Let's Fascia the Facts!

The one in which we explore the connective tissue that holds you together and its possible relationship to the amino acids you consume.   

There's plenty collagen in your body. There are lots of different types of it too. Supplementation of two types of collagen could be possible through introducing bovine collagen peptides into your diet. Type I collagen is typically found in skin. Type III collagen is typically found in hollow organs of the body. Often the two types of collagen are found co-located in the body. Hollow organs are structures like blood vessels, the gut and uterus. 

Lots of people supplement with collagen peptides as it could support skin, hair and nails. But, is that fundamentally all it’s good for? If we are looking at supporting what is inside, as well as outside, than it is useful to note that collagen supports gut health, bones and muscles.

But, there are other structures in the body that are made from our body's own collagen and knowing more about those structures might just persuade us what amazing beings we really are.

While we do love science at WillPowders, we also realise that, as a discipline in the past, science has overlooked some rudimentaries that were right under its nose.  Take, for example, the fact that for a long time science insisted on separating out and dissecting parts of the body separately from observing the living whole.  Maybe this is why much of the marine collagen industry directs your focus to the epidermis, your outermost layer of skin, rather than the foundational factors which lie beneath?   When it comes to collagen, we prefer to understand human beings as whole beings, rather than a sum of parts.    

The eighteenth century gave birth to the surgeon Sir Erasmus Wilson.   Don’t say we don’t bring the history!  Wilson is also widely understood to be the first dermatologist.  This placed him in an ideal position to observe the link between the skin and its connection to all other tissues in the body.  Just like we WillPowderers, Wilson realised that the skin did not exist in isolation from the body as a whole.  He paid attention to the white flexible tissue that, beneath the epidermis, surrounded muscles and, deeper into the body, also surrounded organs and bone, keeping these tissues in place and connected to each other.   He called this white, supple tissue ‘the natural bandage’ thus firmly establishing the interconnection between everything in our body and our skin.  You could say that Wilson firmly debunked the myth that we wear a skin suit.   For him and us at WillPowders today, the skin was a natural continuum of the internal body, the seamless finish that signifies where we end and the rest of the world begins.   

During much of the history of anatomical research, this strong, stretchy connective tissue was cut off and thrown away so anatomers could study what they considered to be the real business of the body, such things as organs and muscles.  If you watch a butcher preparing cuts of meat, they’ll spend time cutting this white fibrous tissue away because it’s tough.  For a long time, scientists seemed to fail to join the dots and notice that whole swathes of the study of the human body and our accumulating knowledge about it was gained from conducting observations on dead tissues, stripped of their natural bandage, so the opportunity for optimum study of this ubiquitous interconnective material was lost.  Today this natural bandage is known to run throughout the body in one continuum and is known as the fascia.   

According to the Fascia Research Society, the ‘fascial system consists of the three-dimensional continuum of soft, collagen containing, loose and dense fibrous connective tissues that permeate the body … [it] surrounds, interweaves between, and interpenetrates all organs, muscles, bones and nerve fibres, endowing the body with a functional structure, and providing an environment that enables all body systems to operate in an integrated manner’.  Truly not just skin deep, then.   

The more you learn of the fascia, the more you will love what turns out not to be an inert piece of ‘natural bandage’ wrapping, not least because it is believed by the most cutting edge hypotheses that it may, amongst other things, operate at a quantum level, employing Einstein’s principle of Spooky Entanglement at a Distance.   Oh, how we love cutting edge science where it begins to seemingly turn to something that walks the line between relativity and the quantum world. Biology never got so good when we were at school.   We might confess to being so excited that a little bit of wee came out when we found out that each of the fascia’s cells,  ‘communicates with the other cells by sending and receiving signals; this concept is a part of quantum physics and it is known as quantum entanglement’ [*].   

None of us mere mortals at WillPowders are ready for the vastness and complexity that is quantum physics just yet (believe us, we’ve spoken to a quantum mechanic and we needed a lie down in a darkened room afterwards) so let’s understand the quantum theory surrounding the fascia through an analogy, albeit a rather clunky one.   If you’ve seen Avatar, you’ll know that the big blue couple, Jake and Neytiri of the Na'vi, plug into the wispy strands from the Tree of Souls.  Their tails, a continuation of the spine and nervous system, communicate with all other beings and sense everything that is going on for all the living things on Pandora, including the health of Pandora herself.  What happens to one individual being in the Na’vi happens to the whole as all particles are entangled.  The Na’vi have found a way to experience this outside of themselves, but our fascia operates in this way across our body within, sensing and communicating across the whole fascia as a sensory organ but also sensing information from other tissues, clusters of specialised cells that are gathered together to make bones and muscles and organs.  If you are being pummelled or palpated by the physiotherapist on the outside of your skin, then the fascia is relaying that information to the internal structures across your body and it is believed this is part of the healing process.  And we thought it was just that they were digging into our muscles to get them to relax! 

