Top 10 Collagen Foods You Cannot Skip!

There's a lot of talk about collagen these days. There's drinks and creams and powders, but here's what most people miss. You can't just eat collagen and absorb it as it is. Your body has to break it down and then rebuild it. And to do that, you need the right amino acids, but also the right cofactors, supportive nutrients, and the right conditions. You can't build a house without bricks and you can't build collagen without the raw materials and the tools your body needs. Hello, Hellchampions. Today, we're going to talk about the top 10 foods that support the body's own collagen production and some of them are probably not what you expect. So what is collagen? First of all, well, it's the most abundant protein that we have in the body. It's sort of like the glue that holds everything together. Collagen is what makes up most of what we call connective tissue. So it's the primary building material for things like skin, bones, muscles, joints, and even your intestinal gut membranes. And what that means, of course, is that if you have a lack of collagen, if you're not making enough, now that could lead to all sorts of problems, such as wrinkles, slow healing, but also joint pain and leaky gut that can cause inflammation and systemic problems and autoimmune disorders and on and on. So I got some good news and some bad news. And we'll start with the bad news and then we'll build on the good ones. So the bad news is that when you're 20 to 25 years old, you are at the peak of your ability to make collagen. Your collagen production is the highest it will ever be at 100%. But for a lot of people, already by age 40, your collagen production could be down to about 50% of its peak value. And by age 60 and beyond, it could be down to as low as 25% of your peak production, which means, of course, that some 40-year-olds will have lost 50% of their collagen production and some people over 60 may have lost 75% of their collagen production. So now the question is, why is it so much? Why do we lose so much? And does it have to be that way? And if you talk to most doctors who represent the mainstream view, they kind of confuse the average with what's normal. They confuse common with how it's supposed to work. So a lot of them are going to tell you that it's inevitable, it's just one of these things that decline with age, and it's just part of normal aging. And what they're not telling you, though, is that a lot of the things that we assign to aging is actually lifestyle. It's nutritional deficiencies and it's disuse. So aging is not completely inevitable. It will take its course, but there's a lot we can do to slow it down. So here are the actual collagen killers. I'm going to start with aging because we mentioned that. We're going to put it in parentheses because it is not the most important factor and you can't do much about it. But the rest of them are things that you can change. And they are going to be much more influential on your collagen production. So these are things like sugar, carbs, and chronic inflammation. Nothing breaks down collagen as fast as high blood sugar and inflammation. But also smoking, excess alcohol, and environmental toxins will break down collagen and will interfere with your body's ability to make it. Chronic stress and poor sleep will interfere with collagen. Also nutritional deficiencies. Of course, if you don't have the right raw materials, you can't make it. But also lack of exercise and mechanical stimulation. So just even stretching and moving the skin contributes to collagen production. But in terms of bones and joints, what you need to do is weight bearing exercise. That's the reason for the body to strengthen the bones. And of course, the protein in bones is collagen. And also UV light breaks down collagen in the skin. So when it comes to appearance, as much as 90% of the damage of the age-related damage to skin, is going to be due to UV light. And now for the good news. And that is, if you improve your lifestyle by avoiding some of the things we talked about, and by eating the right foods, which we're about to talk about, now you can restore a lot of that lost ability to make collagen. So you could, regardless of age, you can restore about half of what you had lost. So if you're in your 40s, you could actually get back from 50 up to about 75% of your full capacity. And if you're in your 60s, you could go from 25% all the way up to 62 and a half percent, roughly speaking. So the first food we often hear about is bone broth. And it's a great example because it has lots of collagen in it. It has type 1, 2, and 3, so it supports a variety of different tissues in the body. And it also has gelatin and glycine, which is the amino acid, that is the primary amino acid and building block in collagen. But it also contains calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus, which are important cofactors for collagen. And when you make it, it's always better to make it yourself rather than by this storebought. And the grass fed is going to have much higher nutrient density. And if you pressure cook it, you're going to extract much more of the nutrients than if you just slow cook it. So in a few hours of pressure cooking, you can extract more nutrients than you could in a few days of slow cooking. Number two is chicken skin. And just like with beef bone broth, you can cook this out and make a broth out of it with the bones. As well. And if you use the thighs, then you get more of the type 1 and 3. And if you use the wings, you get more of the type 2. So if you use both, then you get a broader combination, obviously. And it's really sad that we have this fat and calorie phobia that we have been told to eat skinless chicken for so long. But the skin has a lot of good nutrients. But what if you grill the chicken with the skin now? What does that do? Well, the more you grill it, the harder you grill it, the more you break down the collagen. The less collagen will be available for you to absorb. But here's the thing. You are not really absorbing the collagen as an entire molecule. You're breaking it down first. You're digesting it. And the amino acids in the collagen, the building blocks, they're very, very stable. So you can actually rebuild it into collagen anyway. However, it's going to be much harder to rebuild it if you grill it and break it down. Because now there's going to be much more work for the body. It's going to expand more resources and energy. It will produce some inflammatory