What Is The Importance Of Collagen In The Human Body – For years, naysayers dismissed collagen’s nutritional merits, citing its poor amino acid profile. In fact, there are many unique health benefits of Collagen that no one is talking about.

Some still believe that collagen is an inferior protein source with few positive effects. Incomplete proteins lack the balance of amino acids needed to make them complete, making them less effective at building muscle.

What Is The Importance Of Collagen In The Human Body

If you are interested in building muscle, this article is not for you. However, if you are interested in living a long, pain-free and productive life, read on, because these collagen benefits are fascinating.

The Important Role Collagen Plays For A Happy And Healthy Gut

I always recommend it over collagen because it is an extra nutritious food than just collagen.

Researchers now see collagen as a multifunctional energy source. There’s evidence to suggest that eating collagen-rich foods will benefit everything from arthritis to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Collagen makes up about one-third of your body’s protein. It is primarily found in your tendons, ligaments, bones, cartilage, and Skin (1).

Think of collagen as the tough, fibrous protein that holds our bodies together and gives our skin its natural elasticity. How hard you ask? Type 1 collagen is stronger than steel when stretched (2). In fact, most of your connective tissue is made up of collagen.

What Is Collagen Made Of?

There are 28 different types of collagen, but for our purposes only types 1, 2, and 3 are relevant because they make up 90% of the collagen in your body (3).

Collagen is secreted by connective tissue cells, where it forms a structural part of the extracellular matrix (4). This is the physical scaffolding in all tissues and organs, including your gut lining and skin.

Our body’s ability to produce normal collagen slows down as we age. Collagen production is further disrupted by sun exposure, environmental pollutants, alcohol, smoking and stress (common) (5).

This all sounds great, but why does my friend rate the benefits of collagen as the best after sliced ​​bread? It is a good question.

How Important Is Collagen For Your Skin?

The blend of amino acids found in collagen is unique because they are lacking in our Western diet. Unless you eat a lot of animal skin, small bones (think sardines or anchovies), or bone broth, it’s hard to get collagen in your diet.

Important collagen health benefits include blood sugar control, sleep, glowing skin, joint health, longevity and well-being. You’ll learn more about each of these, as well as when to take collagen to support each benefit, below.

As we age, our natural collagen production declines, leading to gradual deterioration of hair, skin, teeth and nails. You see this visibly with wrinkled skin or osteoporosis.

It’s thought to do this by forming fibroblasts (or clusters of specialized cells in your dermis) that facilitate the growth of new cells (6). This helps replace the dead skin with new, youthful skin.

What Is Collagen And Why Do I Need It? Iowa City

Most people overlook collagen and skin health. Why? Because most of the collagen is presented to you.

The catch is that no research shows any beneficial effects of topical collagen. Let that sink in for a second.

Why is this so? Collagen molecules are too large for your skin to absorb, rendering collagen-based skin care products useless (7). Your money is better spent elsewhere because there are no benefits.

Fortunately, consuming collagen has health benefits. With a collagen-rich diet, you’ll improve the appearance of your skin inside and out.

Unveiling The Fountain Of Youth: The Remarkable Benefits Of Collagen

Skin elasticity sounds fancy, but what’s really going on here? Skin elasticity is increased by repairing damaged collagen fibers, increasing collagen content, and restoring the ratio of type 1 to type 3 collagen in chronically aged skin (9).

Replacing damaged collagen fibers with new collagen is what restores your skin’s hydration status. You develop an abundance of connective tissue, which makes your skin smoother and more elastic.

“It has hyaluronic acid in it, so it’s really good for your skin. And of course collagen, which is great for skin, hair, nails, so many benefits.”

As I mentioned above, collagen is a protein made up of individual amino acids. The single most beneficial amino acid in collagen is glycine.

Benefits Of Collagen

Over the next few years, you’ll be hearing a lot more about glycine because it does so many good things in your body. Read our companion article on glycine health benefits.

Think of glycine as a savior for your gut. Glycine is a master at regulating inflammation in your stomach, small intestine, and gastrointestinal tract (10).

Inflammation occurs in your gut when harmful toxins can pass through your digestive tract into your intestines.

These toxins, in the form of food particles, are now free to enter your bloodstream, causing all kinds of inflammatory problems in your body. No bueno!

Fish Collagen: The Anti Aging Protein With The Best Bioavailability

Glycine helps reduce inflammation by forming connective tissue that protects your gut’s mucosal barrier. This helps tighten small knots in those who suffer from leaky gut syndrome.

