Inflammation and the Immune System Podcast

Episode 01: Professor Kimberly Lloyd, Inflammation & the Immune System

Mon, 1/31 5:12PM • 38:47

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

vitamin c, immune system, cells, inflammation, white blood cells, product, body, vitamin, immune, immune cells, research, blend, chronic inflammation, polysaccharides

SPEAKERS

Janet Walker, Kimberly Lloyd

Janet Walker

Welcome to our first full episode of healthy cells healthy you. I’m your host, Janet Walker. I’ve been working in the healthcare community for 30 years. And for 16 of those years, I’ve been a writer and producer for the award winning national PBS Health Information Programs, American Health Journal, and innovations in medicine. We’ve interviewed 1000s of doctors, scientists and researchers on every topic related to health, medicine and medical technology. You can watch current episodes of innovations in medicine on your local PBS channel, or you can stream our programs on the American Health Journal channel, the better health channel and TV healthy kids. This podcast is sponsored by the good folks at life farm Incorporated, a company whose innovative cellular repair products are backed by extensive science, research and clinical studies. In today’s episode, I’ll be talking to Kimberly Purdy Lloyd, a biochemist and immunologist about something that’s on everyone’s mind today, given our current health crisis, the immune system, a healthy immune system is so important, and especially now, I want to know when I’m sure you do, too, do I have a healthy immune system? can I improve my immune system? Supplements To Boost Immune System ? And if I can improve my immune system, how? We’re going to try to get some answers to those questions today. Now, before we jump into talking about the immune system, let’s talk a little bit about inflammation, which, I guess you can say is the arch nemesis of the immune system. The Lex Luthor, the Green Goblin, the Dr. Doom. Now, not all inflammation is bad, some inflammation is good. Our body has an amazing capacity to heal itself. And inflammation is the way the body responds to infections and injuries with the immune system releasing white blood cells and other factors to fight off those nasty invading pathogens to speed healing. In those situations, inflammation is our superhero, our Superman Spider Man are fantastic for but that’s not the inflammation we’re worried about. It’s that chronic inflammation, also called systemic inflammation that hangs around our bodies for months and even years that can really wreak havoc on our bodies. Time for me to introduce you to today’s expert Kimberly Purdy Lloyd obtained her Bachelor of Science pre med degree from the University of Texas at Arlington and her Master of Science in biochemistry from the University of North Texas in Denton. She received the first place award from the American Chemical Society for Research and presentation and the Welch scholarship, a highly competitive research scholarship for her graduate degree. Her thesis was published in the Archives of biochemical and biophysical and her numerous clinical and investigational studies have appeared in a variety of peer reviewed publications and forums. Professor Lloyd brings over 20 years of experience in dietary supplements and specialty skincare formulations to her role at life farm as their Chief Product Development researcher. She has been a key player in product development and clinical studies, and has taught college level courses in nursing, chemistry and biology. She’s dedicated to utilizing her extensive scientific background and knowledge to further support high quality supplement Development, Research and Education. Welcome to the show, Professor Lloyd.

Kimberly Lloyd

Oh, thank you, Janet. It’s so nice to be with you today. Thank you for having me. And just call me Kimberly.

Janet Walker

I appreciate that. Alright, so let’s start talking a little bit about inflammation. First, I picked up this month’s copy of the publication eating well, which is a special anti-inflammation edition. Do you mind if I read what it says about the eight sneaky signs that you could have inflammation? And then we could talk a little bit about that? Sure. Okay. Eight sneaky signs that you can have inflammation, your joints hurt or stiff. You keep forgetting things. You just don’t feel like yourself. You have new digestive issues. You always seem to catch what’s going around. That’s kind of a scary one for today. Your blood pressure is a little higher, you get hangry frequently, that’s the low blood sugar hungry angry feeling. And you’ve got a new skin irritation that won’t go away. Okay, so I find that I have three, maybe four of these. So what’s going on? What are these symptoms about?

