Collagen & Gut Health: Everything You Need To Know
The benefits of collagen for healthy hair, skin and nails has been widely known for some time.
However, more recently the buzzwords have been all about collagen and gut health, and health food products are increasingly adding collagen to their ingredients lists.
Collagen and Gut Health
Collagen and gut health might be two concepts that you’re not familiar with seeing together.
Collagen has been readily available and is well recognised for use in promoting healthy and youthful skin renewal and in maintaining strong and healthy hair and nails, but it is not yet so well known for its benefits for gut health.
Here we will demystify the connection and explain just why collagen can be so useful in promoting a healthy gut in addition to its other, better known, qualities.
Two well-known products for treating and preventing problems with digestion are gelatine and bone broth, and these have been readily available for many years for this purpose.
Recent studies have shown that collagen is the common denominator at work here.
This protein is present in the products that are already known for aiding a healthy digestion, and it is the collagen protein that is directly responsible for improvements in a variety of gut ailments including stomach ulcers, inflammation, and problems with stomach acid.
Now that this has been recognised, collagen’s use in its own right is becoming quickly more popular among gut health advocates.
What is a healthy gut?
When thinking about collagen and gut health, of course it is important first to consider: What defines gut health? And here, it’s perhaps easier to begin the discussion with examples of gut ‘ill-health’.
It may seem obvious, but equally it may be that your gut problems have become just the way things are.
However, a healthy digestive tract should produce regular, easy bowel movements. Stools that are hard to pass are clearly not ideal, and conversely neither are stools that are loose or that make the urge to go to the bathroom an urgent one.
If either of these issues are troubling you, then it’s an indication that something is not quite right with your gut health.
Why is gut health important?
First of all, for digestion in general, an unhealthy gut can have a negative impact on the rest of the digestive system.
For example, if poor gut health is causing bowel movements that are too frequent or too irregular, the levels of the healthy bacteria present in the gut can quickly be thrown off balance.
Stomach acid secretion can also be affected, which can have a negative impact on digestion of the food in the stomach or even lead to the development of stomach ulcers over time.
As well as being an obvious factor towards having a healthy digestive system, though, gut health is also important for all-round health and well-being, in a number of ways.
It might not immediately seem that some of the health and well-being issues that you may experience could be linked to gut health, but they can indeed be.
Sometimes fixing the problem with your gut, for example by improving your diet or by boosting it by taking collagen, can be enough to cure these other ills.
Skin
A poor diet or an unhealthy gut can lead to a number of skin complaints, including acne or eczema.
This can be due to partly to the lack of proper nutrients being taken in an incomplete diet or being absorbed in the unhealthy gut.
Additionally, poor gut health can trigger an immune response in the body, which can lead to those unsightly breakouts on the skin.
If you are prone to acne or eczema flares, or other skin complaints, it may be a sign that something is wrong in the gut.
It could be worth taking a good look at your diet and to consider boosting it with collagen to improve your gut health.
Mood
An imbalance in your gut health can, perhaps strangely, lead to an imbalance in your mood.
This has been recognised for some time now, but is still not fully understood or widely known.
With all of life’s stresses and deadlines, it has never been more important to look after your body in order to look after your mental well-being, and this begins with promoting good gut health.
Fatigue
Poor gut health can have a negative impact on energy levels, and people with an unhealthy gut can experience extreme exhaustion and fatigue, even if they are otherwise fit and well.
This can be caused by the same immune response that can cause skin breakouts, whereby toxins or abnormal bacteria levels in the gut can cause the body to attack itself.
It can also be caused by poor absorption of nutrients from an otherwise healthy diet, where the body is simply not receiving what it needs from what you eat.
Boosting gut health can help to promote better absorption of these nutrients and therefore banish the lethargy and fatigue that you may have been experiencing.
Irregular blood glucose levels
Poor gut health caused by diets high in sugars or carbohydrates can – perhaps obviously – lead to spikes and dips in blood glucose levels.
This can be a further cause of extreme tiredness, and can also cause sugar cravings when blood glucose is low.
In long-term and more serious cases, this can also be a factor in developing type 2 diabetes, so it is of utmost importance to keep your diet balanced and healthy, and perhaps to consider boosting your gut health with collagen.
General frequent illness
Overall poor gut health can lead to toxins in your bloodstream, which can cause the immune response already discussed as a contributing factor to fatigue and skin problems.
Regular immune responses of this kind can lead to a low immune response more generally, and this can mean that you may be more prone to picking up airborne colds and viruses that can leave you laying low for a while.
Boosting your gut health can help to promote a healthy immune system to help keep these bugs at bay.
If you are experiencing any of these health and well-being issues, and feel that your gut health may have a part to play in them, it might be time to take a look at what you are eating, including boosting your diet with collagen, and to see how you can improve your overall nutrition and boost your gut health.
Collagen and gut health
Collagen is a protein that is produced by the body. It’s used by the body in the connective tissues, which is why it is so important for healthy skin.
It is also one of the main proteins that makes up the gut lining, and this is the reason that taking a collagen supplement to boost the body’s natural production of it and to enhance a healthy diet can promote a healthy gut and digestive tract.
The body’s natural collagen production also begins to naturally decline in adults, so it can be especially helpful to boost its presence by taking a supplement when the body’s natural production slows down.
In this way, we can support our body’s ageing process and continue to promote healthy hair, skin, nails and gut – and therefore overall health and well-being.
Collagen is found in any meat, fish or bone food products, and our modern diets are not as rich in collagen as the diets of our predecessors.
Our ancestors, even until relatively recently, tended to make use of more of the animal when eating meat than we tend to now, or to use bones routinely to make soups and broths.
This is another reason why adding collagen to our diets can be beneficial, especially for vegetarians or vegans, as in an evolutionary sense we can be tending to lack the levels of collagen that previously would naturally be in our diets.
Specific ways in which collagen can help to improve gut health include strengthening the gut lining, which helps to prevent toxins from entering the bloodstream and triggering immune responses as well as helping to prevent irritable bowel syndrome. In more serious cases poor gut lining can lead to leaky gut.
Leaky gut is an ongoing and potentially serious problem that can lead to malabsorption of nutrients and chronic inflammation caused by the toxins and other particles passing into the bloodstream and triggering regular immune responses.
Over time this can lead to thyroid problems and autoimmune disease, so it is really important to try and prevent a leaky gut where possible.
Collagen supplements can help repair and strengthen the intestinal wall and prevent leaky gut as collagen contains the amino acids glycine and glutamine, which help to heal and support gut health.
Collagen solutions from Absolute Collagen
Collagen is becoming increasingly popular in the health food and beauty markets for promoting healthy skin, hair, nails and also digestive systems.
People are becoming ever more familiar with the benefits of collagen and gut health in particular, and its presence as an additional ingredient in many health food and drink products speaks for itself.
Absolute Collagen is your one-stop shop for information and testimonials about using collagen to promote a healthy gut, and our collagen supplements are tried and tested and highly rated by their users.
Contact us now for advice about collagen supplements, or visit our online shop to choose the perfect collagen product for you.
