The Amazing Benefits of Collagen & How Much You Need with JJ Virgin

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Often, oh my gosh, I need to take my calcium for my bones. You know what you need to do for your bones? You need to take collagen. What have you got to lose? Like, only thing you've got to lose here is stiff and ache joints. Hello.

Here'S JJ Virgin, triple board certified nutrition and fitness expert and four time New York Times best selling author. It's time to reignite wellness.

Hey, hey, hey, it's jj. Super excited to be talking collagen with you today because, oh my gosh, we have been getting so many questions about it. So we are going to talk about collagen. Should you be taking collagen? Do you get enough from your diet? How do you know if you need it? Which type should you take? Yep, we're answering all of those questions today. We actually wrote a blog about it which we will link to in the show notes@jjburgin.com collagen so that you can refer to that as well because you've probably seen collagen popping up in the grocery stores, health food stores, all over the place. So let's dive in and know exactly what we should do with it. Alrighty. But before we dive in, I want to do a shout out to this week's reviewer every episode. Actually, I shouldn't say this week because we have multiple shows every week, as you know. What we do here on the JJ Virgin lifestyle show is I do an episode with an awesome cool guest, an episode solo with me, and then a Friday Q and A. So if you've got a question, be sure to leave it either on one of my social media platforms and that's either JJ Virgin on Instagram or JJ Virgin official on Facebook or you can leave it in the comments. So if you're leaving a review, then you can do it there. And easy to leave a review. Just go to subscribe to jj. Subscribe for the show and while you're there, leave a review. Because I love to read the reviews and shout it out. Even when the reviews are like this review, which I had to take a little gulp, take A deep breath because this one was don't get to hear too much of the guests. 2 star review by Chris Chris 214 from the USA and said I found this podcast and was pretty excited because there were some great guests. Unfortunately you don't get to hear too much of their opinions and research. This seems like a one size fits all approach which never works. In her episode with Natalie Jill, when Natalie said she ate pizza, JJ just shut her down because she thinks dairy doesn't work for anyone. She recommends fasting, which is great for men but terrible for women's hormones. All right, I want to respond to this not in a defensive way, but because there's some things here that actually are not how I believe at all. And then ask you Chris Chris214 first of all, thank you for taking the time to write this and give it a shot again and listen to a couple of the other ones with the guests because I do have some amazing guests. So first off, I wrote the Virgin Diet as a way for you to become your own personal health detective so that you could figure out which foods work for you and which foods don't. And so that's what I teach people to do to go through to see if they should eat dairy or not. It really depends on how they react to it. And what we'll do in the show notes is we'll put down the link to the free seven day challenge I have that gets you started in that and it's so it's easy enough to do. Again, the show notes will be at jjvirgin.com forward/collagen. So it's not that I don't think dairy doesn't work for anyone. I think that we should all go through. I believe everyone should do an elimination diet. I do and I'm going to be strong about that. And I find most people do better without gluten and dairy do all no gluten I'm really not much of a fan of, but I don't know for some if it's the gluten or the glyphosate, but. But not for everybody. So that's why you go through yourself, which then allows you to connect the dots between what you're eating and how you feel so you can make an informed decision. There you go. Now, as far as fasting, she said here she recommends fasting, which is great for men but terrible for women's hormones. Actually, I don't feel that way. I recommend fasting in a process. So what I teach people to do first is to go through the process of first detoxifying. First improve the quality of your diet, then detoxify and get those detox nutrients on board. Get your detox pathways working, because before you ever try to lose any kind of body fat, you want to make sure that you're able to detoxify the toxins that are being released. Then figure out your food intolerances, figure out if you should eat dairy or not. Then become metabolically flexible through the sugar impact diet. And that's where you can start to put in fasting and intermittent fasting. I'm a big fan of time restricted feeding, so eating from a shorter window. I start people with 12 hours and get the snacking out and then I try to shorten that window to 12 hours, 10 hours, 8 hours, and with some people, a 20 to 24 hour fast. Now, is that for everybody? No, because fasting, if you've got things, issues with adrenal health would be problematic. So some people, yes, some people know time restricted feeding. Most people, this is a really good idea because it triggers something called autophagy. And autophagy is basically like your body scavenging out the bad damaged cells and getting them gone. All right, there you go. So again, thank you for that. And I did have to take a little bit of a deep breath, but I want to hear all these comments because if there's something I can do better, I'm always looking to uplevel and improve and I want to make sure I'm serving you all at the highest level. All right, now I found another one of my favorites that can help serve you at the highest level. So check this out and I'll be back.