Kimberly Lloyd

Well, this is a very interesting topic. You know, in today’s Health, it’s one of the main topics and a lot has been discovered about chronic inflammation, which is kind of a slow long-term inflammation that can last several months, two years. And it has side effects of what you just made. So what we’re looking at today is there is there a way to reduce inflammation in the body. And what happens is when you get a immune reaction, inflammation is part of the body’s defense mechanism. It’s the process by which the immune system recognizes and removes harmful and foreign stimulus and foreign bodies, and from the area and begins the healing process to bring the tissue back together. So if we think of a simple example, like, you know, your child falls and skins his name off, fallen off the bicycle, or you get a splinter, when you’re doing your yard work or something, so you get this redness around the wound. And then that means that white blood cells are signaling, oh, there’s a wound, we need to go fix this. So you send these signals to the white blood cells, and they come to the point of the injury. And they start signaling and more white blood cells of different types. And you’ll have a arising you know, of tissue, and it will be kind of moist and wet if it’s an infection. And then that material is actually white blood cells, or you have clear and a blister, you know, if you burn your lip, or you eat a pizza, or something that or you burn your finger cooking, you get a little blister, we call it well, that has more clear fluid, and with those fluids are in massing cells that are coming to the side of the injury, getting rid of the foreign body, like in the, in the case of the splinter, it’s going to try and push that Splinter back out of your body with this reaction. So that’s the good inflammation, good inflammation. Now what happens in chronic inflammation is that due to bad living habits, or bad diet, or stress, chronic stress that wears down the body, it begins to put stress on other organs such as the blood vessels of the heart, is where we see chronic inflammation, which is you know, a very dangerous situation, as it carries on in the lifespan of the of the human, you know, are the organisms. So, diabetes, you mentioned as sore joints, then you start to get deterioration the jaw and, and in rheumatoid arthritis, the immune response gets so mixed up, it starts attacking your own tissue. So it’s the bottom line is we want to keep the immune system that is our first defense. There are some cells that are going to turn over as many as three to 5 billion cells in about four or five days.

Janet Walker

So Kimberly, we talked about some signs that you’re having inflammation in your body, what are some of the risk factors that come along with inflammation?

Kimberly Lloyd

Well, Janet age is one of the number one risk factors for beginning to get an inflammation is positively correlated with you know, increases in cellular dysfunction, the cells are getting older. And so you also get more fat storage in the tummy area. And all of these are kind of a sign of inflammation going on in the body as we age, obesity or being overweight is also a risk factor involved. You make different chemicals to when you’re heavy or you have too many fat cells. So diets rich also in saturated fat or trans fat or refined sugar are also associated with higher production of some of these inflammatory molecules. And of course, that leads to diabetes and overweight and so that’s that big problem there. Smoking is associated with lowering the production of some of these anti-inflammatory molecules which induces inflammation. Low sex hormones are also play a factor in Keeping us in balance, keeping our immune system in balance. Stress and Sleep Disorders also play a role both physical and emotional stress.

Janet Walker

While so there is a big link between inflammation and the immune system, bigger than probably most of us realize. So then you would say, it’s probably pretty important to try to protect your immune system and reduce inflammation in the body.

Kimberly Lloyd

Yes, definitely. And then you can stave off some of these age related diseases, you know, and do these in these positive things that you’re going to do will definitely benefit your health in those ways.

Janet Walker

So then a strong immune system does more than just fighting off bacteria and viruses.

Kimberly Lloyd

That’s right, it’s repairing your tissue damage, and it’s going over to your tissue. And when your red blood cells are ready to be reproduced every three months, you’ve got to get rid of those dead cells, you got a lot of cells that are dying in your body that are being replaced periodically. So you’ve got to get rid of those cells in a healthy sort of way to process them on out of your body.

Janet Walker

So given what’s happening today, with this pandemic, how important is it to try to have a strong immune system?

Kimberly Lloyd

Well is very important, you know. And the thing is, is that you can do things that will boost your immune system, you know, we have this product called immune plus. And we actually did a study, and this is, we’re going to talk a little bit more about it, and a few minutes, but it has vitamin C and the skin and berries, you know, wow flavonoids, and these fruit compounds that help the vitamin C get incorporated into the cell. And we found out that using this product, increase the number of white blood cells, all of the different types, there’s many types, but in general by about 12%. So when you increase the vitality and the proliferation of good white blood cells, they can squeeze into the capillaries and get down to the tissues and help repair and get rid of the bad material as well as they’re fighting. The infectious agents, viruses, bacteria, you know, the dirt, the air, in the dirt, whatever, you know, in all, these are all foreign invaders, some are highly more damaging than others.

Janet Walker

I’m glad you brought up vitamin C, because I did read that there’s a link between vitamin C and inflammation, you know, but there are a million vitamin C products on the market. So if Vitamin C is so important to helping the immune system, can people just take any vitamin C that’s out there is there a difference in products between one vitamin C and another?