We know that glycine builds the tissues that line your intestines, colon, and intestinal tract. It follows that supplementing with collagen or glycine can help with many gut problems.

Research supports this. Glycine is used to manage ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and inflammatory bowel disease due to its protective effects on intestinal absorptive cells (11).

It has also been shown to have other protective benefits during injury to the small intestine and improve fructose malabsorption (12, 13).

Collagen Vs. Gelatin: Which To Choose?

Everyone gets injured at some point. They suck! But there is good news about how collagen helps with joint, ligament and tendon injuries.

This particular study showed a reduction in joint pain during daily life, at rest, and during strenuous activities such as exercise, sports, or weight lifting. An effective dose was 10 g of collagen per day.

More recent research shows that collagen or gelatin taken with vitamin C can help repair tendons and prevent injuries.

There is a protocol outlined by researchers that is changing the way we think about tendon and ligament injury repair.

The Unique Benefits Of Collagen For Strengthening And Regenerating The Body

They used gelatin because it is a more cost-effective alternative to collagen. For our purposes they are interchangeable, I will discuss the differences at the end.

So what is the protocol? You take 15 grams of gelatin with vitamin C about 1 hour before exercise, rehabilitation, or your favorite activity (15).

For example, during Achilles rehabilitation, scientists recommend jumping rope for 8 minutes after gelatin + vitamin C.

Compared to placebo, the gelatin + vitamin C group had double the amount of collagen in their blood, which improved movement and healing outcomes.

Collagen Facts And Functions

Why Vitamin C? Vitamin C is known to stimulate collagen synthesis, so it’s always good to include it in your diet if you’re recovering from an injury (16).

Side note: this protocol worked wonders for me personally (even though I replaced the bone broth with gelatin) in repairing a plantar fascia tear. That’s why I started my company.

The tendon-boosting health benefits of collagen have also helped many friends I’ve introduced the protocol to. They have reported successful recovery with mcl sprains and achilles injuries.

The important point here is that gelatin, collagen or bone broth are fantastic insurance against ligament, tendon and joint injuries.

The Benefits Of Collagen Powder For Your Skin

Most of the meat we eat is terrible for us. The popular notion of “eating less meat” completely misses the point if the meat we eat is still junk.

This doesn’t even get into environmental issues, which is a topic for another day. For now, let’s talk about methionine.

Methionine is the most abundant amino acid found in muscle meats such as steak. That’s important because your body can’t make it from other things. It helps your liver detoxify drugs and make some key molecules like the hormone adrenaline.

Animals that consume a diet high in methionine die much younger than those that consume less methionine (17). It follows that to live forever you need to eat less methionine, right? Not so fast!

The Role Of Collagen In Skin Health

This isn’t necessary if you’re getting enough of another amino acid called glycine, which has been shown to counteract the effects of methionine (18).

Your liver needs glycine to effectively protect against excess methionine. So the more chicken breast you eat, the more you need to pay attention to your glycine intake to balance it out.

In addition to regulating inflammation in the liver, I will further discuss how collagen restores antioxidant status to promote longevity.

Glycine makes up one-third of collagen, gelatin, and also bone broth. If you eat a lot of animal meat, consider eating better quality (grass-fed, pasture-raised, etc.) and a little less.

The Benefits Of Collagen In Skin Care

Then you can benefit your health by adding collagen-rich foods, gelatinous meats (animal skin, tendons, small bones, wings, oxtails, etc.) and bone broth to balance the methionine.

Human studies show that three grams of glycine (found in one serving of collagen) taken before bed improves the quality of your sleep (21).

You see, glycine lowers the body’s core temperature and possibly inhibits muscle activity during REM sleep. Your body temperature naturally decreases as bedtime approaches and continues to decrease throughout sleep.

Interestingly, there are other mood-enhancing effects that give us more insight into why glycine helps with sleep. Studies show that glycine is an inhibitory neurotransmitter like GABA.

Things You May Not Know About Rejuvenated Collagen Shots

Glycine increases serotonin levels without increasing dopamine levels (22). Which is generally good. Among other things, this helps maintain healthy circadian rhythms, which leads to better sleep.

The bottom line here is that glycine helps with subjective feelings of anxiety

What is collagen in the Human Body, importance of water in the human body, importance of magnesium in the human body, importance of iodine in the human body, importance of potassium in the human body, importance of zinc in the human body, importance of carbon in the human body, importance of electrolytes in the human body, importance of sodium in the human body, importance of phosphorus in the human body, what is the importance of homeostasis in the human body, importance of ph in the human body