Skin and Bone: Protein or Collagen?

The one where we let you know why you need both bovine collagen peptides and bone broth in your world...

Optimum well-being is a prime concern.  We live in our bodies and minds and it is simply more pleasant to continually move towards, well, what keeps us feeling good.  What creature doesn’t want to live a sensory life of feeling at their best?  Humans have always been in a symbiosis with nutrients from the environment, every single living thing is scattered star stuff, after all, including us.   Our ancestors ate nose to tail when it came to hunting or livestock.  Let’s consider for a moment that they must have been doing something right as they provided the ancestral lines for us to stand here in this century.  Mumma Nature was in charge, of course, without the modern interference of Big Food that alienates ingredients from their natural source and souses them with a man-made chemical load.  And, wow, her bounty was good, brimming, as it was,  with juicy skin and bones!  

In the past, no self-respecting, common or garden variety of great grandma would be caught dead without having a pan of bones on the bubble.  With all that collagen consumption, this could be why she was always happy in her tummy!  But, historically speaking, the connection between moo and chew hasn't been severed for so long but a lot of dire things have happened to human health in that short time.  NASA might have more to answer to than we might guess in the way Big Food encourages us to eat today.  As it ushered in the 1960s space age, it also ushered in the whimsical idea of space food.  Metal aliens with potato mashers began to rustle up our ‘S’mashed spuds and kids snacked on the exploding sugar candy of Space Dust.  The idea of humans existing in dusty, barren environments was on our screens and slowly our connection to land and livestock was replaced almost entirely with novelty ‘food’ in flatpack. The idea of the sensible twin engine of food choice and assembly from fresh and preserved foods that we’d employed for as long as we could sew together a deerskin bag veered dramatically towards only eating anything that looked like it had been assembled on Apollo 13.  In essence, we lost sight of the balance humans need in our complex lives between the ‘now’ foods and the ‘for later on’ foods.  Boiling up a pan of beef bones suddenly seemed oddly, and, at the time, unfashionably, palaeolithic and certainly not something Lieutenant Uhura would be caught dead doing - the TV told us so!

Why, then, does WillPowders encourage consuming both bovine collagen peptides and bone broth and, ironically, given the above, help you do it in (Will)Powder form?  Well, the lean muscle meat we eat is missing the connective fascia tissue that supports collagen production once we’ve eaten it as it is totally unpleasant to chow down on which is why the butcher cuts it away and few of us have time to tend to a gently bubbling pot of bone broth for two days as if we were attending to a newborn.  The days of eating tripe have probably gone forever and, looking at it, many of us will be grateful for that.  We’d only try it from a Michelin starred restaurant and, even then, it would be at a push under threat of fire or flood.  To combat this deficit of collagen rich foods, we propose you fill your fridges with fresh food with good fats and supplement your essential protein profile with WillPowders versatile bovine and bone broth powders for optimum well-being.

Bovine collagen peptides are made from the skin of cattle.  Bovine bone broth is made by boiling cattle bones.  No prizes for guessing that last fact.  But, why would we bother including both in our diet - aren’t they the same thing in different forms?  The answer is that, while incredibly similar in many ways, there are some fundamental differences between the two and then there’s also the way we actually live and want to eat for a full protein profile.  

Fundamentally, at the level of matter, although we cherish you for being a whole lot more, take away the electric currents and water and we’d be a pile of amino acids that lined themselves up in chains.  As our bodies replace and repair, our bodies make some amino acids but we need to consume other amino acids that our bodies can’t make in order to make and mend the protein bits of us.  This is why we suggest both bone broth and bovine collagen peptides should be part of your nutrition on a regular basis, more so if you are under stress (in this modern age, bring me the person who isn’t on a silver platter!), healing from a physical (and some might argue emotional) trauma or injury, repairing from exercise or if those little vices that gnaw away at our health are still part of your guilty or not so guilty pleasures such as sugar, alcohol, smoking and vaping.  

Across our bovine collagen peptides and bone broth products, you can mix and match during the day to consume the full protein profile you need, for example by adding collagen to your cooking sauces or one pot meals to brewing up a cosy, comforting drink or stirring up a cool pud with our protein powders.  In this way, your body can get on with the job of maintenance, drawing from the full profile of amino acids and you can get on with the pleasures of enjoying a wide variety of nutritious and tasty food that satisfies the body and brain. 

Lady and the Tramp, Beauty and the Beast, The Princess and the Frog, Glycine and the Gut … wait a minute!  Yes, that’s right - some marriages were made in heaven!  Our bone broth powder and our bovine collagen peptides are both rich in glycine.  Glycine is an amazing all rounder amino acid with its ability to control insulin and blood sugar and improve sleep and mood by increasing calmness.  However, glycine and the gut take centre stage for us as it works wonders for the gastrointestinal tract.   Glycine is now recognised as key to the management of diseases of the gut such as Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and inflammatory bowel disease.  We need guts that are inflammation free for our general health.  The gut is our largest mucosal lining and it acts to let essential things into our body and keep toxins out.  This is why it is classed as part of our immune system.  When the gut is inflamed, it has a harder job distinguishing between what it needs to let through into the bloodstream and what it needs to keep out.  Small food particles can leak through the gut wall if it is inflamed, a condition known as leaky gut.  If food particles enter the bloodstream, it triggers an immune system response.  Part of the body’s immune system response is to create further inflammation so that our body is a more hostile environment for those little microscopic food particle intruders.  Unfortunately, that internal hostile environment is also self-sabotaging as it becomes hostile to some of our own tissues and we can develop autoimmune diseases which knock out the functions of essential systems of our own bodies, hence the ‘auto’.  Studies have documented autoimmune diseases that have arisen from leaky gut.  Glycine is linked to repair and maintenance of the tight junctures we need in our intestines.   

One thing bone broth powder offers that collagen doesn’t is macrominerals.  These are minerals that our bodies need in relatively large amounts everyday to keep such vitals as our electrical impulses going.  Not only does bone broth powder offer the macrominerals potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, chloride and sodium, the bonus is that it offers them in electrolyte form.  This means that each molecule of these minerals is either positively or negatively charged at electron level and so they are much more likely to be readily absorbed by your body.  Phosphorous is involved in the calcification of bones, 85% of our body’s phosphorous being in our skeleton, but we also need it in soft tissues to metabolise carbohydrates, fats and proteins.  Phosphate ions also play an important role in the body’s acid base balance.  You’ll also find magnesium in bones and muscles and it is essential for the functioning of many enzyme systems and for neuromuscular transmission.  Stabilising nerve function, maintaining bone structure, metabolising energy, muscular activity, enzyme activation and osmotic pressure maintenance are all partly under magnesium’s governance.  Chloride will help you regulate the amount of fluid and types of nutrients going in and out of cells and it helps to maintain proper PH levels, alongside stimulating the stomach acids needed for digestion, stimulating the action of nerve and muscle cells and facilitating the flow of oxygen and carbon dioxide within the cells.  Sodium plays its roles in helping maintain normal blood pressure, supporting the work of nerves and muscles and regulating the body’s fluid balance.  Potassium will help regulate fluids, support nerve signals and muscle contractions.  All in all, they’re a busy bunch helping to keep you thriving and those electrical impulses triggering!  Tracking these macronutrients across your diet, especially when you are up against it and busy, can be tricky.