Kimberly Lloyd

Well, I tell people, you know, drinking or eating the orange, the organic, beautiful orange from Oregon or Florida is the most is the best thing you can do. But you can’t necessarily eat five or seven oranges a day to get this higher level of vitamin C. And this product and then you have like the skin of the orange you know, in some recipes, you see the use the skin of the orange well that’s also very healthy the rind of the plant or the citrus in this case, when you eat those together that pith that helps that vitamin C get better Incorporated. So I do tell people that to eat a couple of organic oranges a day would be optimal. But if you can’t do that, due to time restraints, or shopping or what have you, then orange juice is good. But even better is sometimes getting a large dose of vitamin C and I’ll tell you why in a second. And then if you have a product that combines other ingredients that will help that sea get to the point where it’s needed. We have a two time Nobel Prize winning biochemist that we talked about in biochemistry and you know he got the Nobel Prize for the twisting of the DNA chain they were able to look at you know pictures back then and figure out structures of molecules that hadn’t been figured out yet. His second Nobel Prize was also though, in part of discovering vitamin C, and the Faygo site, we call it this is a big white blood cell that goes around and eats the bad guys literally, like a big amoeba or a big blob, you know, kind of covers around the virus or covers around the bad bacteria, or the piece of Splinter, you know, and tries to engulf that bad material. And process that you know, so it won’t be poisonous or harmful, or in the case of an infectious microbe, it won’t replicate. So it you know, it digested it eats it up. So we want these cells in particular to be healthy and viable. Well, Linus Pauling, the doctorate found out that these cells because they are larger cells, they need about 40 times more vitamin C, than the other cells of your body. And the other thing about vitamin C, that you may not know is that we’re only one of a few mammals, you know, in the animal kingdom, that does not make our own vitamin C, we lack an enzyme for one of the last chemical reactions in our body.

Janet Walker

Oh, that’s interesting. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that.

Kimberly Lloyd

So that means the cat and the dog and the horse and the sheep and the goats. And the giraffe tend to make their own vitamin C, they make it from you know, another pathway. And so we must get our vitamin C from a dietary source. And, you know, the more is better. And then, real quickly, of course, a lot of these studies that came out of various parts of the world when this epidemic hit, you know, several years ago, and was a surprise to the doctors that were dealing with that they hardly knew what it was yet. But as they kept those people in the clinics, they would give them particular vitamins, and noticed that those that were had either a higher level coming in of vitamin C, and or to use it as a treatment in the hospital, once they were sick, tended to fare better. Now, they’re not going to cure you of this infectious disease, you don’t want to make a false claim, that’s not the point. But that, but with you building up your own immune system, and helping the therapy along, all of these things are good, you know, like you’re saying, to keep your immune system build up.

Janet Walker

I think I shared with you earlier that my husband’s a kidney transplant patient, and when this pandemic hit, the doctors put all the transplant patients on vitamin C. So clearly, there’s got to be an important link with vitamin C.

Kimberly Lloyd

Excellent to hear.

Janet Walker

I also heard about B T and natural killer cells explain what those are and why they’re important.

Kimberly Lloyd

Okay, well, the, the majority of cells are called B cells, most of them because they’re derived in the bone marrow, that’s where their origin, more they’re made in the body, therefore, they get the label B for bone. And so those cells float around, and those are the ones that make the immunoglobulins. So when you get the vaccination, or you get a piece of that virus, or that microbe that you know, you want your body to fight against, you’re kind of showing it a little piece, it’s not alive, it’s not going to replicate your body, but your these immune cells are going to read it like a code, oh, that’s a, b, c, d, g, W F, you know, some little code on that protein, they say, Aha, you don’t belong here. You’re not in my genetic code, you are a foreign object, B microbe or virus, or you know, poison or whatever. So you got to go. So, again, we send out the signals to the other macrophages and the other types of cells and the B cells actually make an anti body so they make like the mirror code of it, so it inactivates it and blocks it blocks that virus particle or that microbial particle from doing harm. It stopped opposite signals getting in the map, the Macro Bars, the big guy can come along and eat it. And so all of those cells we want working in optimal condition. And again, like you’re saying you have real high turnover on some of these cells. So you’re literally making your body’s got to make three or 4 billion of a particular type of immune cell, you know, to keep up with what all is going on in your body. So you want to keep you know, nutrition and good nutrition, give it the vitamins that it needs, you know, they these cells need vitamins, you know, 40 times more vitamins, vitamin C, and this one huge sell, that he figured out. And so that’s the reason that these are important. And then, you know, vitamin C deficiency we talked a lot about, or, you know, when you read the stories of the Europeans coming over to the Americas, and that long boat ride, if they didn’t have any citrus or fruits, they literally got sick, their gums, sores, wounds, and could even lead to death.

Janet Walker

scurvy, right, is that.

