Unlocking the power of whey protein: Immunity Webinar
05 Nov 2021 | Volac International Ltd
Whey protein is a well-known, complete protein source that provides all the essential amino acids that the body needs. Whilst this makes whey protein a great choice for promoting muscle growth and recovery, it can also help support a healthy immune system. This webinar will deep dive into the science based evidence around whey protein and immunity and share insight from trends experts from Innova, Kent University and Volac International Ltd.
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Hello and welcome to today's Food ingredients first hosted webinar.
I'm Elizabeth Green and I'll be moderating the webinar from VolAC today.
I'm the deputy editor of CNS Media, which is the publisher of The World of Food Ingredients.
We are also the sister company of Enova Market Insights.
Now before we get started, you can submit any questions you wish to be answered through the Q&A engagement tool.
Any questions we don't have time to respond to during today's session can be answered via email following the presentation.
The webinar will also be available on demand on food ingredientsfirst.com.
A link to view the on-demand webinar will be emailed to you after the presentation.
Today's webinar is presented by VolAC and is entitled Unlocking the Power of Whey protein, Immunity Webinar.
Enhancing immune health has become a growing priority for global consumers.
In fact, as many as 6 in 10 consumers say they have become more conscious about their immune health and overall -being.
Cultivating a healthy lifestyle that includes regular exercise, good quality sleep, and a balanced diet is widely known to maintain and support the integrity of the immune system, which is one of the body's most sophisticated and complex systems.
When functioning correctly, the immune system is a powerful defense tool against bacteria and infections that can severely compromise health.
Now, whey protein is a -known complete protein source that provides all the essential amino acids that the that the body needs.
While this makes whey protein a good choice for promoting muscle growth and recovery, it can also help support a healthy immune system.
This webinar will dive into the science-based evidence around whey protein and immunity with content from Enova Market Insights, Kent University and FOLAC International.
We have 2 speakers joining us for the webinar today.
The first speaker is Glenn Davison, professor and Chair in sport and Exercise Sciences at the University of Kent.
Glenn is an active researcher in nutrition and exercise immunology, where he seeks to advance the understanding of the influence of physical exercise on the human immune system, immune defense and illness risk.
Our second speaker today is Alisa Glover, a nutrition specialist at BOLAC International.
Lisa has a bachelor's degree in molecular biology and genetics and a master's degree in pharmacology.
Her scientific interests include protein intake and physical activity across the lifespan, the role of protein quality and functional properties of dairy components.
To get started, I'd like to give a short presentation of Nova Market Insights data to provide some background context on immune health claims which are driving the sports nutrition arena.
Firstly, it is important to note that consumer demand for immune boosting products is propelling NPD.
With this in mind, 1 in 5 consumers in the in Europe and the US have indicated that in healthy food and beverages.
Ingredients known to boost health are most important to them.
You can see a few products here on the right, which signal immune boosting claims, such as products from Actimel, Weetabix, and Ocean Spray.
Now, moving on to our next slide.
It is clear that the COVID-19 pandemic has opened up opportunities for immune health innovation, with 1 in 5 consumers stating that they have taken action to improve their immunity in the past 12 months.
Notably, immune health claims in food and beverage applications are growing in different regions.
You can see from this chart that in the UK there has been a 15% rise in F&B launches trapped with an immune health claim and an average annual growth of 12% for launches with the same claim.
Meanwhile, in the US there has been a 15% rise in launches, tracked with an immune health claim and an average annual growth of 12% for launches tracked with the same claim.
In Europe as a whole, there has been a 42% rise in launches tracked with an immune health claim and average annual growth of 25% for launches, tapping into immunity trends.
Now, it is clear to see that sports nutrition products and immunity claims are on a clear growth path.
1 in 3 consumers in Europe and the US says that in the past 12 months, they have increased the amount of physical exercise they do to manage -being.
When asked which lifestyle changes are you most likely to maintain as a method of managing stress and tension after the pandemic, 29% of consumers replied by saying physical exercise.
As you can see from this growth chart, immunity boosting sports nutrition has taken an upward trend following a slight dip in 2019 in both the US and Europe.
To the right of the slide, you can see a nice example from the database of an electrolyte and immunity beverage which was launched in the US in September this year.
Moving on to our next slide now, Anova Market Insights has noted that sports powders lead nutrition in sports nutrition with immune health claims, representing 94% of sports nutrition launches.
To the right of this slide, Enova Market Insights has provided an example of a sports powder targeting immune support.
The Biochem 100% weight isolate protein powder has a natural flavor and supports immune health.
Other claims are that it is easily digestible.
