Bumps, Scrapes, Super-Stimuli and Stress

Collagen 101: Can kids take collagen? The one in which we explore why they should and how the stressors of our children’s lives affect their collagen production and so their growth and repair - it’s the collagen for kids edit.

And besides, they need to learn risk taking and resilience, even though we might have our hearts in our mouths for a good proportion of their childhood.   I mean, who hasn’t held their breath when mi’laddo or her ladyship decides to start climbing trees or there’s an impromptu trip to the local skate park?  Of course they get bumped and scraped by life, physically and we pick ‘em up and patch ‘em.  But, at WillPowders, we think it’s worth taking a little time out from the busy-ness of regular childhood and considering whether the range of physical stressors our little darlings encounter are also being compounded by mental stressors.  Might our children be caught in a loop of one stress impacting on another, compromising their collagen production (it is)?   

The mental stressors our children are now under, often when we hand them over to the classroom and, as they grow, the world of social media, are unprecedented in the history of childhood.  Plus, there’s that thought that needles away at the back of our minds that maybe the way we’ve structured our own adult lives is overwhelming for our children.   They’re out of bed and in the car before their tummies have even realised they’re up and they can be out of our sight, the very people who champion them the most, for, sometimes, eleven hours.  When we pick them back up we have to sift through their day when we barely have any words left because we’re so tired that we are trying not to just sit in a corner rocking and dribbling.  

But, of course, every kid adores a good scab and quite rightly so - they are the fascinating Hallowe’en type creations of Mumma Nature with a good dose of collagen thrown in for special FX!  For kids (and maybe some of us parents too - Scab Pickers Anonymous, anyone?) there’s nothing better than working your fingernail under that edge, just to have a look-see, mind you.  But we all know what happens next.  Before long, there’s blood seeping out of our little darlings again and their wound repair mechanisms are working overtime.  Collagen is supportive in a bit of wound healing.  Type III collagen starts the whole healing shebang off and then Type I gets a turn.  That’s one of the reasons why we plump for the cleanest Swiss collagen which has both collagen peptide types at your healing service.  Moo-ha!  Even when a cut or graze is visibly healed, the process of collagen remodelling ‘continues for months after wound closure’ which is why we say slip a some of our WillPowders Bovine Collagen Peptides into their baked beans on sourdough toast (although they will happily and tastelessly disappear into any old liquid, hot or cold) daily as collagen continues to increase ‘the tensile strength of the repaired tissue [...] to about 80–85% of normal tissue if all processes proceed without any perturbations’ [*].  Essentially, everything will be well again but try not to pick, kiddiewinkles, because that’s perturbation!  

Breaking a bone is physically stressful - the shock and pain of the injury, the trauma of sitting in A&E along with the broken and bruised, and then being put through a series of x-ray positions that may well have really hurt, being patched up in a cast and then, within what seems like minutes, school demanding their attendance and pressuring you with a series of statistics about Little Charlie’s presence in school.  Before they know it, they’re back on the merry-go-round before they’ve had a moment to process what the heck happened to them.  Alas, teaching our children deep rest seems to be an anathema to the current education system when it comes to healing. #sadfaceemoji 

So, alongside the physical trauma, inside, there might be some residual hypervigilance that the world isn’t quite the safe place they once thought it was.  Stress produces cortisol which itself crushes the body’s ability to produce collagen.  Collagen Type III is needed in increased quantities to help repair broken bones.  It seems that Collagen Type III may be key in determining a cell’s fate (as in a rush of cells that end up mending that fracture in this case) but, honestly, this is one for the body to know (as it surely does - it’s been healing bones like a boss forever) and scientists to work out, because even they admit that understanding how a cell’s fate is determined is complex and plenty of what’s going on is still to be discovered [*].  However, those boffins do know that Type III collagen increases during the healing period for a broken bone so, we say, if they have a fracture and they’re not already on collagen supplements, it might be a good time to bung them some.  Let’s make it easy on their little bodies and give them the nuts and bolts in collagen peptide terms to meet the demands of increased Type III collagen’s role in bone healing.

Of course, they’re going to need energy to execute that perfect tennis rally, but carbs will not repair muscles.  For that, you need amino acids because athletic children and little live wires have greater stressors on their growth and repair.  Those hulking teens that we’ve raised, who’ve already spent a good few years bouncing around on their joints and are beginning to perfect a sport in which they are becoming elite for their age, might gain support from supplementing with collagen as it has been shown to provide a range of benefits including reducing joint pain, improving joint functionality and increasing pain-free time to exertion and collagen synthesis.  Additionally, taking collagen one hour prior to exercise may aid in reducing functional joint pain and improving muscle recovery [*].  

Alongside the collagen boost, given that your teen might well be beginning to eye up protein powders (and we do a fabulously clean range here, you might want to suggest good, clean collagen supplementation as well as, or instead.  Bung them some Vitamin C to help them soak up that collagen, or slip the taste and odour free powders into those isotonics that they are so fond of while pointing out that they’d be better off with a delicious WillPowders ElectroTide that is sugar free.  Because, there’s no greater satisfaction than showing them you know more about fitness than the ‘carpet-carrying’ gym bunnies your teen is increasingly enamoured by at the gym!