Hack Your Hormones
Put a Pep(Tide) and Electro(Tide) in Your Step
The one where you’re drinking the water, you’re eating the fruit and veg and you’re doing the exercise but there still seems to be something missing from feeling well. Is natural ageing simply catching up with you? Might collagen be the missing link?
A Fundament of Wellness
If you’re of an age, you’ll be familiar with this scenario: one day you're bumbling along just nicely, happy as a clam, getting out of chairs without making an effortful noise, you’re comfortable in your skin, feeling good in your tummy and then, seemingly overnight, some nebulous sensations start to creep in: you’re more tired, you twinge, your tummy bloats and, at times, your gut feels like it’s had a fight with a cheese grater and your skin somehow feels … dusty? Somehow, your body is starting to feel like something that needs consigning to the shed while you order up a new one. How has this happened? Finding your feel-good is suddenly akin to playing hide and seek with your body, checking in for where it actually does feel ok, even if it’s just your little finger some days, and you’ve got a sneaky suspicion that the more you concentrate on what’s happening, the more you’re adding to the creep of unease as you vigilantly wait for the next symptom to drop.
And so the Great Symptom Chase Begins
Chasing every last nuance of discomfort becomes the new normal and if you had to point to where it hurts you’d do a general, exasperated and dramatic sweep of your whole body and probably burst into tears or retreat to the man cave, depending. Time is ravishing you, and not in the good sense, as you knew it eventually would. But did it have to be so soon? As children, we imagined that the effects of the wear and tear of life must suddenly knock at your door in your seventies and that seemed far enough away to return to tending to our Tamagotchi without too much concern. What we didn’t account for were those little niggles starting to creep in during our mid thirties and then really start ganging up on us in our forties and fifties. When even elite athletes are feeling their age in their fourth decade, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Of course, visits to the doctor are astute; let’s rule out anything obvious and get that treated, if need be. But, when you are once again sitting in that hard plastic chair in the doctor’s consulting room, the one that’s placed at the exact angle that communicates, you sit here at the side of my desk so that I don’t seem superior and intimidating, but, equally, don’t get too familiar with me, I’m the authority on your body in here and you’re pretty certain that, earlier, the receptionist rolled her eyes down the phone at you when she asked for a brief summary of your symptoms and you murmured apologetically, I just don’t feel great, again, we can always ask ourselves, is there something obvious that I’m missing?
Ground Control to Collagen
Sometimes with feelings of well-being, choosing one positive starting point for wellness can make a big difference to the way you perceive your whole self: mind, body and that magic sprinkle. You fear that starting a complex regime might overwhelm you and your nervous system when your cortisol is already probably sky high as it’s just another thing to add to the to do list. But, if you’ve ever encountered a toddler with a concern, you’ll know that sometimes all they really need in order to calm down is the notion that someone is doing something about it. In some ways, our grown up bodies and minds can react to the stressors of life and convoluted pathways to wellness in the style of that tantruming toddler. Bodies like to know that the conscious mind bit of you is playing its part in doing something and then it can compliantly come along for the ride. The converse is also true, when our bodies begin to feel nourished, since our mind-body works almost like a twin piston engine, our minds can begin to calm down and not constantly be anxiously reaching for solutions. In this way, we can better enjoy a peaceful mind-body dynamic. All in all, you can be your own best ally by choosing just one thing.
But, where to begin?
We suggest that a perfect grounding for looking after ourselves but avoiding the overwhelm of making changes that put additional strain on us when we already feel frazzled can be found in WillPowders hydrolysed bovine collagen peptides. By providing the amino acid building blocks for your body’s collagen, you are supporting the whole of your body in maintenance and repair. When your mind is spiralling with how to look after your body in a simple and achievable way, it really can be a case of ground control needing to dial you up some clean, no nasties, sneaky nutrition, collagen peptide support.
Why would I bother with ECM: the extracellular matrix?
No, ECM is not the newest sequel in the Matrix film series, although admittedly Keanu is an all round panacea. Think of it this way: it has been said, if you took all the cells and water out of your body, you would still keep your recognisable form because there’s so much collagen in the human body that, where solids and liquids are concerned, collagen’s mainly what we’re made from. This ECM is the latticework on which every other cellular part of us depends, and yet collagen has somehow got lost in the discourse on well-being.