Kimberly Lloyd

And then what we’re seeing is that higher levels of vitamin C, are more effective, I read one article, where young people were did get an influenza taught a virus and had the A eggs and felt low and everything well, if they took the equivalent like of two tablets of this immune product, three times the day, they had 80% less symptoms. And it was, you know, kids in college or something that got the flu, or regular flu type of thing, but it still would knock them out for a week or two. And so they just did a lot better if they just took kind of a megadose. So when we start to get a sore throat or itchy throat, we make sure we’re taking that product and a lot of people so I feel better the next day, you know, because you’re pumping up your immune system, and it’s working to help you get rid of that little bug that you may have been exposed to.

Janet Walker

So before we delve into the immune product, and what that is, I want to talk a little bit about how you got into the field of research that you did and why it became important to you to research supplementation and create these products that help build our immune system through Whole Foods.

Kimberly Lloyd

Oh, okay. Well, thanks for asking me that. I don’t tell that story very often. But you know, I went to pre med college and did my curriculum in that. And then I got a job at the medical school in Dallas, Southwest medical school as a research associate. And I got familiar with research techniques. There were a lot of grants and a lot of things you know, to do. And so I learned how to do laboratory research, and happened to work with immune cells in my first job there. And but then, I went on back to graduate school, I wanted some more schooling. And I did like the sciences and medical and I wasn’t sure what direction to go, but I liked I liked it and was fascinated. But then I worked as an r&d department. And one of the engineers that I was working with, I was confiding in her eyes that I have this terrible breast tenderness, and it’s just very, very painful. We were young women in our 20s. And she said, Well, I know a good female doctor, go see her. And I went to see this lady. And I said, you know, what could it be? What could it be? I was very concerned because it was very painful. And she said you have this fibrocystic breast disease which is common in women. It’s not cancer or not cancer yet, but it’s showing a change in the tissue. I read a small research paper that was published and the results were good. And I’m going to tell you to go home now and go to the grocery store and I want you to take 900 units of vitamin E a day, which was a mega dose of vitamin E, not the same that’s on the typical label of a, you know, vitamin product a little bit higher quite a bit. harm. I did that for two months. And oh my goodness, that all cleared up.

Kimberly Lloyd

So then the light bulbs went off and I thought well, this is the area I need to be in.

Janet Walker

What a wonderful way to find your career path. Alright, so now let’s dive into the product that you’ve mentioned a few times immune three plus, immune three plus is made by life farm. And we know that there’s a good amount of natural vitamin C in immune three plus from our conversation so far, but there are other ingredients that are combined with vitamin C that really make immune three plus super immune boosting supplement.

Kimberly Lloyd

Yes,

Janet Walker

because at first I was I was curious about all of those pluses. In fact, I was inaccurately calling the product immune plus plus plus, I was told no, it’s immune three plus. So I’d like to talk a little bit about what those pluses are all about. So the first one is the Optus shield blend, which is a polysaccharide complex with Reishi Mottaki and Turkey Tail mushrooms. So what does that blend? do for us? Why is that in the product, okay,

Kimberly Lloyd

these polysaccharides are found in brown rice are found in aloe vera and mushrooms. You have polysaccharides and they help the immune system they kind of turn the immune system on. And they’re in a number of natural products now. And mushrooms have a tremendous amount of research that shows that they stimulate the immune system in a good way to be more reactive and to do their job better. There’s something these medicinal Chinese mushrooms have been in their culture for 1000s of years. And they’ve identified the beta glucans. You know, some of these polysaccharides are called that they’re just very strong immune enhancers.

Janet Walker

So they’re sort of a blend of Eastern and Western thought in this product.

Kimberly Lloyd

Yes, that’s right. Good. That’s excellent.

Janet Walker

Okay, and then next is the life see blend, which has the purest form of vitamin C with citrus bioflavonoids and lipid metabolites. So you’re going to have to tell us what that is what that means. And when they say it’s the purest form of vitamin C, what form is that?

Kimberly Lloyd

Will this is a little bit different vitamin C and it’s also attached to a lipid molecule of Vitamin C, as you hear about is kind of a water soluble. But when it’s combined with a lipid means the fat, then it tends to get absorbed a little better, and it stays in the body a little bit longer. In other words, this vitamin C product will stay in your system about 24 hours. You know, until the same time, the next day, if you were to take one a day or two a day, then it’s about a 24 hour period before that will that will clear out of your body which is good that keeps it in the blood longer rather than it just drinking water and vitamins are flushed out you have to be kind of careful. When you take vitamin products too, you don’t want to you know help people sell go drink a liter of water. Well, you know, you can dilute those vitamins to the point where they won’t get to the necessary tissue, they’ll just gone and go through your digestive system and not be absorbed. You want those vitamins to get into your bloodstream and get into your immune system and the capillaries in the organs you know, you want it to float around.