It also contains 20 g of grass-fed vegetarian protein.
It is 99% lactose free and contains added sugars, yeast, wheat, soy, preservatives, artificial flavors, artificial sweeteners.
Moving on to our final slide now, sports powders featuring immune health claims are gaining ground according to Nova Market Insights.
Overall, there has been a 50% average annual growth of sports powders tracked with an immune health claim.
In this slide, we've pulled a selection of sports products which are tapping into these immunity trends.
Firstly, this PhD synergy all in one lean muscle building formula has a double chocolate flavor and contains vitamin D for a healthy immune system.
The product in the middle is a Nutrition X Ultimate whey protein powder with banana flavor.
According to the brand, it is fortified with additional glutamine, shown to enhance immune function and improve gut health.
Our 3rd and final product to the right of the slide is Keforma Sport Nutrition Endurance protein powder with chocolate flavor that contains zinc and vitamin C, which supports the immune system.
Now that concludes the presentation from Anova Market Insights, so I'll now hand it over to Glenn, who will share his insights from the exercise immunology field.
Glenn, over to you.
Thank you very much.
So yeah, today I'm going to talk about some of the research that's been done over the years in the field of Exercise immunology with a specific focus on things that are either protein derived or protein containing products and supplements.
So the reason that we're interested in this and as a way of a bit of background and introduction, this all comes about because of the fact that some athletes and some groups of individuals are at an increased risk of picking up upper respiratory illnesses, URTIs for short, and we refer to these individuals as illness prone.
And because of this, there's been a lot of interest in potential countermeasures that we can use to support these individuals.
Now there's a number of contributing factors and a number of contributing mechanisms that you can see up on the screen there and all of these things are highly important, there's no single factor alone and of course probably one of the most significant factors is whether or not an individual is actually exposed to a potentially illness causing pathogen.
But altogether when we take all of these things into account, we certainly see some groups of individuals and some groups of high level athletes who seem to be better than others at fighting off illness and of course those who are not so good and we refer to these as the illness prone athletes.
And in terms of what we can do to help those individuals, you know, they, they, they could try to minimize some of those risk factors that I showed on the previous slide.
And if they can modify behavior and do things to minimize those risk factors, then that is fantastic.
But of course as a high level athlete, some of those things are not so easy to minimize.
Some of the things like exposure are kind of a natural hazard of their occupation, and they simply can't minimize those easily.
So a really powerful strategy that we often look to is the role of nutrition.
And there's a lot of research over the last probably 1015 years or so looking at nutrition as a potential countermeasure that can help these individuals either by protecting or boosting their immune system or reducing or and or reducing their risk of picking up illnesses and infections.
Obviously nutrition is a very broad area and so what I'm going to focus on today is the protein area, obviously in line with the theme for today's webinar.
So there's been kind of 3 main streams, I would say 3 main streams of research interest in these areas.
So there's been interest looking at just total protein need and total protein.
Intake on a daily basis and usually this is obviously coming from an individual's habitual diet, but if there is a shortfall, and the research that's been done is usually used whey protein, as a complete source of protein in order to modify the protein intake on a daily basis of an individual.
There's then some research looking at individual amino acids and glutamine and we saw mentioned in the in the preliminary talk, but glutamine as an individual amino acid has some interest and there's been some research on that, both on immune and gut health, and then something that we've done a lot of work on in my labs is , In various products, in particular dairy based products that might have other powerful bioactive properties that can enhance the immune system and or reduce the risk of individuals picking up these URTI's and something that we've looked at a lot in our labs is bovine colostrum.
So I'll show you some of the research that's been done and then finish off with a little bit of a sort of where we might go next based on what we've seen from these various areas.
So first of all, if we start with protein intake in general, and a really nice paper that was done or was published in in 2014 was from Wittard and colleagues, and if I give you a very brief overview or a brief summary of this study, so they had a group of trained endurance athletes, so cyclists, triathletes and individuals like that.
And what they did with these individuals is they monitored them over several weeks.
They quantified or they, they recorded the amount of protein that was in their normal diet, and what they found was that their normal diet, they, they might have had to adjust it slightly, but their normal diet was providing around about 1.5 g per kilogram body mass per day of total protein intake.
So what they did to these individuals, they had a relatively high training load, so they were training around about 5 times per week, and I think around about 5 to 6 hours on average training, which is a moderately high training volume.
So what they did to these individuals was they put them through an intensified training period for a couple of weeks.
So the way they did this was they increased their training volume and added a lot of very strenuous, high intensity training bouts to their training.
So they came close to doubling their training load.
And they did this on two separate occasions.
