vegan formulations. Now, obviously that posed a problem for us as a company, because we are a milk company, so we're never going to be vegan, but it also seeded in our minds, there might be some point in the future, who knows, in a catastrophe where there is not enough goat milk, you know, for our products, you know, or, you know, there's something happens. We just can't get goat milk. 

Brent Ridge  23:14  
So what then? And so we were just trying to future proof, thinking, you know, worst case scenarios, what would happen? And we said, okay, let's find out every single component in the goat milk, so that in the future, if something happens with supply of goat milk, for whatever reason, we know what the components are, and we will know where we can find those components somewhere else, right? Because, yes, the combination of goat milk and all the components and nutrients in goat milk are unique, but the individual components that make up goat milk are not in and of themselves, unique. It's just the ratios of them in the goat milk. 

Brent Ridge  23:55  
And so we wanted to have this kind of library of all the various components of the goat milk, and then we were also interested, and we did, for a while, make a moisturizer that was completely created with biotechnology, where we had taken all of the components of goat milk, there are 31 different things that we've identified so far. Now those could be broken down further when we have more tools and better science to break them down further. But right now, there are 31 components that we've identified, and we completely resourced all of them from plant based materials, used biotechnology and fermentation to reconstruct goat milk in a vegan formula, so we do have that on reserve in our library and database. 

Brent Ridge  24:44  
Now, it turned out that with that particular product, which was a very good product, the small number of people who were interested in a vegan only product, who also wanted to pay for all the technology that went into creating a vegan only formula were not large enough to sustain production of that product. There wasn't the demand for it at the price point that need to be charged to continue that product. But I'm glad that we did that research, and we have that research for potential use in the future, but also because it did help us understand goat milk more and and now we can go in and research each of those amino acids, each of those peptides, each of those vitamins that are natural in the goat milk, and how they are influencing the surface of the skin. 

Brent Ridge  25:30  
Of course, we knew this already, but now we know the exact ratios. One of the other great things about goat milk as a cleanser is that it is a natural source of lactic acid. And lactic acid is a great exfoliator. And generally, if you go into a store and you buy something that's labeled as an exfoliator, it's usually a very high percentage of acid, or there's a physical exfoliant in it, which is a different category. But if you're looking at a chemical exfoliator a lot and it's using lactic acid, they use a high percentage of lactic acid. 

Brent Ridge  26:01  
And if you have sensitive skin, it can be very irritating to the skin, but because in its natural state, goat milk has lactic acid at a very dilute percentage, every time you cleanse with it, you're going to get this gentle exfoliation. So then you don't have to do this periodic deep exfoliation, because every day when you cleanse, you're getting this gentle exfoliation. So even people who have sensitive skin can still exfoliate by virtue of lactic acid that's natural in the goat milk.

Deborah Niemann  26:32  
That is so cool to know. You know, I've been using goat milk soap now for 23 years, ever since I learned how to make it. Yeah, and it just occurred me, I don't really use any exfoliants or anything, and I've never felt like, Oh, I really need to go get an exfoliant.

Brent Ridge  26:48  
And you probably have to use less body moisturizer than most people do as well. 

Deborah Niemann  26:54  
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Brent Ridge  26:56  
As you get older, you're going to probably need more. But you know, for a lot of people, if you just change the way you cleanse, and you're cleansing with the goat milk, you're going to eliminate a lot of other products.

Deborah Niemann  27:08  
Yeah, before I started making goat milk soap, I was one of those people. I had like, a bottle of liquid soap and a bottle of lotion at my sink, and I would wash my hands, and then after I dried my hands, about half the time I would use the liquid soap, because my hands would be feeling really dry at that point. And now, boy, I think I was just thinking, like, it's time to throw away this bottle of moisturizer that I bought three years ago, because it's starting to smell a little funky, like because in the dead of winter, when it's below zero in Illinois, and there's no moisture in the air whatsoever, and everybody's heat is on, like my feet and my hands do start to get kind of dry, and, you know, so I'll buy something, and then, you know, like I said, this bottle I bought three years ago is not even half empty, and whatever the preservative, and it's natural, you know, and it's starting to smell funky now. So it's like,

Brent Ridge  28:04  
There's only there's only so much that preservatives can do, particularly if it's you're using a natural preservative, or if you are falling under clean beauty standards, the preservatives are usually used at lower quantities in clean beauty products, and so the shelf life is going to be diminished, particularly you're probably using a pump bottle. But if you have a bottle or tube or tub that has more access to your fingers as it's getting into the product, the shelf life is going to get shorter and shorter just because the natural bacteria from your skin is polluting the product and overwhelming the preservative system.