agents, some advanced glycation and products. And it will cost your body some antioxidants to remake it. So it's not going to be as available, but it's also not going to be completely lost. And there will be a huge difference between if you are eating whole food, if you're healthy, if you have a low state of inflammation, you'll be much better at rebuilding it from the grilled chicken skin than if you're inflamed and insulin resistant. Food number three is beef. And here you want to go for the cuts that have high connective tissue content. So these are going to be tough meat, basically, unless you cook them. So we're talking chuck roast, shank, ox tail and ribs, for example. And obviously you're going to cook the meats to some degree, but these, you want to slow cook for a long, long time. So they get very, very tender like ribs that are fall off the bone tender. Now that means that they have soften. They have released the collagen and the gelatin. So it's available for you. And if you find grass fed beef, that's always going to be better because these are relatively high in fat. And then you want to make sure that the fat they contain are the best possible. So grass fed is going to have about an equal ratio of omega three to omega six, whereas grain fed could have as much as a 20 to one omega six to omega three ratio. So much higher omega six means more inflammatory. So again, these meats are going to be the ones that are really tough, unless you cook them for a long time. And that makes sense because your body, use is collagen for connective tissue for things that hold things together, that tough, the sinewy stuff. And the same thing holds true for the beef. And therefore if it's tough you just have to cook it longer and now you're releasing that collagen. Number four is sardines. And these would be sardines with the skin and the bones. They're tiny, tiny, and you don't really notice it, but it's the skin and bones that contain the collagen. And sardines are one of the richest sources in omega-3 fatty acids, the EPA and the DHA that your body needs to make all sorts of things, their precursors for hormones, their signaling molecules, they help balance inflammation and so forth. And because foods that are rich in these omega-3s tends to help the body balance and reduce inflammation. Now inflammation is one of the things that destroys collagen. So if we reduce inflammation, now we reduce collagen breakdown. Now so far we've talked about some foods that already contain pre-made, complete collagen. And they're going to be rich in collagen and they're going to be animal foods, animal-based foods because animals just like humans, we use the collagen to build structural components in the body. But next we're going to talk about some other foods that can also be helpful even though they don't have pre-formed collagen in them. And these can be both animal and plant-based foods. And these are the foods can be helpful because they contain amino acids that your body uses to make collagen. They could have other cofactors that are critical for the production of collagen. They could also be something that stimulates the production of collagen or they could protect the existing collagen in the body and lessen the breakdown. So how does the body make collagen? Well first of all we have to understand that you cannot absorb collagen the way it is. It's an enormous molecule. So it's built as a triple helix. That means that it's like three long strings that are changed. They're a wound around each other. And each of these three chains will have somewhere on the order of 1,000 amino acids in each of them. So it's like you think of a huge tree or a branch where each leaf might be an amino acid and the entire branch could be one of these chains. And then we twist them all together and now we have this triple helix. But your body can only absorb. You can only have things enter the bloodstream if they are small, small pieces. The biggest thing we can absorb is somewhere like just a few of these amino acids. So we're going to digest these proteins. We're going to break them down into individual amino acids or into what we call dipeptide or tripeptide. So that means that there's two amino acids or three amino acids. And that's basically the smallest pieces or the biggest pieces that we can absorb. And now these small broken down pieces become both raw materials for building collagen but also signaling molecules. And if something used to be collagen, then it has signaling properties that will stimulate the body and tell it to reassemble it into collagen. But food can also be beneficial for collagen if it contains a cofactor, something that is necessary for the body to make it. And one of the most important is going to be vitamin C. It's an essential cofactor. We cannot put this thing together without vitamin C. But we also need enzymes to put it together and we need zinc and copper to activate some of those enzymes. And the two most prevalent amino acids are going to be glycine and proline. They're going to act as the main building materials, the raw materials. But then we also need to cross link. We need sulfur compounds to connect these long chains to each other because they need to cross link to be stable and hold together. And just to emphasize how important it is, even though we often neglect it, I put deep sleep as a cofactor here because during the early sleeping hours, we make most of our growth hormone. And it's during this phase of sleep that we actually manufacture most of the collagen. So if we don't get the proper sleep and if we don't get enough of the deep sleep, now we may be suffering in producing collagen. And food number five is eggs. And even though eggs don't have any collagen per se, they're very rich in glycine and proline, the two main amino acids we need to make collagen. But eggs also contain sulfur compounds that we need for cross linking. Remember, we need to tie these strands together for stability and sulfur comes in handy for that. And the sulfur is also going to support liver detox. And overall, this is going to help our tissue repair. And number six is vitamin C and the foods that contain them. So classically, we think about citrus, fruits, lemons, oranges, grape fruits, etc. But we also want to think about vegetables, which actually can have more vitamin C in bell peppers, broccoli, cabbage, and there's many, many others. So there's basically no fruit, berry, or vegetable that doesn't have a fair amount of vitamin C. And