On one occasion they were just following their normal protein intake of around about 1.5 g per kilogram body mass per day.
And on another occasion they increased their daily protein intake to 3 g per kilogram body mass per day.
Now that is a very high intake, and I think an important caveat here is that they, they did see beneficial effects from that, but that's not necessarily saying that 3 is the target.
What I think that study is showing is that perhaps 1.5 wasn't quite enough for these individuals who were going through this very stressful and very strenuous bout of exercise.
Now they had a number of outcome measures in this study.
They had some markers of immune cell trafficking and immune cell function.
But probably the most significant and most important finding is the one that's shown on the graph on the right hand side of the screen here.
So this graph essentially shows the incidence rate of upper respiratory illness and in the black bar to the left of the figure you can see there's a very low incidence of illness under normal training.
The, and that's with their normal diet, the white bar in the middle is when they put them through that intensified period of training, and what you can see there is, they see a significant increase, a significantly higher proportion of individuals reporting upper respiratory illness, however, when they did the same thing, but they had this higher protein intake in their diet, That's the hashed bar to the right, then you can see there is considerable protection there.
So the takeaway message here is putting individuals through very strenuous intensified block of training does increase their risk of picking up these illnesses, but there was some protection against that when they increased the protein intake in their diet.
So this is quite a nice study which shows the importance of protein and I think the importance of obtaining the right amount of protein or avoiding an insufficient amount of protein and 1.5 g per kilogram body mass might have been insufficient for these individuals at this particular time.
And the way that they provided this was with whey protein supplements, incidentally.
So if we move on to some of the other work that I've done in my own labs and and we've done a lot of work with bovine colostrum and this has been around for for quite a long time and there's been quite a lot of research on this and I'll just show you some highlights here from some other groups before I I show you some of the stuff from my lab so.
I guess the takeaway message here is if we just look at the balance of evidence and and what you're seeing on the figures here is the incidence rate of upper respiratory illness in groups of athletes who have been consuming daily bovine colostrum compared to placebo, and there's a number of different studies you get, you know, dosages ranging from, you know, 5 to 10 g per day up to as high as 60 g per day, but the most common is around about 10 to 20 g per day.
And in short, most of the studies have reported a significant reduction in the reporting rate of upper respiratory illness.
The figure up on the top there is from a former PhD student of mine, RL Jones, and, the, the, the text is, is, is actually missing off this slide for some reason, but that one was another relatively large study with, 53 individuals monitored over a 12 week training period.
And again what you can see here is that during the periods when illness was higher in the placebo group, the group that were consuming the bovine colostrum seemed to be protected considerably with between 40 and 65% lower incidence in those groups.
And Jones and colleagues did a nice meta-analysis a few years ago where they combined the data from 5 trials with around about 150 individuals and in that meta-analysis, which I think is a really nice way to pull together a range of studies, they found that there was significantly reduced rates of illness and also days for which illness was suffered when individuals did get ill.
So all in all we do in general see significant beneficial effects from bovine colostrum supplementation in terms of upper respiratory illness risk and many markers of immune function in active individuals and individuals undertaking heavy periods of training.
So what is it that's that's actually happening, what is it that causes these effects and.
There are a number of theories, but the, the ones that are gaining the sort of most likelihood I suppose are that it's, it's bioactive constituents within this product and this is why it's, it's relevant to other type or other supplements and other products which contain protein because it's not necessarily the, the bovine cholostrum per se.
The thing with bovine colostrum is it's, it's, it's highly concentrated in, in many of the constituents in it, so taking that as a supplement is, is more likely to provide a higher concentration of these factors.
But actually if you could isolate these factors or if you can obtain these factors from other sources, then you very likely will see the same benefits.
So there's been some in vitro work and and this group that you can see referenced on the top of the screen here, they've done quite a lot of work in this area, whereby they took isolations of bovine colostrum and also they fractioned the colostrum into different constituents where they basically separated, it by the molecular weight or the size of the, of the components in it, so the proteins in particular and, Added those to the, to a incubation media that contained immune cells, and basically what they found, so what this graph on the left here is showing, is that when they added this media or when they added this to the incubation media, they were seeing an enhancement of some immune cell functions, so this figure here is showing neutrophil function.
And What was interesting is actually that's not they used colostrum in this study, but that's not exclusive to colostrum.
So when they used mature milk, for example, and they did this same process and they purified these same fractions, they were actually seeing the same beneficial effects.
So if you look at the figure on the bottom right of the screen.
Then you can see that actually when they were doing this with mature milk, they were getting a greater enhancement, so it is certainly fractions in dairy and dairy products per se that seem to be having these beneficial effects.