Science is seemingly on the verge of viewing the fascia in the same way it views quantum particles, that what happens in one part of the fascia affects other areas in the fascia at the same time, no matter the distance between the points.  It’s a fascinating idea that our fascia is like a connecting dark matter (except it’s white, of course) in our internal cosmos.  Homage must be paid to its biological intelligence!  

In this way, it is fast becoming a focus in the understanding of chronic pain that seemingly doesn’t have its genesis in the musculoskeletal system but in disruptions in the fascia, for example due to the deterioration of the assembly of collagen through age, injury, a sugary diet or smoking and vaping,  so that this disruption in the fascia is experienced as transferred pain in the musculoskeletal system.   Our quantum point is that a ‘physical system [like us humans] cannot be described individually [for example, by discussing just what our skin does], but only as a juxtaposition of multiple systems [all the rest of us]’.  It’s this very interconnectedness that is a watchword at WillPowders.   Phew! Not a living doll in sight!

Now, we are in no way suggesting that collagen peptide supplements will support this quantum entanglement! That is beyond our scope. However, what we do know is that the fascia comprises of our body's own collagen.

Amino acids from our diet become part of who we are. We have to consume amino acids for our health. As part of your broader diet, it is worth knowing that WillPowders' Award Winning Bovine Collagen Peptides contain glycine.

Glycine always makes one of the strands in the triple helix that is collagen in our bodies. Collagen has a rather unique proportion of glycine in its structures. Glycine could also support sleep which is when our bodies repair.

It has various states of being in its continuum - both solid and liquid as is necessary - and it provides the slip and glide that all the things in your body have over each other.   In the fascia, you’ll find collagen Types I and III. Giving your body the best chance to continue forming optimum collagen is, surely, fundamentally, a given once we understand that the fascia relies partly on Type I and III collagen.

When a company is selling you collagen for your skin, they would have you believe that, somehow, collagen has a one way ticket through a barren landscape between your gut and your epidermis and, eventually, those brave peptide travellers will come to nestle just beneath your skin, plumping it out, or in your nail beds where it will enrol itself in the manufacture of strong nails, similarly, it could cross those lands of tumbleweed you have inside, heading off to your scalp, across the vacuum of internal space to tighten things up there so that your hair is cinched in at the follicle, preventing hair fall.  

For long enough, the wellbeing industry, particularly the beauty wellbeing sector, has chopped us up into the sum of our parts (just like science did for a long time, discarding the prevalence and holistic nature of the fascia by cutting it off and throwing it away in order to subdivide the body in to parts) so that our self-image has become disjointed, so much so that when we look in the mirror, it can feel like we are being asked to assess our well-being as if it were the produce in a surreal butcher’s shop window:  Get your lovely lean muscle here!  Bulging biceps for sale.  A pound of firm flesh for you lovely ladies!  

But our bodies didn’t assemble in separate parts like an AirFix kit when we were in utero.  And, besides, if you are aiming to support fitness recovery goals, you might do well to add Brilliance Broth nutrition to your diet alongside collagen peptides.   Luckily, WillPowders support you with this too and you can peruse our delicious Protein Powder Range here. 

But let's once again step towards understanding the fascia. It seems that fascia tissue is present in an embryo at two to three weeks.  The fascial net, with its Type I and III collagen, develops first and then bone, blood, cartilage, adipose tissue, lymphatic tissue and collections of specialised cells that form organs and muscle are inserted into it.  The fascia has ‘no discontinuity in its path’ but instead its different characteristics and layers overlap.  In the order of making you, it’s not a matter of which came first, the chicken or the egg, but a matter of fascia first with all else following.  

Just look at how wondrously it operates in our adulthood, ‘The fascial continuum is the result of the evolution of the perfect synergy among different tissues, capable of supporting, dividing, penetrating and connecting all the districts of the body, from the epidermis to the bone, involving all the functions and organic structures.  The continuum constantly transmits and receives mechanometabolic information that can influence the shape and function of the entire body’.

Fascia Anatomy & Physiology - The Fascia Guide includes a modern definition of the fascia that we have drawn on here

The Awareness of the Fascial System - PMC (nih.gov) includes a discussion of the quantum nature of interconnectedness of cells and the fascia

Anatomy, Fascia - StatPearls - NCBI Bookshelf (nih.gov) includes discussion of body image and emotional disturbances linked with the fascia

Fascia Research Society for helpful understand of the fascia and the modern interpretation thereof