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Alrighty, here we go. So let's talk collagen. First off, grabbing my green iced tea here. Hold one moment. First off, let's look at what collagen is. So, it is the most common form of protein in your body. It's in your skin, your hair, your nails, your bones, your ligaments, tendons, muscle tissue. It's even in your arteries. And it's commonly referred to as the glue that holds your body together like the walls of a building. 75% of the protein in your skin is made up of collagen. So a deficiency often shows up, most noticeably as facial wrinkles. Now, collagen decreases as you age, and decreases in your collagen levels can also lead to joint pain and an increased likelihood of soft tissue injuries. So when you hear all that, you can tell that you're probably going to want to get a bunch of it in your diet. So how much, how much collagen do you really need? Well, okay, first off, everyone needs it, but there's times and circumstances that may mean you need more. First off, signs of aging. So if you're getting wrinkles or age, spots kick up the collagen. So as soon as we reach the age of 20, our collagen production begins to decrease by about 1% each year. So that means by the age of 45, you've had a 25% collagen loss. So after age 20, and I, you know, I'm like going, where was all this information when I was 20? Come on. But after the age 20 of 20, adding 5 grams of collagen daily Is a great way to maintain optimal collagen levels. And if you're starting to notice little saggy, a little wrinkles, you know, not on my watch, if I can help it. Let's just add 10 grams or more per day to smooth out wrinkles and sagging and that can actually start to help. It's like, don't feel like, oh my gosh, I got wrinkles and sagging. It's over. Ank. Nope. Can turn, start to turn this around with collagen, so that's exciting. All right, how about for joint stiffness and loss of mobility? So, you know, when you think about stiff and achy joints, they're typically dismissed as signs of aging, but they can also often be improved by adding collagen. And what I look at there is like, what have you got to lose? Like, only thing you've got to lose here is stiff and achy joints. Hello. So one of the things that happens as you start to lose collagen is you also can have the breakdown of cartilage that you need to protect your joints. And when you lose that cartilage cushion, you can have chronic pain, osteoarthritis, and inflammation. I know that personally and I can tell you because When I was 17, I had a bad pointe ballet accident. Now, this is ridiculous anyway because I am 6ft tall. Have you ever seen a 64 point ballerina? No, because there's no one for them to dance with. So this was a dumb thing for me to be doing anyway, But I really loved it. And I had a bad ACL injury from a pirouette gone wrong and I blew out my knee and I basically had multiple surgeries and ended up with no cartilage. And boy, does that hurt. So I ended up with massive osteoarthritis, a collapsed joint, and a knee replacement just after 50. And the doctors were amazed I managed to hold it together that long. But it does cause chronic pain and inflammation. Not fun at all. Now, if you supplement with collagen, which, by the way, I did for years now, I didn't have anything that it could like, help with because there was no cushion left. So that was problematic. But if you, if you are not in that situation, you're better off. Supplementing with collagen can help address these issues because it triggers your body to repair the structure of your joints. And studies show that increasing your collagen intake can actually improve mobility. So if you want to get the joint repair benefits of collagen, you're going to want to add 10 grams or more per day. By the way, I know I'm citing some studies here. We will have these in the show notes as well. Again, jjvirgin.com collagen. So how about for osteoporosis? And I mean, you know, I look at osteoporosis, this is a massively scary thing because, you know, osteoporosis or basically bone loss, brittle bones, very scary situation. And what we want to do is we want to live long, awesome, high quality lives and then one day go out like a light bulb, right? So you want to have strong bones the whole way through. So if you've got any kind of bone loss going on or brittle bones, you're going to need more collagen. 90 to 95% of your bone mass is made up of collagen and keeps your bones strong, flexible, and less likely to break. So more collagen in your diet has been shown to prevent bone loss and improve bone density. In fact, research shows that adding just 5 grams of collagen to your daily diet can begin to increase bone mass and decrease the rate of fractures. So that is like huge. And what's crazy is I hear so often, oh my gosh, I need to take my calcium for my bones. You know what you need to do for your bones? You take collagen. You need to take vitamin D with K, need to do fish oil, which helps with bone remodeling, and good omega 3 fats. You need to lift weights, especially over your head, to load your spine, which when you do that, forces your bones to remodel. And you need to make sure that your estrogen levels are