Collagen for Healthy Joints, Tendons and Ligaments

Collagen Peptides Reduce Inflammation and Support Your Joints! Let Us Show You How!

Joints are what allows you to be active every day. They permit you to go on that walk, to swim in the ocean, to hold onto your phone, and even to sit comfortably in a chair. You need your joints to be healthy to enjoy your life and live it to the fullest.

As you age and even from overuse injuries from sports while you are young, the cartilage in your joints can break down. Inflammation and the feeling of bone rubbing on bone make activities you used to love filled with pain rather than fun. Taking collagen peptides changes that.

Here’s how collagen peptides reduce inflammation and support your joints:

• Collagen is the glue for your entire body
• Your joints are primarily made up of type 2 collagen
• Collagen peptide builders can help you make more collagen to keep your joints young
• Collagen can reduce the inflammation in your joints and allow them to function properly

What is Collagen?

You probably thought that collagen is solely used for making your skin look younger and have greater elasticity. Well, you’ll get that same effect from your joints if you take collagen orally by taking a daily collagen peptide supplement.

Think of collagen as glue for your body. The very word collagen actually means glue. The Greek word “kòlla” and the French suffix “-gene” literally translate to glue-producing.

Glue has a very elastic effect. If you were to put glue on your hands right now, it would feel sticky and gummy. Collagen keeps everything pulled together and working properly. This protein maintains the structure of your skin, bones, intestinal barrier, muscles, tendons, and joints.

Collagen is a complex long-chain protein made up of 19 different amino acids. Over 30% of your body’s protein is from this particular type of protein.

Also, there are 16 different types of collagen. Your joints are made up of type 1 and 2 collagen. Type 1 collagen is the most abundant and makes up the tendons, ligaments, bones, skin, and arteries. Type 2 is constructed from chondrocytes, a liquid-like filling in your cartilage.

An important thing to note is that you can’t simply take a collagen supplement and expect your joints to heal. Collagen is worthless without the presence of vitamin C in your body. That’s why you should always be eating plenty of fruits and vegetable in your diet.

Think about the scurvy epidemic. In our modern time, you don’t see many people who suffer from this in first world countries, but seafarers from the 1500s to the 1800s were severely affected. It’s estimated that two million sailors suffered from scurvy.

When you have scurvy, your teeth fall out, your gums bleed, your skin breaks out in rashes, your hair falls out, and your muscles weaken. Each and every single one of these symptoms is related to loss of collagen.

They were eating plenty of meat and fat (usually what people think of when they think of collagen-rich foods). Nonetheless, they were losing collagen rapidly. They didn’t have any vegetable or fruits in their diet.

Without vitamin C, your body can’t produce or absorb collagen. And, fruits and vegetables contain the highest levels of vitamin C. You need to be sure you get vitamin C in your diet for your joint health as well.

Some of these fruits and vegetables that contain vitamin C include:

• Oranges
• Kiwis
• Lemons
• Broccoli
• Guava
• Cauliflower
• Brussels Sprouts
• Bell Peppers

To encourage your body to make more collagen, you also need proline, glycine, and lysine. If you want a longer list of foods that can help you stimulate your body to produce collagen, check out this article.

Collagen for Healthy Joints

The older you get, the more the cartilage between your joints starts to thin out and become weaker. At age 35, the rate that your body produces collagen begins to slow. Then, just five years later, the rate at which your collagen levels decrease is greater than the rate your body can produce it. By 60, over half of your body’s collagen stores will be lost.

You can also expedite this process from overuse and injuries in sports. It’s easy to start having joint pain at a young age if you don’t take care of your body with proper diet and rest.

Different joint injuries that you had as a child, teenager, or young adult can come back to haunt you even if it healed when you were younger. You might first begin to notice it around the colder months. Then, later on, pain can become an everyday reality.

But collagen can change that fate or alleviate most of the pain you feel today. It does diminish pain and supports the amount of collagen that you currently have.

A recent study looked at how taking collagen peptide supplements daily could affect those who have osteoarthritis. They found that collagen did provide some improvement when measuring patients’ pain levels.

Another twenty-four week study looked at how collagen affected athletes when used as a dietary supplement. All subjects showed statistically significant results from using collagen as a supplement. The results suggested that collagen reduces pain and helps to speed up recovery time for athletes.