Deborah Niemann  28:44  
That is really interesting. Are there any other interesting things that you want to share today? 

Brent Ridge  28:49  
Well, there are couple interesting things that we're working on right now. One is, um, you know, I'm always continuing to read all medical literature like I just am interested, you know. So I want to see, oh, what's happening, you know? Because I haven't worked with patients now for almost 20 years, so I just like to stay up to date as much as I can about what's happening in the world. And so I was reading, well, we were investigating this polypeptide from this plant called the Rene seed. It's a plant that's native to Australia. We've been looking at it for several years because the clinical data around it was that it was four times as potent as retinol at collagen stimulation, and without any sensitivity, without the sensitivity that can come from using retinol. 

Brent Ridge  29:41  
And you know, Retinol is a fantastic ingredient for skin, but it is very sensitizing to a lot of people, and because we really focus on sensitive skin and trying to solve those issues for people, we did not want to formulate with retinol. So we were very interested in this polypeptide. And so we were working, working with it. And then I was just reading this, this oncology journal, and so cancer journal looking at cancer treatments, and there was this study, and they were looking at ways to administer chemotherapy so that the chemotherapy could get directly into the tumor cell without impacting, or having minimal impact on the healthy cells surrounding the tumor. 

Brent Ridge  30:27  
You know, because that's a big issue with chemotherapy. It's the reason your hair falls out, the reason you feel so sick is because it's not only impacting the cancer cells, it's impacting the healthy cells throughout the body. And so the more targeted your chemotherapy can be the better, the fewer side effects you're going to have. So they were just testing out lots of different things. This particular group are looking at lots of different ways to administer chemotherapy, and one of the newer fields of study across disciplines are exosomes. 

Brent Ridge  30:55  
Now exosomes are these tiny little pockets. They're like little envelopes, and they carry strands of DNA, they carry peptides, they carry lipids, lots of things. They're like delivery systems that kind of go in between cells. And you can find these exosomes in lots of places in nature. And so they had discovered that they could use these exosomes as delivery systems to deliver chemotherapy into the tumor cells. And so once they knew that this possibility existed, then the next question was, Where can we find a large number of exosomes that are fairly reasonably extracted and cost effective to extract? And they looked at lots of different places, and they found the most viable source of the exosomes in goat milk. 

Brent Ridge  31:44  
And so we researched our goat milk because I'm sure the study had done this too, but they didn't have it in their study. But we researched our goat milk and found that there were over 116 billion exosomes per milliliter of the goat milk. And so what we did was we paired those goat milk exosomes with this Rene seed polypeptide, and that became the source of our better aging treatment. And, you know, and we call it better aging treatment, because my specialty was longevity and aging, and so I'd always forbidden our team to ever conceptualize a product that was called anti-aging. 

Brent Ridge  32:30  
That is such a bad marketing term, it was created to make people feel bad about themselves, and as we all know, aging is a natural process going to happen to all of us. But can we help people age better, not just on their skin, but in general? Like, longevity is not about the years that you're living, it's how many good years you live. And the same with your skin, like, how long can we keep your skin healthy? So that's how our better aging cream came about. And with the combination of this Rene seed polypeptide, which was so good of collagen stimulation and the exosome delivery system to really get it, you know, in between the cells into the skin, that became a very powerful combination. 

Brent Ridge  33:11  
So exosomes are something that we're looking at really heavily right now. And then there's this whole field called peptide omics, okay, so if you walk down the beauty store aisle, or even the mass aisle, you're seeing lots of products touting peptides, peptides, peptides. Pep this has peptides. So the consumer understands peptides are important, and what peptides are – they are basically strands of amino acids that are computer codes basically for every cell in our body. 

Brent Ridge  33:47  
So these little computer codes travel through the body, and when they interact with the cell, they tell that cell what it needs to do. And so when you use these peptides on the surface of the skin, they can communicate certain messages to the skin, to say, Oh, you need to hold on to moisture, or you need to ramp up production of this molecule. And so peptides are very important, but a lot of the peptides, even the ones that are studied in a lab, individually ex vivo, so on a cell, but outside of surface of the human body, they can be very impactful, and they can be the exact right computer code. 

Brent Ridge  34:29  
But once you formulate with them and put them on the surface of the skin, do they actually get to where they need to in the skin? Do they go down into the layers of the skin? Do they penetrate the skin cell in a certain way that they're actually impactful in real life, on the surface of your skin? And a lot of them aren't – a lot of them – the molecular weight of the peptides are too large, and so they don't really get to where they need to be to have the function that that is the problem of the peptide. And so now what we're looking at with this other fabulous lab is how we can break down the natural peptides that occur in the goat milk and really make them impactful. So break them into smaller and smaller strands so they can really be just overwhelmingly impactful. 