good. So these are all key. And don't get stressed out. That's also catabolic and can break down bone and make sure that you've got good minerals on board every single day. This is not a calcium thing. This is a calcium, magnesium, potassium. You want to make sure that you've got good, good mineral balance on board and a lot of in good acid alkaline balance so you're not leaching calcium from your bones. So lots of deep green leafies. Okay. All right. Off my little osteoporosis high horse. But it always, it's always like, we need more calcium. I'm like, no, actually there's a whole bunch of stuff you want to do to keep your bones healthy. All right, how about heart health? So if you're worried about atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, you want to think about collagen here, which you probably have never really thought about, I know I hadn't. So collagen, it's interesting, has the same effect on your arteries as it does for your skin, your ligaments and your tendons. And by really strengthening it and supporting it, it prevents it from getting brittle and can prevent atherosclerosis. In fact, studies show that adding 16 grams of collagen daily for six months can help arteries regain, regain flexibility and even increase good cholesterol levels. Okay, how about muscle growth and recovery? Now, one of the big things that you want to think about as you're aging is holding on or building lean muscle mass. People talk all the time about how do I have, you know, how do I boost my metabolism. It's not that you want a fast metabolism, you want a good metabolism, you want a metabolism that can burn off fat, that's insulin sensitive and that's working well. And the single best way to start to trigger that is through muscle mass. It's the easiest way you can shift your metabolism because muscle requires more energy to be on your body. And it's one of the first places you can start to regain your insulin sensitivity, which means you're better at burning off fat. But here's the other important thing with muscle, just talking osteoporosis. Muscle is critical for both, both protecting your bones, but also helping you have strong bones. Because if you're using muscles, you're stressing your bones. If you're stressing your bones, you're helping your bones stay stronger. All right, so let's talk muscles. Up to 10% of your muscle mass is made up of collagen. So supplementing can prevent age related muscle loss and even improve muscle growth and strength. So now if you take collagen before exercise, it can help stimulate muscle growth. So it's a great addition to your pre workout coffee or smoothie. And I'm a big fan. Like if you're going to work out in the morning, have a little coffee. It's an ergogenic aid. It's going to help you work out harder and then throw a little collagen in there. You could throw a little mcts, a little collagen, and it's going to help you with more energy and it's going to help you keep build muscle. All right, next, this is super important too. When you are healing from an injury or surgery, you're going to also want to increase. In fact, one of the key things that I've done, I've had to have a couple surgeries over the last couple years and so has My son Bryce, who blew out his acl, too. Doing tricking is we always do our bone broth. My paleo shakes, that are made from bone broth, poaching, which has collagen in it, and then I spike it with more collagen. So we always do that when we're healing. Anyone telling me that they're having any kind of surgery, that's what I do. I help them with that. All right, next up. Oh, this is a good one, too. Here's a study that shows that an additional 5 grams of collagen daily can improve muscle mass and strength noticeably over 12 weeks, especially with regular exercise. So, and that's important, too, because people like, collagen is not exercise in a bottle. Right. You want to make sure that you're working out. Plus working out in terms of what it can do for your gut. Microbiome for your brain function, for insulin sensitivity, for your mood. Oh, my gosh. If that was a drug, it would be the most prescribed drug on the planet. Okay, now let's talk gut. Okay, so the deal is collagen contains amino acids that heal and smooth the lining of your digestive tract. So that can protect you from leaky gut syndrome. And that is what I wrote the virgin diet about. Leaky gut syndrome is where your gut becomes more permeable than it should be, and then protein, little molecules sneak out into circulation. They're called antigens. And your body goes, what the heck are those doing there? Thinks that they're rogue and triggers an immune response and. And triggers the release of antibodies. The antibodies grab onto the antigens now, hopefully, and they form these immune complexes. If you don't have too many, get rid of them. But if you're eating the same thing every single day, these things build up, and they start to trigger all sorts of things from inflammation, autoimmune disease, gas and bloating, joint pain, headaches, fatigue, cravings, skin problems. So super important to not to do everything you can to not have leaky gut. A strong gut lining, in fact, is proven to reduce inflammation and boost your immune