These results indicate that collagen is one of many foods that you should be eating to keep your joints healthy and moving free from pain.

How Does it Work?

So, we understand that collagen is the main building block of your cartilage in your joints. But how does eating collagen help your joints exactly?

Well, it works in a couple of different ways. And there is a lot of debate surrounding whether or not it can rebuild the cartilage in your joints.

Some doctors and scientists believe that collagen does not rebuild any cartilage that you might have lost. If you have lost cartilage, they believe eating collagen will not replace the collagen you lost.

The way they believe collagen works for your joints is if you buy an undenatured or raw type 2 collagen supplement. This particular way of using collagen is especially for those who have been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis.

Basically, by taking a collagen supplement, you are tricking your body. When you have rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis, your body tries to attack the cartilage in your joints.

You could be fine one day, and the next your cartilage has disappeared. Both rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis are autoimmune diseases. So, you need to figure out a way to get your body to stop hurting you.

Let me illustrate an example of how this works. Let’s say for instance that when you were a teenager, you loved to go running, but you ended up with runner’s knee. When you developed runner’s knee, you also created a tiny tear in your cartilage. Small minuscule pieces of that joint will leak out through that tear.

Your body’s immune system will recognize these tiny pieces of joint cartilage as foreign bodies. So, to combat this, your body releases and creates more antibodies to attack the particles. This may not kick in while you are young, but as you age and more stress is put on your body, your body may develop this immune response.

Here’s where taking a collagen supplement comes in. If you take a collagen supplement, it will act as a decoy for your body. Your body will attack the supplement and leave your joint cartilage alone. The collagen will be allowed past the lymphatic system to enter the stomach. Then your antibodies will redirect themselves from your joints to your stomach to work to get rid of that collagen instead of your body’s cartilage.

This new response will allow the inflammation in your joints to go down, and you’ll feel better. You can also eat other anti-inflammatory foods in conjunction with taking a collagen supplement for added benefits.

These doctors believe this solution won’t work for people who have already worn through their cartilage. They believe eating collagen won’t replace the cartilage in your knee if you have arthritis. Instead, collagen acts as a decoy, so you keep the cartilage you have and reduce inflammation in your joints that cause pain.

Other doctors claim the opposite. They say that their patients have actually regrown cartilage from taking collagen supplements.

Either way you look at it, collagen does help your joints.

Another way you can use collagen for your joints is if you take a collagen peptide builder. You are basically giving your body the ingredients to make its own collagen.

This is like if you went to the grocery store and bought tomato sauce, spaghetti noodles, and basil. You now have the ingredients to make an Italian dish at home. All you need to do is cook the ingredients to make a meal.

Your body works in a similar way. It can’t make collagen if it doesn’t have the ingredients to make it. But, if you take a collagen peptide builder, your body will have everything it needs to make collagen.

Does Collagen Help Arthritis?

There is still lots of research to be done to see more long-term effects of collagen for joints. It would be easy to say that by taking one magic collagen pill a day, your arthritis will be gone. But, that simply isn’t the case.

Yes, collagen will help your joints, but collagen shouldn’t be used simply as a Band-Aid for a more deeply rooted issue. You need to look for the root cause of your pain. What’s causing your arthritis?

Come at arthritis from both sides. Take a collagen supplement to manage your pain, but also look at how other things in your life could be making your arthritis worse.

The cause is usually from you straining your immune system in various ways. It could be food related, infection related, or even from toxins that you’re exposed to on a day to day basis.

Collagen shouldn’t be the only thing that you use to treat your arthritis either. Eating an anti-inflammatory diet, staying hydrated, maintaining a healthy weight, engaging in light exercise, and some forms of alternative medicine such as physical therapy and massage can help you feel better.

How to Choose a Collagen Supplement

Not all collagen supplements are the same. Picking a collagen supplement for your needs is essential for you to experience results.

Vegan collagen peptide builders are very different from animal-based collagen powders. A collagen builder essentially gives your body the ingredients it needs to produce its own collagen.

In contrast, an animal-based collagen supplement takes the bones, hides, hooves, and joints of animals and transforms those ingredients into a powder. Basically, the animal collagen is supposed to replace the collagen your body has lost.

The problem with this idea is that collagen needs vitamin C to survive. So, even if you take an animal-based collagen supplement, it doesn’t mean that your body will absorb the protein. You have to have vitamin C in your body.