At WillPowders, we seek the most efficient ways to care for your well-being because who doesn’t immediately answer, Oh, busy, when asked How are you?
We are about a blend of modern and established wisdoms and cutting through the misleading when it comes to health. In bringing you hydrolysed bovine collagen peptides, we have salvaged good knowledge that fell by the wayside as the world headed off into throwing the baby out with the bathwater with the erroneous ‘No Fat Low Fat’ approach and we add in a dash of 21st century convenience to putting collagen support into your daily nutrition.
We are also about innovating products that deliver a breadth of efficient foundational wellbeing solutions when it comes to looking after your health. So, while the wellness world is awash with lots of fun facts about humans consisting mostly of water, and our deliciously innovative ElectroTides will certainly help you hydrate, we also feel it’s pertinent to ask yourself, what is stopping that personal ocean from ebbing away and heading back to the sea? The answer is collagen. You simply can’t have hydration without the collagen. Once you get that it’s collagen keeping everything in place, water and cells alike, you’ll recognise that hydrolysed bovine collagen peptides could be a way to feel better in your skin, gut and mind. We would never think of depriving our bodies of water if we could help it and, yet, we live in times that for too long have divorced us from knowledge of our extracellular matrix and the amino acids that help it assemble.
Like a perky fresh lettuce from the crisper?
If you think about it, it’s astounding that governments haven't launched health campaigns about collagen when they certainly launch them involving plenty of its plant counterpart, cellulose. That’s the very stuff that does for plants what collagen does for the mammalian body. Cellulose keeps your melons juicy and your aubergine, er, turgid! It provides a structure for the plant to keep its juices in. Here we all are, dutifully trying to eat five a day to give us cellulose that the body can’t digest while blithely ignoring the very stuff we are made from, that stuff that helps keep us juicy too! Cellulose may help us achieve ‘poophoria’ but it does nothing at all for anything else in us mammals. If we are feeling a little limp and wizened but want to be as vital as that crisp lettuce from the crisper, because limpness is always a disappointment, then collagen is to mammals as cellulose is to plants. We aren’t saying don’t eat your greens, they are nutrient packed, and your body’s collagen production also relies on Vitamin C to function which is in abundance in those fruits and veg, but, we are saying, if you want to support what you are mainly made of, you'll need to eat your bovine collagen peptides too! Given that you’re probably doing as much as you can to keep up with your five a day already, and you’re drinking the water cooler dry, maybe now is the time to look at your own ECM structure and how you can support it.
Put a little pep(tide) in your step
WillPowders bovine collagen peptides are odour and taste free. They dissolve completely in liquids, hot or cold, sweet or savoury, and they don’t change the viscosity of the liquid they are in. Sometimes, when you are starting out with how to look after yourself that bit better, you need to cling onto the familiar comforts. It’s that part of you that wants to keep you safe by keeping things safe and familiar. The beauty of our hydrolysed peptides is that incorporating them into your existing diet is a doddle. They can be stirred into a comfortingly familiar cup of tea and even the most suspicious of hyper-tasters simply wouldn’t be able to tell. Their thermal stability means that you can cook with them, adding them to any liquid within a meal. If you've had a sudden rush of blood to the head and made ice-cream, those peptides will freeze like marines versed in arctic training and those little amino acids will still be ready to go, being bioavailable and absorbable by your gut when you lick the spoon clean. In a world of mind and body frazzlement, when it seems like having to add one more thing into your life will bring the whole house of cards down, it couldn’t be easier to begin to look after your body’s own collagen.
What’s in it for me?
The collagen in your body takes its elegance from its triple helix structure. To deconstruct this structure, we need to understand a little about collagen peptides. Collagen proteins are made up of peptides which are in turn made up of amino acids. If we go the other way, and build upwards, as our body does, amino acids are the building blocks of peptides which are the building blocks of collagen protein. It’s at this point you can step in with a little rescue package for your collagen production. The phrase ‘collagen supplement’ has become a shorthand for peptide and amino acid supplementation to support collagen protein production. There is little point in taking collagen as a whole protein, topically or orally, because it’s simply too big to enter our skin or gut systems. However, luckily, we aren’t consuming collagen in a supplement but we humans like to be efficient, even a little lazy, with our language so, of course, ‘hydrolysed collagen peptides’ has become condensed to ‘collagen supplement’ in our everyday conversations. When we discuss supplementing collagen in our diets, we are really talking about supplementing our nutrition with the amino acids and collagen peptides from which our bodies build collagen. These have been hydrolysed so that they are small enough to be the building blocks of the larger collagen protein. Essentially, they are bioavailable.