system, because an estimated 70% of your immune system, your cells, are housed in your gut. There you go. Okay, so what should you do here? 10 to 15 grams of collagen, taken consistently every day can help soothe the gut and improve digestion. So. So you're probably wondering this. How do I get more collagen? Okay, first off, bone broth. Now, couple different ways you can do this. Lots of bone broths out there. I use one for my buddy, Chef Lance the flavor chef. So I keep some in my freezer. I always have a stash of bone broth in my freezer. But I also get bone broth every day because I use my bone broth shake, my paleo shake. So it's an easy way to have bone broth that's chocolate or vanilla. So there's one. So that's how I do it. And then also I take collagen powder. So that's the obviously the easy way and easy for travel too. What's cool about collagen powder is you can kind of dump it into anything, easy places, obviously to put it into your coffee, throw it into your protein shake. You can throw it into your oatmeal, but it's really kind of flavorless. Dissolves easily. So you can put it into sauces. You won't notice it. I find the easiest thing is coffee and smoothies. That's kind of my go to there. Another one that you probably haven't considered because it's not collagen, but it has glycine and proline and these are the main amino acids that make up collagen. So if you are on a plant based diet, this can be good for you is spirulina powder. Now the deal with spirulina powder, rather the deal with it is it's got this strong seaweedy flavor. So you know, you got to kind of hide it places if you don't love that, which is. I don't really love that. So you may have to just like chug it down or throw it into a soup or something. All right, now after the break, I am going to be back to show you how to put this into immediate action. See you in a minute.

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Alrighty. Welcome back. So, a couple things before I give you this action step and issue my challenge for this week. Jjvirgin.com collagen is where you're going to get the show notes. We'll put a couple fun recipes because my big takeaway is get yourself some collagen powder. And we'll also put the information for my collagen powder. Yes, I get to do a shameless Plug. It is my podcast and I do have collagen. And again, what you do want to make sure you're looking for when you're buying collagen is that it's from grass fed cows and they have not been given any hormones or GMO feed. But the easiest thing is just start to look at how you can add in if at least 5 grams. But honestly, if you're over the age of 40, I'm going to say let's get 10 to 15 grams in a day of added collagen. So if you do a scoop of mine, you're going to get in 12 and a half collagen peptides. So that gets pretty simple. You do that and throw it into your paleo shake and you're done. Or throw it into your coffee again. A great pre workout idea here is to take a scoop of collagen, whisk it with a little MCT oil and put it into your coffee. Yum, yum, yum. Makes it taste creamy and delish and you got that collagen hit. That's the perfect pre workout deal. So that's what I look for is where can you throw this in to your everyday life and just make it part of your routine? Because remember, that's what what really makes the difference. It's not what you do once, it's what you do ongoing that makes all the difference. So that's really my challenge to you is decide that you are going to just start to add collagen in and then I also want you just to kind of take stock. One of the things that we do over here on Team JJ is we are big on kind of tracking milestones. And while I think that you should weigh in every single day because the studies show that people who do that maintain their weight. Right? Because things don't get to slide too much one way or the other. If you're doing that, um, the other thing I like to do is check in with your symptoms on a weekly basis. And so as you start to add collagen in, if you've been having any kind of joint pain, if you've been having trouble putting muscle on, you know, if you've been having any issues with leaky gut, hey, let's check in there and go, how am I feeling? Am I noticing a difference? Give yourself a couple weeks on that to notice a difference. Like I'd say really give it a month. But just be aware because what I find so often is you, the absence of pain doesn't really trigger you don't go oh my gosh, my joints don't hurt. You just know when your joints do. So just pay attention to that because if you're having any of the things that I talked about earlier, let's start to see if those things start to shift, which is obviously my goal. My other goal is to be able to shout you out at the beginning of the podcast. So I would just love, love, love it if you'd leave a review. And remember, I'm going to read them all. So leave a review. Love to know what you'd love to hear about, what you're liking. If you've got anything you think I can improve on, and you can do that by going over to subscribe to jj. That's where you can subscribe, share and leave those reviews and I will see you next time. Bye.

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