So what it seems like is that there's bioactive constituents or bioavailable constituents or their metabolites within various dairy products that seem to be having immune enhancing or immune stimulating effects.
Now what the in vitro work has suggested is that this could be things like the proteose peptones or possibly things like prolein rich polypeptides, possibly some immune factors like cytokines, or maybe microRNAs.
Possibly also some of the specific individual amino acids.
But most of this has come from research that has been done in vitro.
That doesn't necessarily show that these substances are actually bioavailable and are able to make it into the systemic circulation and make it into the body after they've been consumed orally, after they've been consumed from an actual food product.
So what we did to try and get some greater insight into this was we, there's there's so many candidates, so this is a sort of preliminary stage that we're at at the moment.
We, we decided that we couldn't necessarily isolate individual components or we didn't yet want to isolate individual components.
What we first of all wanted to do was to see whether things are actually appearing in the blood after you consume these products and whether therefore they are bioavailable and could be having these in vivo effects in the body.
So the way we did that was we used our bovine cholostrum supplement or a macronutrient matched placebo, and we had participants consume.
A bolus of this, we then waited around about one hour for it to be absorbed, and any metabolites or bioactive constituents that would be bioavailable would then appear in the bloodstream before we then did a blood draw.
We then processed that blood sample so we spun it down in a centrifuge in order to obtain the plasma, and then what we did was we then did a second blood draw from the same individual.
We then incubated their fresh blood with plasma that we'd drawn one hour after they'd consumed the product.
So what we're doing here is seeing if there's anything that is bioavailable and appears in their plasma and then if we then mix that back with a fresh blood sample and incubate it with something that's gonna activate the immune cells and we do and we compare the placebo to the clostrum, does that actually enhance the functioning of immune cells?
And we have an index of neutrophil respiratory burst function here, so we, we used a a stimulant that activates the neutrophils and and this figure here shows an index of their respiratory burst capacity.
And what you can see in the purple bar to the right of this figure is that when we incubated this blood sample with the plasma post consuming colostrum, we did see a significant enhancement in the functioning.
Of these cells, so that told us that it is something that is bioavailable, either a particular component or possibly a metabolite that does get into the system and is, and this is likely the thing which is causing the beneficial effects that we see on the immune system and potentially therefore reducing the risks of illness in these studies that we've seen in these individuals.
Another possible mechanism for some of these products is via effects on the gut and again we use the exercise stress model here, there's a lot of research showing that exercise above a certain intensity causes disturbance to the gut barrier.
Function.
So we see an increase in intestinal permeability, so we've got some classic studies like the one on the left here showing that once you exercise above a certain intensity, so the right of this curve is 80% VO2 max, you see an increase in MGI permeability.
The Ashton paper is an incremental test to exhaustion and the Yukonbr paper is showing a marker of bacterial translocation, lipopolysaccharide, when individuals have completed an Ironman triathlon, so a very strenuous and prolonged event, and basically all in all, these, this group of research shows that exercise can cause damage and increased permeability to the gut, and this could be, A contributing factor because this is going to activate the immune system and potentially divert, I guess some immune resources away from, you know, the, the need to actually fight infection.
So again there's been a lot of work with bovine colostrum, so the, the figure on the top left there, and this was an animal study, so here they passively heated rats up to a core temperature of around about 42 degrees, and when they had bovine colostrum or goat's milk incidentally, there was significant protection against that heat induced increase in intestinal permeability.
The Playford paper on the top right there that shows what happened when they gave individuals a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug which causes damage to the gut, so the figure to the right shows an increase in permeability, but that was protected against when they were provided with bovine colostrum.
And then exercise studies, so we've done a few studies on this over the years and the figure that you can see in the middle bottom there basically shows the bars to the left of each figure on the placebo, that's a resting sample and the bar to the right shows what happens after exercise, so you get a significant increase in GI permeability.
But if colostrum was consumed for a couple of weeks before that was almost completely prevented.
And again the March study shows another marker which is a a systemic marker of damage to the gut cells and again that goes up after exercise but with colostrum there was protection against that.
Now there are studies showing similar effects within a single amino acid, so there's been quite a lot of interest in glutamine, and there's been a couple of studies from this group here where they provided a relatively high dose actually of of glutamine for either 7 days or in a more recent study for 2 hours or just an acute dose 2 hours before they actually undertook this 60m or this running at a moderate intensity in a hot environment.
And basically what they showed here was again that exercise caused a significant increase in a marker of GI permeability, but glutamine provided some protection against that.