Brent Ridge  35:20  
And so that's what we're working on now, are these enzymatic cleavages of the peptides into smaller components. And what's fascinating about this is that we've discovered some peptides that have never been documented before anywhere in nature, that are part of the goat milk. So there's lots more study that has to be done. What do these particular peptides do? Are they impactful on the skin? So lots more work to be done, enough to keep me busy until I decide to retire. But those are the things we're working on. And I know that a lot of people who listen to your podcast are small farmers. They make their own soap, stuff like that. 

Brent Ridge  35:58  
And I'm like, yes, please keep doing that, I think what you're doing is beneficial. You can look at Deborah and look at her skin and say, Look, she's been using goat milk all these years. And look at her skin. I mean testament and thank you, because everything that you do to introduce people to goat milk helps us do this research that is so important, and hopefully it becomes a virtuous cycle. You know, if people come into Ulta, or they're watching QVC, and they hear us talking about, you know, our milk, RX, better aging cream that's using the exosum goat milk. 

Brent Ridge  36:28  
And they use it, and they love it, and they have never even considered goat milk as a skincare treatment before. And then the next time they're walking to the farmers market to get their tomatoes, and they see your stand and you're selling goat milk soap, they'll be more interested in buying your goat milk soap. So I hope it becomes a virtuous cycle of interest and scientific study of the goat milk.

Deborah Niemann  36:50  
Yeah, exactly. Gosh, the time has just flown by. This has been so interesting, and I know we've barely just scratched the surface. 

Brent Ridge  36:58  
Yeah, there's always something to talk about. That's why Josh never lets me go into it, because he's like, it's so boring, but glad I found an audience of one in you,  Deborah.

Deborah Niemann  37:08  
Oh no. I think a lot of people are going to enjoy this. I know I have found it really interesting. And like you said, we've all known forever that goat milk is awesome, and it's nice now that we're getting the science to back it up and go, Oh, okay, well, this is why it's awesome. That is great. Thank you so much for joining us. Do you have any final words before we go?

Brent Ridge  37:30  
You know, I will say one other thing, because we always say we have two key ingredients in all of our products, goat milk and kindness. And we say that because those are the two ingredients that started our company. You know, we had lost our jobs. Had to figure out a way to save our farm, because we've taken in this homeless farmer and his, you know, 100 homeless goats, and we say that was the original act of kindness that started our company. And as it turns out, kindness, in and of itself, is a pathway to wellness. 

Brent Ridge  38:02  
And if you think about kindness and what it does to your body when you give or receive an act of kindness, and I like to really point out whether you are giving it or you're receiving it, because receiving kindness is also hard to do, people are embarrassed to receive kindness. When you are able to do those things, give or receive kindness, you actually alter the chemicals in your body. You know the dopamine, the serotonin, you know the cortisol levels. You're altering those chemicals in your bloodstream. 

Brent Ridge  38:34  
You are actually changing the DNA, methylation on your cells, in your DNA, and these things have real health benefits. And so when we talk about applying the science of kindness, we are not just saying just, oh, it's, you know, it's a nice thing to be and Isn't it nice to be kind to one another? We are saying kindness is wellness. And I will tell you, after spending so many years counseling people to eat a better diet, eat the right diet, get the right amount of exercise, move around. I will say that if you can incorporate more kindness into your life, you will be a healthier person. You will be mentally healthier. You will be physically healthier. 

Brent Ridge  39:18  
And because my specialty was in longevity. And some of the research I had worked on early in my career at Harvard was looking to try to find this genetic component that longevity like, what was it that made people live to be longer like longer lives? And at the end of the day, what we determined, and what other studies have determined is that the biggest contributor to longevity is your social interaction, your optimism, the amount of friends, how close you are to your friends. And if you boil that down, that really is kindness, right? Because you don't have close relationships if you're not giving and receiving. Kindness of those relationships. So there we go. Kindness is longevity. And if you look at our ingredient list on the back of our products, kindness is actually listed as an ingredient because we really do believe that it has an impact on the health, not just of the microbiome of the skin, but throughout your entire body.

Deborah Niemann  40:20  
Oh, I love it. What a fantastic note to end on. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

Brent Ridge  40:25  
Thanks, Deborah. 

Deborah Niemann  40:26  
And that's it for today's show. If you haven't already done so, be sure to hit the subscribe button so that you don't miss any episodes to see show notes, you can always visit or the love of goats.com and you can follow us on facebook@facebook.com, slash love goats podcast, see you again next time. Bye for now you.