The #1 Secret to Restoring Your Heart, Joints & Gut

What does collagen do? Collagen isn’t just about skin health. Discover why collagen is vital for your heart, gut, joints, arteries, and overall health. Find out what collagen deficiency really does to your body and the best ways to improve your intake.

Collagen is not about your skin. So many people associate collagen with beauty supplements. That is actually the lowest thing on the list as far as what it can do for you. Let me reveal what collagen really does in your body, and it’s going to blow your mind. It’s absolutely true that as we age, your collagen goes down.

We don’t get enough collagen. The low amount of collagen shows up on our skin as wrinkles, but it also shows up in our gut, in our arteries, and our gums, and our organs. It has to do with something called ancestral mismatch. I mean, even just 50 years ago, people ate differently than they eat now, and we will move a really key structural protein out of our diet, and this is called collagen. First of all, if we look at protein in your body, you might think muscles.

But protein also involves tendons, ligaments, fascia, which is your biological wet suit that actually holds everything together. But out of all the protein that you have in your body, 30% of it’s collagen, but we only consume a very small part of that collagen. Now, our body does make some collagen, but we’re usually in the deficit. Let’s first talk about the chalk effect with your bones. I know typically people think bones, calcium.

If you have bone loss, it’s really about calcium. Not true at all. 1/3 of your bones are collagen. That’s right. So yes, calcium is involved, okay?

But collagen actually helps prevent fractures. And so, it’s not just about calcium. Another very important biological function is your heartbeat, and I’m talking about your heart valves. Every single day, your heart opens and closes 100,000 times. And also, something called mitral valve prolapse is actually very, very common as well.

One in 40 people have a mitral valve prolapse, and this has everything to do with a floppy valve that’s not closing correctly. And then also aneurysms, that’s a problem of collagen. All right, let’s go to number three, your gut wall lining. Every 3 days, that very thin single cell wall in your gut replaces itself with, guess what? Collagen.

Collagen is the building block for your gut lining. If you have a leaky gut, I’m going to show you the best way to fix it. I want to first talk about scurvy. It’s what a lack of vitamin C does to your connective tissue, your collagen. Because without vitamin C, collagen falls apart in the body.

So, when sailors would get scurvy, and their teeth would naturally fall out because the collagen their gums couldn’t hold the teeth into their skull. So, in reality, it was the collagen weakness behind the vitamin C deficiency. They found also that the sailors that had scurvy, if they had old scars, the old scars would suddenly tear open. So, these are some really important biological effects of collagen, but I wanted to just touch on something called triage. When the body runs low on collagen, it triages the collagen.

It will direct the collagen to only the essential most important tissues that need it. And in your case, it’s going to be the red blood cells, the heme. And so, the body considers this important because without oxygen, you don’t survive. You don’t live very long. Also, DNA is made out of collagen.

So, if the body’s deficient, it’s going to give that collagen to the red blood cell and your DNA, the blueprints of the cell, which is important because without the blueprints, you can’t reproduce cells. Now, the joints are kind of considered less important and your gums. So, this is why people will feel it most in the joints, maybe in the tendons, the ligaments, the cartilage, the gums, the skin, the hair, the nails all go downhill because those are not as important as other things. But, we do need to acknowledge why people are deficient in collagen. They’re living on boneless, skinless chicken breast.

They’re consuming lean, tender meat. When something is tender, it has less collagen. If your environment is off, everything else struggles. It’s like a fish tank. Pollute the water and the fish gets sick.

You could feed them the best food. You can treat every single symptom, but if the water stays toxic, nothing recovers. The body runs on 10 signals like insulin, cortisol, inflammation, sleep quality, gut function. Every one of them affects how you feel. But, there is always one signal that is more broken than the rest.

And until you fix that one, everything else stays stuck. I built a free 2-minute quiz that finds it for you. It tells you which one of the main signals is holding your body back right now. Click the link in the description, take the quiz, and stop guessing. A lot of the collagen is in the skin, especially number two, marine collagen.

So, it’s really important, especially if you buy sardines, to get them with the skin and the bones because the collagen’s going to be in the bones, the skin, the head, and of course, the eyes. But, typically, if you look at marine collagen, you get a little better absorption than animal like beef collagen. And then, also, when you consume shellfish, oysters especially, are loaded with copper. Copper is very important in making collagen really, really strong. Think about copper as like the steel rebar that keeps the collagen from cracking open.

As another side note, out of all the things that are missing, the trace minerals are at the top of the list. So, in other words, we’re growing a lot of food without the full spectrum of all the trace minerals. And this is why it’s important to consume things from the ocean. So, a lot of people ask me, what supplements do I recommend? Now, of course, I’m not biased with my own high-quality supplement line, but if you go to Amazon and type Dr.

Berg supplements, you’ll find more information. I also want to mention the before caramelization. There’s a certain biological thing that happens, it’s called glycation. You’re basically destroying the protein, the collagen structure when you do that. Now, think about what tissues it’s going to destroy.

The lens of the eye, the protein in your kidneys. So, when we eat a lot of sugar, everything gets really brittle and stiff in the body, including your arteries, because your arteries are made out of collagen. And I also want to just bring up and refine stress, high levels of cortisol, with a lack of sleep will also destroy and age your collagen. Okay, so how do we fix all this? Start consuming the skin on the chicken and the fish.

Consume less tender meats and have more grass-fed, grass-finished meats that have more collagen in there, but you might need to cook them longer. This is why it’s so important to eat nose to tail and cook different meats that are maybe tougher that then you can have as a roast, and then, you know, put that in the fridge and consume that several days in a row. My wife and I do that on a regular basis. Don’t forget about vitamin C to help collagen work in your body, like lemons, berries, bell peppers, leafy greens have vitamin C. If you’re doing a collagen powder, make sure it comes with vitamin C as well.

Definitely go low-carb, super important. And also, the timing of when you take collagen could actually benefit you, too. So, if you’re going to work out and if you consume 10 to 15 g of collagen 45 to 60 minutes before a workout, you would actually see a little more benefit with that collagen going to the body and helping to repair the damage. Because exercise is a stress, it’s damage, and it causes your body to adapt and get stronger. Also, one other tip, you can put your collagen in your coffee and get the benefit of that collagen to help heal the gut because it’s on an empty stomach and you have these amino acids, especially glycine, in the collagen that dissolves