So looking at things like cholostrum and things like glutamine, what we do see is that they do seem to protect against an exercise or a stress induced increase in gut permeability.
The mechanisms are are some of the things that you can see on the middle of the screen here, but many of these are mediated via proteins or protein components that we actually find in these products, and this possibly contributes to the immune effects.
OK then, so to sum up, what can the exercise immunology research on this tell us about protein and immunity?
I think we can take away a couple of key messages here.
The first one is that meeting protein requirements are highly essential and if individuals are not meeting their daily protein need in terms of the total quantity that they need in a given day then they certainly will suffer in terms of immune function and infection risk.
If we look at specific supplements, then there's evidence from some that for example with bovine colostrum potentially via the protein or protein derived components or metabolites and also as having a direct effect on the immune system and then also possibly via effects via the gut and protecting the gut against stress induced damage.
And then we see that with both bovine colostrum and glutamine.
So where next?
So I think the, the stuff that I showed you where it's highly likely that it is bioactive metabolites or components from this dairy product, what the next step would be, would be to actually identify exactly what it is and which components, which metabolites are responsible, and see if, you know, we can actually optimize these or deliver these in a specific product.
OK, thank you very much for your attention, I hope you've enjoyed my talk and I look forward to answering your questions later.
Thank you, Glenn.
Now, I'm just gonna finish as the third speaker with some slides about whey-derived ingredients for immune support, and they'll be slightly different focus, from what Glenn's been talking about, but hopefully, it will, it will complement what he said.
So in this presentation, I will be.
Looking at The micronutrients, B12 and selenium, as as they're present in dairy products and, and particularly in whey, a couple of the immunomodulatory proteins, lactoferrinn and immunoglobulins, and also taking a look at dairy polar lipids or the milk fat globule membrane.
So just to start off.
B12 and its role in immune function.
As we saw with some of those new products on the market, there's usually a lot of focus on the micronutrients like vitamin C and D and zinc when you think about supporting healthy immune function.
But several other micronutrients play important roles in the immune system and, and B12 is one of them.
So, it's needed for cell replication, particularly the production of T lymphocytes, for example.
And in deficiency states like pernicious anemia where, patients can't absorb B12 properly, you start to see abnormalities such as a high CD4 positive to CD8 positive ratio and suppressed natural killer cell activity.
But supplementing these patients and studies shows up to normal serum levels of B12, a reverse of these abnormalities, and, you also get a restoration of the hummoral immune system, so the complement system and immunoglobulin concentrations.
And the importance of B12 to immune system function has been recognized by the EFSA with a claim.
So it is claimable if, if there's a source of, if your product or for food is a source of B12.
And selenium, is also another essential, micronutrient.
It's a, it's a mineral rather than a, vitamin, and that's primarily in the body as part of, selenoproteins.
So, integrated into selenocysteine.
And in this case, deficiency is also linked to diminished tumoral and cell-mediated immune responses and progression of viral infections.
Now, with supplementation, because, actually reduced, intake and insufficiency isn't uncommon, supplementing does, increase those, activities.
So, natural killer cell activity, T cell proliferation, and vaccine-induced immunity are all enhanced.
Now, again, the role of selenium in normal immune functions also been acknowledged by EFSA with acclaim.
Now, obviously, there's a lot of interest at the moment in potential interventions, including nutritional treatments for COVID-19.
And interestingly, a, virtual screen of FDA approved drugs as as, vitamins, identified B12 as one of the top four compounds behind antiviral, three antiviral compounds that can block or dock the coronavirus, At 3C protease and interestingly, in line with this suboptimal consumption of B12 has been found to be linked on a national level with higher mortality rates in countries where the B12 consumption was, was lower than ideal.
Deficiency of selenium, as I said, does increase susceptibility to viral infections, particularly RNA viral infections, and, and that's, that leads to more severe outcomes.
And, as with B12, low selenium levels have been linked to increased mortality with COVID-19 infection.
Now, we'll move on to a couple of the immune modulating proteins that I mentioned that are in dairy.
Now, immunoglobulin proteins are the specific part of the immune system.
So they allow the system to recognize antigens on foreign microbes and, and viruses.
And naturally occurring antibodies to antigens of pathogenic bacteria and viruses have been found in colostrum and milk, colostruming being a particularly rich source, and they function to provide passive immunity to the, to the calf or the baby animal because several of the mammals do not receive.
The, the transfer of immunity through the placenta and therefore they need to get it through, through the early days of colostrum.
But it's also potential that they, it can be of benefit to, to humans and animals to, to take immunoglobulins.
