5 Benefits of Collagen Powder

5 Benefits of Collagen Powder

Have you heard about collagen powder?  It seems like the next big hype but this time I actually feel the hype is warranted.  Collagen can now be found in just about everything — from creams and cosmetics, to powders and pills. As the most abundant protein in the body, collagen is found in your muscles, skin, blood, bones, cartilage, and ligaments. You may want to consider squeezing in an extra serving of this vital protein for several reasons, as collagen is a building block that:

• promotes skin elasticity
• holds together your bones and muscles
• protects your organs
• heals the gut

The good news is that your body produces collagen on a regular basis. But, it does slow down with age. It also slows down with smoking, sun exposure, and an unhealthy diet. If you don't have enough collagen in the body you may start to see wrinkles and sagging skin, or even experience joint pain.
Keep reading to discover five specific benefits you may experience if you take the time to up your collagen consumption.

1. Eases joint pain

As your cartilage weakens and deteriorates with age, you may start to feel stiff, achy joints. It’s possible that upping your collagen intake may help reduce joint pain and alleviate symptoms of arthritis.
In a 2009 study, participants took a collagen supplement for 90 days. Results showed that osteoarthritis symptoms decreased by 40% while the severity of symptoms dropped by an impressive 33%.
In an older study from 1993 with the same collagen supplement, participants with severe rheumatoid arthritis saw a reduced number of swollen and tender joints — 4 out of 60 participants also experienced complete remission. 

2. Reverses skin aging

One of the most well-known benefits of collagen is its ability to promote glowing, vibrant skin. This essential protein provides elasticity to the skin, helping it to appear more youthful and healthy. But as you get older and collagen production declines, fine lines, loose skin, and dryness can occur. 
A study published in 2014 randomly chose 46 of 69 women, ages 35-55 years old, to take a collagen hydrolysate supplement. The rest of the group took a placebo. The women who took the collagen showed an improvement in skin elasticity within four weeks.
The same manufacturer also conducted another study in 2014 with the same supplement, which significantly reduced wrinkles after just eight weeks.

3. Helps build muscle and burn fat

Collagen is a major component of muscle tissue, so it should come as no surprise that it can have a big impact when it comes to building muscle mass. Plus, collagen also contains a concentrated amount of glycine, an amino acid involved in the synthesis of creatine which provides muscles with the fuel needed to power through your workout. So what happens when you add collagen to your workout routine?
There’s not much research on collagen and exercise, but a study in 2015 looked at collagen supplements in 53 older males with sarcopenia, a condition where you lose muscle mass due to aging. After 12 weeks, those who took supplements along with resistance training saw an increase in fat loss and muscle strength more than the placebo group.

4. May reduce cellulite

Besides keeping your skin healthy and glowing, collagen may also help improve the appearance of stubborn cellulite. Cellulite is when the layer of fat under the skin pushes up against the connective tissue, creating a dimpled or lumpy appearance on the skin.
Another study was sponsored in 2015 by manufacturers to see what collagen would do for cellulite. They randomly assigned 105 women, ages 24-50, to take collagen for six months. Those who did demonstrated a clear improvement in skin texture.  Yet cellulite is incredibly common — an estimated 80 to 90% of women have it. It’s a natural part of aging and skin formation and not a cause for concern.

5. Improves digestive health

Collagen is in the gut’s connective tissue and can help support and strengthen the protective lining of your digestive tract. This is critically important because alterations in the barrier function of your intestine, also known as leaky gut syndrome, can allow particles to pass into the bloodstream. This may result in inflammation.
In fact, an older study from 2003 looked at 170 individuals with inflammatory bowel disease and found that they were more likely to have lower levels of serum collagen. So the current theory is that by increasing your intake of collagen, you could help build up the tissues that line your gastrointestinal tract and promote better gut health. 

Here are a few easy ways to kick up your collagen intake:

1. Experiment with bone broth

Bone broth is made by simmering bones to help extract the flavor and beneficial nutrients. Not only is it an excellent source of collagen, but it’s also tasty and easy to add to your diet by using it to make soups and stews, whole grains like rice and quinoa, and even to moisten leftovers. You can easily make bone broth at home, or save time by purchasing it in powder form. The brand I love for powdered bone broth and carry in the office for your convenience is Organixx.  

2. Try out powdered gelatin

Gelatin is essentially the cooked form of collagen, and powdered gelatin can be a quick and convenient way to bump up your collagen consumption. It can be mixed into any liquid, including soups, stews, and broths. You can also enjoy it to satisfy your sweet tooth by making homemade Jell-O or natural fruit snacks.