Janet Walker

And immune three plus you can take it any time during the day or anytime at night with just a glass of water is the best way to take that. Yes, thank you. And then the last blend is the herbs and botanical blend. So what’s in the herbs and botanical blend?

Kimberly Lloyd

Well, this is a lovely blend of some specific herbs that have also been shown to be supportive to vitamin C. With these model flavonoids, there’s a camo, camo berry from South America. There’s ashwagandha, which is a stress relief, our horsetail, there’s pomegranate. So we have included another little blend of optimizing stress fighting herbs that go in this formula to kind of fight general stress in the body.

Janet Walker

And some of these things are some of these things are anti

Kimberly Lloyd

oxidants, there is an antioxidant, which fights the damage that’s done to your cells. Again, we’re working on the cellular level trying to, you know, give the cells the compounds that they need to stay healthy and to build the nutrients that they need to work well.

Janet Walker

So this is a good overall product for general health as well as the immune system.

Kimberly Lloyd

Yes, and then there’s some other functions of taking a product like this, such as we’ve mentioned, the anti-inflammatory, some chiropractors will literally give for People with sore stiff knees or even athletic injuries will use a vitamin C to help reduce the pain in the in the sore joints are dosage, you know, it would be maybe two to two tablets of our product two or three times a day. And so that’s a safe way to get a little bit of pain relief. And since all your cartilage and your skin is made of collagen, collagen, and elastin depend on vitamin C as a crosslinker. So your complexion can improve by taking vitamin C, your skin can improve. So that’s an wound healing if you do get a wound or some people that have bad wounds due to different situations. Many experiments will show that if we did that patient took a large dose of a good vitamin C product. Those wounds can sometimes be triggered to go on and heal.

Janet Walker

So lots of benefits the skin the eyes. Yeah, healing is on top of supporting the immune system.

Kimberly Lloyd

Yes. You mentioned the eye is in the eye. The Eye Institute recommends vitamin C for the eyes. I’m glad you remembered that and brought it up.

Janet Walker

You know I’ve been so impressed with the products that life farm manufacturers. One thing that we talked about when we talked for PBS was that your products are all Whole Foods. They’re meant manufactured in the United States in FDA approved facilities, and they’re backed by lots of research and clinical studies. Now there was a clinical study that was conducted on this particular product isn’t that right?

Kimberly Lloyd

Yes. Yes.

Janet Walker

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Kimberly Lloyd

Yes, we did a study, it was a study that we took the blood of people with a range of conditions, they were basically healthy, or they may have had some minor chronic situation. And we took, took blood from those people and did a baseline on all their white blood cells, the B cells, the T cells, the killer cells, and sent that off to the laboratory, then the subjects took the immune product for four weeks, and measured their level again, and they had increased by about 12 and a half percent, the number of immune cells, that’s what the doctor will do in the laboratory give you what they call a total white blood cell count. So that’s measuring all the different categories of white blood cells, or immune cells that you have, you know, in a fairly standard medical test. So that increased and that was statistically significant, you know, at a at a high level, showing that it was taking the supplement that increase the activity, and the proliferation of those immune cells, thus making you know, you have a healthier immune system. And we were proud, and I did get to publish that study, and it’s on our website. So yes, that that showed us right off the bat that that product worked. And you just know you’re doing something good for your body clean for your body being supportive to your body, when you take a product like that. There’s no big mystery, you’re doing your body a lot of good by taking even one a day.

Janet Walker

I just know how high your standards are how high life farm standards are for safety, efficacy, and just putting together the best ingredients for optimal results. Thank you very much, Professor Kimberly, I know that life farm also has a product called Laminine that you mentioned, and it has an ingredient called fibroblast growth factor. And that FGF is a powerful inflammation fighting and cell rebuilding tool, especially when it’s combined with immune three plus, I know that there’s another study with the combination of those supplements. So I would love to ask you to come back if you’re willing another time so that we could talk about Laminine and the FGF ingredient and the study that was done with Laminine and immune would you do that?

Kimberly Lloyd

I’d love to.

Janet Walker

That’s great. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for listening to the healthy cells healthy you podcast with me, Janet Walker. And thank you again Professor Kimberly for visiting with us. You can find us on Apple podcasts I Heart Radio, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, subscribe and tell your friends and together we’ll build healthy cells and healthy you