Consuming collagen, whether that is through supplements e.g. collagen peptides or naturally through food such as bone broths, chicken, fish and egg whites will provide your body with the nutrition and sustenance it needs to maintain and recover itself.
By maintaining and recovering, it will last longer and be able operate for longer which impacts your quality of life.
Why should we take collagen?
Whilst your body can create its own collagen, the amount and quality is entirely dependent on your diet and lifestyle needs. When you can’t get your daily intake of vitamins and nutrients from your usual diet, that is when you can consider supplementing.
Supplementing collagen just adds another pool of resource that your body can rely on when it comes to maintenance and recovery.
And, as we know, the body’s natural ability to create collagen decreases over time, so if the primary supply of collagen decreases, a secondary supply needs to be created to top it up so that you can maintain a certain quality of life.
Collagen benefits for women
Whilst collagen benefits are universal, applicable to young, old, as well as men and women it is understandable that different genders look for different benefits.
As always it is important to take the right type of collagen for your goals and needs. Please read about the different types of collagen in the body and the roles they play and the quantity of each type.
This will also help you decide the daily amount and source of your collagen intake.
Nail Health
Nails are made up of a protein called keratin and collagen Types 1 and 3 specifically are essential in helping with the creation of the keratin protein in your body. The result of daily collagen intake would include stronger, healthier and more supple nails as well as better nail growth.
Hair Health
Just like nails, hair is also made up of keratin. By supplementing collagen into the body, not only does it help with keratin production, it promotes hair growth, delays the graying of hair and acts as an antioxidant, repairing damaged hair follicles. By doing so, collagen can help with hair that is thinning as well as excessive hair loss. Overall, collagen can help hair look healthy as well as feel healthy.
Skin Health
Collagen is well known with helping improve the skin health of women and men. Collagen essentially maintains the hydration and elasticity of the skin, and these are one of few noticeable improvements you can measure when you first take collagen.
By improving skin hydration, blood flow and elasticity, collagen helps fight dryness as well as sagging and wrinkly skin. The resulting effect is skin with more volume and plumpness as well as better texture and tone.
Wound healing
Taking collagen can be effective in speeding up the recovery time of your wound, spot or scar. It is an area that has been widely researched mainly because a wound is damage to your tissues and collagen directly helps with tissue regeneration and repair.
With collagen accounting for 30% of the protein in the body it is not surprising the role it plays.
Now when you have damage to your skin, your body needs additional collagen to help repair it. Supplementing collagen would be recommended here, especially as you age and your collagen production decreases.