3. Supplement with collagen peptides

Collagen peptides are another easy option to get your fix of this important amino acid. Most brands sell hydrolyzed collagen peptides, which means that the amino acids in collagen have been broken down so that they’re more easily digested and absorbed.
Collagen powder can also be added to smoothies, hot beverages, or baked goods to pump some extra protein into your day. The collagen powder I recommend the most is also from Organixx which we also have in the office.  

There is also ways to get collagen in through your daily diet. If you want to consume collagen naturally, eat a well-balanced, high-protein diet that includes animal products. Collagen is in beef, chicken, fish, and egg whites.

But you don’t want to eat too much protein, either. Your body doesn’t tell the collagen where to go. Instead, it distributes the collagen like it would any other nutrient. So taking collagen supplements works much like exercise — it’s difficult to target a specific need, but increasing your intake could still have benefits.

Eat This: Bone Broth

There’s a South American Proverb that says, “A good broth can raise the dead.” There is a reason why we eat soup when we are sick. A real bone broth has been simmering for hours to leach all the minerals and vitamins out of the bone making it liquid gold for our immune system. There are other great benefits to drinking bone broth on a daily basis.

If you slow cook the bone it draws out the collagen, marrow, and other healing elements from the bones, including amino acids, minerals, glycine, and gelatin—which helps heal the gut and reduce inflammation for the whole body.

Collagen, the protein matrix in bones, tendons, ligaments, and other flexible tissues, is broken down during the cooking process into another protein called gelatin. Gelatin is the reason properly prepared broth congeals in the fridge. This gelatin has in it the raw materials to rebuild your own connective tissue, especially tendons (which connect muscles to bones) and ligaments (which connect bones to each other).

Another benefit of bone broth for joint health comes from glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), a family of carbohydrates found in bones and connective tissue that show interesting effects in reducing joint pain. One of these GAGs, hyaluronic acid, is an effective treatment for osteoarthritis.



Bone broth helps in digestion by containing glycine, because it stimulates the production of stomach acid. Who may need more stomach acid, you ask? People who have acid reflux do because acid reflux is actually a problem of too little stomach acid, not too much. By prompting your body to secrete more stomach acid, glycine can help prevent or treat this painful and potentially dangerous problem. This makes bone broth a delicious supplemental food for anyone suffering from acid reflux, IBS, or FODMAPS intolerance.

Adding to its metabolic virtues, glycine is also an important component of bile acid, which is necessary for fat digestion in the small intestine, and also helps maintain healthy blood cholesterol levels. Especially for people who are new to Paleo and switching from a carb-based to a fat-based diet, this has the potential to keep the digestive process running a lot more smoothly.

Glycine isn’t the only useful protein for gut health, either. glutamine, another amino acid found in bone broth, is a natural remedy for “leaky gut,” that unpleasant and dangerous condition where the barrier between your gut and the rest of your body isn’t working properly, allowing molecules that should stay inside the gut to cross over into the bloodstream and potentially set of a cascade of autoimmune reactions. Glutamine helps maintain the function of the intestinal wall, preventing this damage from occurring.

Glycine also helps in detoxification because it supports the liver in removing anything dangerous from the body.
Glycine is also necessary for the synthesis of glutathione and uric acid, the body’s most important endogenous antioxidants.

Yet another detox-related benefit is that glycine helps clear out excess methionine, another amino acid found in large quantities in eggs and muscle meat. Methionine is an essential amino acid, but too much of it can raise blood levels of another amino acid called homocysteine, and the process of breaking down homocysteine increases the body’s need for B vitamins (thus increasing the risk of B vitamin deficiency even if your intake is adequate). Glycine from broths and cartilage can help break down homocysteine without the need for B vitamins.

Bone broth is extremely high in minerals. Bones from land animals are rich in calcium, magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus, and fish bones also contain iodine. We know that at least some of this mineral content leaches out into the water, because the bones are crumbly and demineralized when the broth is done cooking – often they’re so weak that they’ll fall apart if you put any pressure on them. If you use smaller bones, like chicken or fish, they’ll sometimes even entirely dissolve into the stock.

Another interesting anti-inflammatory benefit of the proteins in bone broth is more rapid recovery from injury. Under the stress of an injury or disease, the body’s needs for these amino acids increases and bone broth is perfect for supplementing this increased need for the body to repair.

So the old advice of drink soup when you are sick still stands. Drink soup when inflamed, when joints hurt, to heal the gut or when recovering from an injury as well! If you don't want to make your own bone broth there's a great organic bone broth place in NYC, Brodo and online, even though it comes in plastic, The Osso Good Co.