In a study of mice, the whey protein concentrate with , the greater amount of immunoglobulins in it produced the highest humoral response when they were fed whey protein concentrate.
And, in human trials, immunoglobulin preparations from milk or colostrum, have been effective against bacterial and viral infections, particularly of the gut.
Lactoferrin is a, a small iron-binding globular, glycoprotein.
And, unlike immunoglobulins, it's, non-specific, but it binds, lipopolysaccharide, bacteria, viruses, and it's particularly high in human cholostrum.
Now, , in the digestive tract, the enzymes act on it and that releases antimicrobial peptides, like lactofeerrocin.
And in, in vitro research did show that lactoferrin binds to a, a glycoprotein on the, on the SARS-COVID-2 virus that causes COVID-19.
And that was then followed up with a clinical trial of lactoferin supplementation on patients, COVID-19 patients.
And the treated patients , did show a faster conversion to negative RNA and recovery of clinical symptoms relative to the patients who'd received the standard of care or no treatment at all.
Now, it's thought that lactoferin and immunoglobulins can work synergistically together to amplify lactoferin's antimicrobial effects.
And this is one study where people who self-reported frequent upper respiratory tract symptoms and infections were supplemented with 600 mg daily of bovine lactoferonn.
Combined with a whey protein, immunoglobulin rich fraction.
Combination, yeah.
And it, that reduced the number of reported colds by more than half.
So from 112 in the placebo group to 48 in the active treatment group.
And just to finish off looking at dairy polar lipids or milk fat globule membrane, the milk fat globule membrane surrounds the lipid droplets in milk and it's made up of proteins and polar lipids.
So you can see in that diagram there, the, the glycerophospholipids, and sphingolipids, particularly sphingomyelin.
And research is starting to reveal, reveal that these components have various properties, so anti-inflammatory and prebiotic properties.
In an in vitro study, milk'sphingomyelin, decrease the pro-inflammatory expression in macrophages that had been treated, with, LPS which lipopolysaccharide is what, will induce an inflammatory response.
So, The milk'sphingomyelin reduced that.
And feeding mice that had been challenged with lipopolysaccharide to induce systemic inflammation.
Also, , the MFGM feeding improved gut barrier function and reduced the inflammation in that situation as.
So, looking, obviously something's happening there at the gut level, and the potential now of modulating the gut microbiome with dietary, polar lipids is starting to become an area of interest.
And the sphingolipid fraction is reported to possess antibacterial effects and supplementing with milk polar lipids has been shown to promote an increase in the beneficial bifidobacteria in several pre-clinical studies, but we do need to follow that up with some clinical studies to confirm those effects.
And so I'll leave you now with , some exciting news, letting you know that coming soon from Volactiv is a new product to support healthy immune function.
And it will be a, it's a whey protein concentrate enriched in immunoglobulins, lactoferrrin and milk polar lipids.
And it will, it's a, a, a natural source of highly bioavailable B12 and selenium.
So look out for that and thank you very much.
Thank you very much for this great presentation, Alisa, and also to Glenn, who we heard from earlier.
Some very interesting insights from the both of you.
This is Elizabeth Green once again from Food Ingredients First, and I'll now open a Q&A session with our speakers and listeners.
Some great questions have already been sent in, so thank you to our listeners in advance.
Now our first question is for Alisa, and is, what is the advantage to getting B12 and selenium from whey versus supplement?
Alisa, over to you.
Hi, thanks for the question.
It's a good one.
Yes.
So, you can definitely buy supplements out there with those micronutrients in them, but, in a way, it's naturally present.
And, generally with animal products and, and, whole foods, micronutrients are more bioavailable.
So they're more absorbed and, , they're maybe less hard on the GI tract while some supplements can cause GI discomfort.
So it's generally recommended that you can take, get your nutrients that way, if possible.
I see, thank you, that's very interesting.
OK, I'm gonna move across to Glenn now.
Our first question for Glen is looking at the athlete's risk factors you mentioned at the beginning, it's included things like psychological stress.
So does this mean that psychological stress can increase infection risk?
Yeah absolutely and it's it's you know we we've got a kind of a long history of of thinking about individuals under physical stress might be at an increased risk because they're putting physiological stress on the body and potentially stress on the immune system but there's, you know, they often overlook the other areas of life you know because you you you know we're thinking about athletes, but athletes are people.
And there's lots of other risk factors, so all of the ones that I showed up there, but yes, psychological stress is, is definitely, it can have massive physical and physiological effects, and there's actually been some really nice studies looking at psychological stress in isolation.
And there was quite an, an interesting study back from the early 90s now where they actually inoculated people or they exposed them with to, to live upper respiratory viruses, so things like rhinovirus, which is one of the viruses that causes the common cold.
