Collagen 101: It's Not for Dolls

The one in which we question why any company would ignore the rest of you while selling you collagen peptides just for your skin ...

Let’s start at the very beginning.  It's a very good place to start.  

If you are becoming collagen curious, know this: collagen is not for dolls.  There are so many awesome things that collagen does in our bodies and in conjunction with our vital systems that, at WillPowders , we want to tell you about all of them, what it’s doing everywhere, and we’re so enthralled by its properties that we want to say it all at once.  We simply cannot wait for you to support your body with this essential protein and the many roles it plays in your health.  

But, we have to start somewhere in our Collagen 101 blog series, so let’s start here:  note carefully, not all companies that sell collagen supplements treat you as a whole person.  That’s right, they ignore the fact you have eleven vital systems, all interconnected.  In fact, if you listen carefully to some collagen supplement brands, you can hear the faint hum of, Well, hello Dolly!  Don’t patronise us, other companies, we’re not dolls so stop talking to us as if we are. 

Supporting collagen’s ‘glue of life’ qualities is one of the fundamental elements to our ethos of inside out fortification for your health.  With our bovine collagen peptides, amongst our other fundamentals*, we help you nourish.   We tried to begin our 101 for collagen beginners simply but initial forays down singular avenues of one virtue of collagen at a time always ended up leading to the colossal cathedral of worship to all things we adore about collagen.  That’s because of those eleven vital systems that make up us humans and their utter interdependence, with collagen playing a key factor in all.  

Yup, it’s a prevalent protein in the human body, accounting for around a third of all the protein bits of you.  Although trying to single out individual plus points for supporting the collagen in your body is no bad thing, we believe it is helpful to take both the newly collagen curious and our WillPowders  old guard by the hand and say, we’ve got you; the whole of you!  Why? Because the collagen supplement industry can be one that divides a handful of particulars about you off and speaks only to them - you know the sort of thing, it’s a bit like when women experience someone talking solely to their boobs.  Annoying!

It’s precisely to get away from that divide and conquer attitude that we bang the drum for hydrolysed bovine collagen peptides.  Yes, the WillPowders  drum skin is firmly Swiss, grass-fed cow hide!  Swiss-swoo! And, yes, it does have prestigious, award-winning status!  To get you up to speed, we’ll give you the whistle stop tour of why, when it comes to collagen, the WillPowders tribe is all things bovine:

• Grass fed cows have the best natural diet possible for a cow (lucky moos!)
• Swiss herds are tended at a high welfare point
• Unfortunately, the native collagen proteins in their hides are too big to be absorbed by our gut, however, … 
• … luckily, to make it bioavailable to you, we process the native collagen into smaller collagen chains - known as collagen peptides - and amino acids which are the building blocks of protein
• And your intelligent body will absorb these peptides and amino acids to produce your collagen
• Hydrolysed bovine collagen peptides mean it is possible to supplement for both Type I and Type III collagen which is great news because …
• Collagen Types I and III are typically co-located in tissues, including skin, but also the heart, bowel and bladder, and our other vital organs, for strength, stretch and repair
• The body needs Type I and III collagen in the most abundance throughout its vital systems

A quick Google search won’t readily tell you those last two facts.  They do take a little patience to find, a bit like having to swirl through the grit to pan for gold.  You’ll readily be able to find out that Type I collagen is the most abundant in the body.  It is.  But allow us a little collagen 101 teaser question: why would anyone want to limit themselves to just Type I collagen if you can also support the second most abundant collagen - Type III? They are co-located meaning that, if we focus on skin for a moment, ‘bovine collagen may be especially useful for reducing wrinkles, promoting elasticity and increasing skin structure’, according to Dr. Cheri Bantilan of Healthline.  If you want to support your collagen, not supporting both types makes no sense at all.  Once you let land the fact that these two collagen types are typically co-located throughout your body, not just your skin, you too will begin to raise at least a quizzical eyebrow about certain sectors of the collagen industry that push the benefits of Type I alone.  

Yes, in some parts of the collagen industry, you’d be forgiven for thinking that collagen Type I is for one thing and one thing only: to help you look good and that Type III just isn’t relevant at all.  We know because we did the dip test for you here in our 'Come on, Barbie, Let’s Go Research' blog.

Since Type I and Type III collagen are typically co-located in your body, in skin, yes, but also, maybe more importantly, in vital organs, of course you would choose to supplement with a product which supports your collagen more comprehensively.  Of course you would choose the most efficient and bioavailable way to do this for your body and your buck.   The road to that end is bovine collagen peptides.