Deliver the building blocks to the creation system that is your body, and it will build you, well, a body! In fact, your body is doing this all the time. Imagine that - we are being built and rebuilt day in, day out from the inside. Most of us have heard the idea that we completely renew every seven years, as if we are trapped in some kind of weird Dr. Who regeneration process, but this isn’t quite true. It might be an ‘on average every seven years’ kind of fact, but the truth is that some parts of us renew quicker than others. Our skin cells, for example, slough away at quite an alarming rate - just check your house dust for 500 million cells a day to verify that one - whereas muscles in the skeletal system can take up to fifteen years to be replaced and the nerve cells in the spine are, particularly when damaged, notorious for either never renewing or doing so at a less than glacial pace. But, overall, some of the process of replacing the materials, big and small, in your body takes place daily.
It’s easy to become obsessed with helping to repair muscles or skin - the wellness industry has us all thoroughly well versed in these aspects...
However, at WillPowders, we also consider the fact that you have to help your collagen replace itself. The natural ageing process puts your back against the wall where this is concerned and, remember, collagen is the latticework on which all the other bits of you depend. We need to alter our mindsets with wellness towards supporting that latticework, the ECM, so that all the other bits of us have a chance of optimum performance.
WillPowders hydrolysed bovine collagen peptides are a wonderfully simple starting point.
WillPowders hydrolysed bovine collagen peptides are a wonderfully simple starting point. Mother Nature put us together with collagen when we were that cluster of cells that began to multiply. She gave our bodies a brilliant self-repair system. Unfortunately, she did make that repair system time-sensitive so that, as we naturally age, our collagen does not form as well as it once did. Connective tissue is also vulnerable to the effects of smoking and vaping and sugar consumption. Additionally, our body’s collagen production needs a good supply of vitamin C to form itself from any peptides we give it in supplementation and this is where those five a day really do come in useful!
In the case of natural ageing, you can expect that, if you’re over thirty, your collagen production isn’t what it was and that it will continue to drop for the rest of your life at around 1-1.5% a year...
While we all expect to look somewhat older eventually, what we might be missing is that the degeneration of collagen for structures within our bodies is what can marshal in serious disease and these diseases turn into comorbidities of diseases that often go hand in hand. No wonder those pesky little feelings of not feeling quite as grand as we used to can creep up on us. Willpowders want your insides to be as structurally well as they can be for as long as they can, helping vital organs, hydration, guts and heart muscle. We have faith that we are supporting a healthy longevity for our customers with our WillPowders hydrolysed bovine collagen peptides.
Given the wear and tear and the body’s natural diminishing returns on collagen production, it stands to reason that supporting collagen renewal is beneficial, particularly when you understand that collagen is the glue whose matrix provides safe harbours for our body’s water and the range of different cell collections in our body. In engineering terms - everything that moves, wears and so it all needs renewing at some point. Also, everything that moves in your organs needs keeping in place, otherwise cells would just go floating off willy-nilly and your body would be spending its time proverbially trying to round up a herd of cats. To be fair, without collagen, we probably would never have existed. It is collagen that allowed us to cocoon enough inner sea within us during evolution and use muscles to transport it with us onto land. It’s good to know all that when it comes to dipping out of the game of chasing those niggling feelings that come with getting older.
Further Reading:
Collagen Degradation Pathways in Humans Reginald Davey and Reviewed by Dr. Christian Zerfaß PhD covers some of the reasons why collagen degrades
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Disclaimer
Our blogs are written with love in the hope that they go some way in helping you feel like the rockstar you are, and whilst we do our due diligence, research like maniacs and fact check our stuff, we know everyone’s journey is different. They are intended to educate and empower you, not usurp medical advice. We would never advise you to stop, adjust, or modify any prescription medication without the direct supervision of your healthcare practitioner, but don’t be afraid to talk to your doctor about your new found knowledge, brought to you by the marvels of nature because they don't know everything! Blogs are always informed by Davinia but often written by a member of the team. Not all blogs reflect Davinia's experiences and sometimes provide alternative perspectives