And they, they looked at people and they categorized their, their stress from a general psychological stress index, and what they found was people with lower stress, when they were exposed to that virus, they were more likely able to fight it off.
People with higher stress were more likely to suffer.
And actually become infected rather than be able to fight it off, so yeah, there's definitely really robust evidence showing psychological stress in isolation, can definitely be a, a significant factor in lowering your defenses and, and, and making you less able to fight off these things.
Perfect, Ben, thank you.
That's some really interesting insights from you there.
Our next question now is for Alisa again.
So I'm gonna jump back to you, Alisa.
And the question from our listener is, what is the recommended amount of whey protein to take for immune health?
OK, that's a really good question.
And actually, you know, I, I'd appreciate maybe your input on this too, Glenn, because that study you showed by Ollie Whittard, that's quite interesting and it, they did use the waste supplementation there to increase the amounts on a daily basis.
So, I guess, to increase your general protein intake and when you're training, we'd recommend, you know, 20 to 40 g after, every training session.
So, I, I don't actually know off the top of my head for that study how much, how much weight they were giving the participants to, to increase it up to 3 g a day.
But certainly, that would have been, they would have been taking at least a couple of Shakes, in order to, to increase their protein levels there.
With, you know, with something more like Colostrum, you were saying it's like 10 to 20 g because of its composition.
But I guess with way to see those benefits with intense training, it, it would be more like probably two sort of typical dose, at least 2 doses of sort of 20 g or so, possibly to get, get up to that 3 g a day.
3 3 g per kg a day.
Do you think Glenn, or any, any thoughts on that as?
Yeah, in that study they, they were giving bespoke amounts to each individual in order for them to hit the target, so it depends what they were getting from their diet, but yeah basically what they were doing was giving it to them in drinks, you know, to take after training or or the way that you would use it, and yeah , you know, they're giving them an extra 1.5 g per kilogram body mass per day, so, You're, you're looking at, yeah, you know, probably 3 or 4 by 20 g, on top.
But that, that doesn't mean that that's the minimum that you need.
In fact, I think that's probably too much, but in that study they basically, they, they, I, I think what they wanted to do was make sure that if there was an effect they saw it, so it wasn't titrated to see what's the optimal amount between those two.
Those two levels, yeah, so, but I get, my response to that would be.
In terms of total daily requirement, it depends what you're already getting from your diet, because I think you've probably got a daily target that you need to hit, and that daily target really depends on what you're doing, so yeah, I would say.
Adjust the intake to hit the daily target, but yeah, absolutely agree with what you said about the, when you take it and how much you take at a, at a given time, like yeah, the, the research is, is suggesting 20 to 40 g, is optimal again, it depends what, what, if it's post exercise, it depends what that exercise is, that you've done the harder, or the more muscle mass that's involved in that exercise, probably the higher the, the dose required.
Do you think, other protein sources could have, done the same thing, or there was something special about the fact it was way being used to, to supplement in that particular study?
Yeah, it's hard to say.
I think, I think that one was, was, was down to just hitting the, the total need, for, for the day for those athletes that I think was.
A, a bit higher than 1.5 and probably the fact that they were, they, they were likely taking it soon after exercise as.
So I, I would think that probably any complete protein would have likely had, from what we saw in your talk there's obviously some other you know important immune related factors in there, so maybe if it was, you know, something really really processed that didn't have all of that stuff in, maybe that wouldn't be as good, but I think it's likely that hitting the.
The total need is is probably the key one, but again that's maybe speculating a bit.
Thanks.
Perfect, guys.
Thank you.
That's really interesting insights from the both of you.
Now this next question again is for Glenn, and the question is, in the over-training study, they gave 3G per kilogram body mass per day.
This seems very high, says the listener.
I thought the upper limit was 2G per kg.
Does this suggest that it might be higher, Glenn?
Maybe you had some thoughts on that.
Yeah, I, I, I guess that we kind of, we, we, we talked about that a little bit in that last chat that we just had there when we were when we were talking about the the, the, the whey protein dose.
Yes.
I, I think.
I don't think it necessarily means that that.
That it's higher, that the upper limit is higher, it might be a little bit higher, but I, I still think it's probably that's where it is, in, in terms of anything above that is probably not needed, but again I think what that study had, it was, it had an amount that was probably too low, 1.
1.5 g per kilogram body mass per day is, is fine for most people, most of the time, you know, during normal training, but because of what they were doing to these guys, they were really putting them through the wringer.