But, in one click, it’s easy to be corralled into a collagen cul-de-sac

There you were, admirably trying to support your health by asking what collagen can comprehensively do for you, and, yet, somehow, you find yourself encouraged to solely focus on Type I for, as women, skin, hair and nails or muscle mass and brawn for the boys.  Hmmmm!  Something soon begins to smell a little bit fishy.    

It’s not that these aspects of vitality don’t matter to us at WillPowders .  They do,  although we might be less inclined to separate the goats from the sheep, because, let’s face it, great skin looks great on any gender and muscle mass is a key to vitality for all, regardless of what you were assigned with at birth in your no-no square.  Although, we are mindful of the fact that, historically, women’s health in the sectors of medicine, pharma- and nutrition have led us down not so helpful paths - how many of us are still aiming for low fat or consuming vegetable oils that do not support, and in lots of cases are detrimental to, our brain and physical health?  This misstepping is also echoing through some parts of the collagen industry.  We agree that the near holy triple of skin-hair-nails  and the salubrious M-squared of muscle mass are, for many, enmeshed with feelings of self-esteem and self-care at this point in human history and both are part of good mental, as well as physical, health.  Let’s face it, time has changed things for the better, it used to be that having facial skin covered in white lead paint was considered de rigueur for the self-respecting!

But reading the top results for ‘collagen’ placed us in a slough of despond.  Not, mind you, about the gifts that collagen gives to our outsides because there’s abundant clinical evidence we can gain entry to the illustrious members clubs of skin hydration and elasticity, increased hair strength and less hair fall and nail strength and growth, if we give our bodies the building blocks of collagen.  No, our despondency revolved around the fact that, in the wider collagen industry, there is a wellness subtext at play that is very reductive of human beings and what health is.  This subtext encourages us to concentrate on our worth as merely skin deep and looks related.  That subtext we don’t much care for.  It’s a subtext which screams:  boys be brawn and girls, er … you can be, well, beauty!   To which patronisation WillPowders  say, with our tongues firmly in our cheeks, gee, thanks!  Do we really want to engage with companies who only engage with the health of our armoury?  And, even then, sell us the idea that our armoury is purely Type I collagen?

If the Barbie movie taught us anything, it reminded us to break out of the straight jackets of externally imposed expectations surrounding what and who we should be.  Should be language always has someone else’s finger wagging agenda attached.  Instead, we were gently reminded to start to live in every single one of our vital systems with more reverence for ourselves.  

In a pop culture changing moment, men re-learned, muscles or no muscles, horse or no horse, grrrr or no grrrr, the state of Kenoughness.  Women reacquainted themselves with two tender ideas:  firstly, to be a real 21st century human woman can be frazzling for our minds and bodies and, maybe more importantly, the sum of our insides as well as our outsides matter.  

Find me someone who didn’t have a tear in their eye when, at the end of the film, Barbie was dropped off for her first gynae exam, finally able to embrace and cherish an inside as well as an outside.   Exactly!  None of us are dolls made up of cookie cutter bodies with luscious long lashes, preened princess hair, smooth synthetic skin and moulded muscles, yet absolutely hollow voids inside.   Yes, hair, skin, nails and muscle mass are part of our power, presence and prestige in the world and tending to them has its role in health but they are not all that we have or all that we are.  There’s a heck of a lot else going on where collagen is concerned that’s keeping us alive!

However, as absolute collagen rookies, where other collagen companies are involved, one might be forgiven for imagining we should attend to merely the sum of our shells when many collagen brands treat us like Action Man, Sindy or, worse still, Malibu Mermaid Barbie (yes, we’re looking at you, marine collagen)!  

If a collagen peptide brand is not helping you understand wellness for the whole of you, given that your life partly depends on collagen for all its vital systems, its their very connectedness, then their focus belongs to an outdated paradigm of worthy wellness which encourages you to narrow your focus and signals that you are only worthy of attention in terms of how you look.  Over time, this becomes an activity of papering over the cracks as chronological time naturally depletes us.  

At WillPowders , we don’t ever blinker ourselves or you in this way.  We support and cherish from the inside out.  We start there and invite you to start there too, after all, gut and organ health, which could be supported by our Hydrolysed Bovine Collagen Peptides, leads to brighter skin as well. 

We’ve also made doubly sure the cows that bring you the collagen peptides are well looked after too - those grass-fed, free roaming, Swiss bevy of bovine beauties - because that’s who we are.  The only Dolly in our herd is one very happy cow!

All in all, you might say, the sole thing we need you to ‘doll up’ for at WillPowders is a marriage made in nourishment nirvana.  

Don’t just take our word for it.  Take a look at our dip test research as our Collagen 101 blog series continues with Come on, Barbie, Let’s Go Research and Ken and Allan Can Come Too.