vitamin C is absolutely required for collagen synthesis. And to really get the context and the importance here, you want to think about scurvy. This used to be a disease that killed people like the sailors who went to see for months at a time and didn't have vitamin C. What would happen is their collagen would break down and they couldn't make any new. So their connective tissue degraded, their joints fell apart, their teeth fell out, they had bleeding gums. And eventually they would actually die from this because the connective tissue, the whole structure of the body just fell apart. Food number seven is berries and the classic ones are blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries. But most of the berries you can find are going to be great. They're going to have similar properties, but these are the ones we can find most commonly. And of course they're going to have vitamin C like we just talked about, but they're also going to have antioxidants called polyphenols. And these are very powerful compounds that will help protect collagen from breakdown, degrading, but polyphenols also act as support and food for your gut bacteria. So they're going to promote your gut health and the diversity of bacteria in your gut. Food number eight is garlic and besides being delicious and having all sorts of benefits for inflammation and being antibacterial and so forth, it also helps collagen in that it contains sulfur, lipobic acid, and torine. And all of these will help collagen in terms of supporting the cross linking and the stability of that collagen molecule. So with greater stability, we have less breakdown. And number nine is green stuff. So here we start off with leafy greens such as spinach, kale, collards, arugula, parsley. And anything that's really deep green is going to have chlorophyll in it. And there's some promising research that suggests that it may increase what's called pro collagen. So that is the preformed collagen that's ready to be distributed around the body. It has a little attachment that helps it move around in the body without sticking to things. So chlorophyll is a good thing and anything deep green will contain chlorophyll. But leafy greens also have vitamin C and antioxidants that we talked about their benefits. Now there's more green stuff and one of those is called spirulina. It is a very ancient thing that's called a cyanobacterium. It's kind of a cross between. It has certain properties of plants and certain properties of animals. And it's one of the oldest things we know. It is very high in protein, especially in glycine, which is the number one component of collagen. But it also contains iron and copper that helps activate enzymes and helps with the cross linking. So overall, spirulina will help the body build collagen. And then there's a similar substance, similar thing called clorella. That's not quite as old. It's a little bit more plant-like. And it also contains chlorophyll, but also vitamin C and other detoxifiers. So overall, clorella is going to help protect collagen, whereas spirulina is going to help build it. Number 10 is avocado. What video would be complete without avocado. And interestingly, I put this on the top 10 list, even though it has no collagen, because it has so many other things in it that optimize the conditions of the body making collagen and protecting existing collagen. And avocados are very rich in mono-unsaturated fatty acids just like olives are. And that will help reduce the collagen breakdown in the body. So in the skin, it will help protect it from dryness and system-wide it's going to help reduce inflammation in the body. It's a very rich source of vitamin E which will help prevent oxidative damage and breakdown. And it also has plenty of vitamin C and B which will help with tissue repair and collagen synthesis. And avocado is a tremendously rich source of fiber, especially soluble fiber that helps support a healthy gut. And if you have a healthy gut, you're going to have less leaky gut, you're going to have less food sensitivity, you're going to have less inflammation. It's going to be an overall much better condition to prevent the breakdown of collagen. So even though collagen has got most attention because it's a component of skin and a lack of it contributes to wrinkles and a less an appearance, less beautiful appearance. That's where most people really care about it. But we want to understand that there's more to it than just putting a cream on. It's a whole lifestyle just like we talked about. And it affects so many things beyond the skin. Yes, that's important, but also bones, muscles, joints, and gut, like we talked about. And in terms of the lifestyle, the things that you want to do is yes, you could supplement, you could buy collagen powder, you could eat foods that are rich in collagen, but there's so many different aspects that you want to fill in and get the complete picture so that you don't waste your money on just buying a supplement and you miss all the other parts. You also want to make sure to get the vitamin C so you can make collagen. You want to make sure that you get the sleep, like we talked about, the deep sleep and the early part of the night is where you make growth hormone and where you make most of the collagen. You want to avoid excess UV light. You realize that we are made to be in the sun. We have pigment. We have defense mechanisms, but we do not want to get damaged. We do not want to get sunburn. The sun is really good for us. We make vitamin D from it. It stimulates all kinds of positive aspects and our hormones and endocrine system. We just want to avoid the excess and avoid getting burned. Most people probably don't think of meditation as a way of making more collagen, but the fact is if you are more relaxed, if you have less stress, now you're going to sleep better and you're going to make less cortisol, which is destructive to collagen. You want to make sure that your gut is working properly and do things to support your gut health. You want to make sure that you get regular exercise, both with dynamic movements, with stretching and also weight bearing. The number one thing that you can do to have healthy levels of collagen is to stabilize your blood sugar. Make sure it's at a healthy level. Your fasting blood glucose should be in the 80s and your A1C, your three-month average for glucose, ideally should be at 5.3 or lower. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. 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