Glowing skin, healthy hair and nails, and decreased
joint pain are easier to attain than we thought, thanks to an increasing
popularity of collagen supplements on the market. Why is everyone
buzzing about it? We asked the ultimate health and wellness guru Mark
Sisson, creator of Primal Kitchen and the author of two bestselling books, Primal Blueprint and The Keto Reset Diet, to give us the scoop. Below, he shares the benefits of adding a collagen supplement to your daily routine.
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Why is collagen having a moment?
In truth, it’s always been a common supplement for many purposes. These days there’s more quality research to validate collagen’s role in supporting connective tissue and promoting skin and hair health, among other basic functions.Who needs to take it?
I’d suggest that most if not all of us would benefit from some supplementation just for the unmet maintenance needs of connective tissue as well as skin and hair. Add to this the additional recovery related to heavy exercise, and you can see how athletes would require additional supplementary support. Even for those of us who aren’t professional caliber or endurance athletes, collagen is essential for the day-to-day repair involved in exercise recovery. Whether we’re runners or yoga practitioners, collagen helps keep joints, tendons and ligaments healthy to maintain the flexibility and mobility we need. Finally, supplementary collagen is an essential tool for maintaining the vibrancy of our skin and the strength of both hair and nails.Why did you decide to create a collage-based product line?
Collagen is the most abundant protein in the human
body, comprising around a quarter of your overall protein makeup and as
much as 80% of the protein in your skin alone. Not only does it keep
skin elastic and hair strong, but it’s critical for the functionality of
joints and connective tissue. Ironically, we don’t get much collagen
from a regular healthy diet. Up until the Primal Kitchen Collagen
Protein Bars, there wasn’t a ready, flavorful source of supplemental
collagen. (Supplements then were mostly unflavored gels and pills.) The
bars were launched to offer an easy, delicious delivery system for
collagen filled with real food ingredients and only 3 grams of sugar
from honey.
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What happened in your own personal experience that collagen helped correct?
A while back, I experienced significant Achilles
tendon issues after a long, hard season of Ultimate Frisbee matches. I
was told by physicians I’d be out of commission for months and that
surgery was the best course of action for what might not even be a full
recovery. In my attempt to speed recovery time, I did some research and
started supplementing with collagen. The results were pretty dramatic.
Once I added collagen to the mix, my healing kicked into overdrive
without my ever having to resort to surgery. I became a huge believer.
There are a lot of collagen supplements on the market, how does the consumer choose a good one?
Given that you’ll be taking collagen every day to
obtain the full benefits, taste becomes a huge deciding factor. Bars are
great to grab at breakfast, as a meal replacement, or as a snack
between meals. For unflavored collagen, the biggest deciding factor is
its ability to dissolve in liquid. Some dissolve better than others,
particularly if you don’t want to be limited to using them with hot
liquids. Ultimately, go with the brand that you trust the most.
What’s the secret to feeling good and staying healthy?
Everything I do is motivated by enjoyment. Sure, I
work hard in the gym to maintain my strength, flexibility, muscle mass,
and explosive power as I battle the calendar. However, I also greatly
enjoy my sessions. I never, ever overdo it to the extent of compromising
my health. My main motivation is to do the least amount of training
possible to safely enjoy the passions I love the most—Ultimate Frisbee,
stand up paddling, and snowboarding.
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What’s the most important piece of advice you’ve learned about health and fitness?
The clues to optimum health are in our evolutionary
template. The foods we ate, the movements we had to perform, the
sunlight to which we were exposed, the stressors we face (or didn’t
face)—influence our makeup today. When we act out of alignment with our
body’s innate expectations (e.g. eating processed food every day or
shortchanging sleep), our health suffers. Likewise, this model shows us
we don’t need to chronically exercise to get fit or restrict calories to
manage weight. We need to simply meet our bodies’ needs with healthy
inputs—lots of slow movement each day with lifting heavy things and
sprinting on the side each week, and the balance of macronutrients (and a
full set of micronutrients) that our bodies run best on. We make things
overly complicated and get tripped up by changing and competing
messages. In truth, the inherent formula for health is already set up
for us to follow.