And when you induce a really acute additional load on somebody like that, that isn't that they're not used to, you do have a, a short-term increase in your need for protein, you, you know, to maintain positive protein balance, protein synthesis and all of that sort of stuff.
So what I think was 1.5 just wasn't enough for those participants at that time.
Three was probably surplus.
So what we don't have from that study is all of the steps in between.
So, you know, we didn't have a 1.8 and a 2 and a 2.2 and so on.
If we had a, and again, you know, this is a massive study if you were to do that, but if we did have that titration, I think we might have found that once you got over 2.
Then you, you wouldn't have seen any further benefit is, is my guess as to what we would have seen in that study.
Mhm.
OK, fantastic, thank you very much.
We have time for a few more questions now.
But we are sort of nearing the end, so I'm gonna put forward this next question to Alisa.
And the question is, can plant protein support the immune system?
I guess that's sort of, that also can tie into what we were just discussing.
So, plant protein can, it, it can be high in certain beneficial amino acids like glu glutamine as we were discussing today.
But, I guess the main point is that they can be, limited in certain of the essential amino acids.
So, then it becomes an issue of, whether they're high quality.
Or complete proteins.
And so, whereas with whey and dairy, you've got that full complement of the essentials and that's important for making the proteins of the immune system.
So, it's been shown, for example, you need the branch chain amino acids or they're, they're used to quite a high extent by immune cells for cell replication and, and metabolic processes.
So, it's , it's strong evidence that, you know, a, a good quality protein is what you need for supporting the immune system.
And you may not always be getting that with, with the, with the plant proteins.
And then, of course, with potential bioactive proteins present in, in dairy as , you'd be missing out on that with plant proteins.
OK, fantastic.
Thank you very much, Alisa.
Really interesting stuff there.
OK, Glenn, I'm coming back to you with another question from a listener.
And the question is, you refer to future work to identify the bioactive constituents responsible for the immune benefits.
Is it possible these individual constituents will be less effective if extracted and administered as a single ingredient?
It is, it is possible, I, I get that that's, that's, I guess would be one of the key questions if and when we get to do, to do that study.
Because I, I guess I can only speculate and it's not too dissimilar to the question that Alisa had about the, you know, why is it better in a food than as a supplement, and it, it, it, it has some similarity to that, in that if it's purified, it might, you know, be able to be delivered safely in a higher concentration and that could have, higher effects, but then what we often see is when you deliver something in a food, it, it might help with the bioavailability of it, so you might be able to better absorb it and get it into the system if it's contained in the food matrix, that it comes from.
So, and of course we do see synergies, between nutrients and constituents sometimes, so it could be that.
Yet the, the sum or adding all of the parts together is actually greater than just, you know, the sum of each of the individual bits.
So it's a great question and yes it's absolutely possible, but it could go either way, so I, I think, yeah, I'd love to do that study, just need to, just need to get the, the funding to, to, to do that and, and the technology to be able to.
To really comprehensively quantify all of the, cos it's a really complex mixture, it's a complex matrix, and it's not simple to quantify everything in there actually, there's loads of things that we we we still don't know you know we know a lot about the big things in there but some of the smaller things, you know, it it would be, yeah I I I think it would be a really interesting study to do and I just yeah, hope that I can do it one day soon.
Yeah, hopefully one day.
Fantastic.
OK, I have another question now, and the question is, is there any risk from bovine colostrum in terms of IGF one levels?
Glenn, maybe you'd like to share some insights on that.
Yeah, this, this has been around for about probably 10 years or so now, I, I don't, I don't think there's any more risk from bovine clottrum than from any other animal product, or any other dairy product, to be honest.
There is a, if, if, if you are a competitive athlete, and you're subject to sort of doping regulations and stuff like that, then you obviously should read the WADA, guidelines, and there is a, there is a statement.
On the WADA website, that says, you know, it does have reasonably high levels of IGF-1 in it, and therefore we don't recommend its use, but you could actually, you'll get the same amount from having a high intake of dairy in general or, you know, it, there was a one or two studies that weren't the best studies if I'm honest, a few years ago where they seemed to suggest that after you'd consumed it, IGF levels went up.
But there's probably been another 10 studies since then which, which don't show that at all.
You just break it down like any other protein.
So I think there's very little, risk, there's probably no more risk than, you know, having a pound of steak or, you know, another dairy product, but.
Definitely something to be aware of if you are, you know, a competitive athlete subject, to, to WADA regulations and so on.
Sure, fantastic.
Thank you very much for that, Glenn.
OK, I think that's about all we have time for today, so thank you to both Glenn and Alisa and everyone else involved in today's Q&A session and the presentation.
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