Speaker 1 (00:00):
Collagen, it’s in powders, gummies, even your morning coffee. It promises glowing skin, smooth joints, thicker hair. But lately I’ve been seeing more and more patients spending hundreds of dollars on collagen and still wondering why they don’t notice a difference. So today, let’s pull back the curtain on the truth about collagen and what your body actually needs to look and feel younger. Now, if you’re new here, make sure to follow on your favorite podcast platform or subscribe if you’re watching this on YouTube. I share simple science backed ways to feel and look your best every week.

(00:55):
Now, don’t get me wrong, collagen itself is vital. It’s the scaffolding that holds you to together. But the real question is, does eating collagen actually help you make more of it? So here’s the problem. Collagen is the most abundant protein in your body. It really acts like rebar in your tissues, skin joints, bones, tendons, ligaments, blood vessels. Now it’s essential for the structure and strength of all of these various structures. So because it’s so important, most people assume that if you eat collagen you’ll rebuild collagen. But sadly, that’s not how biology works. So let’s start with what happens in the moment. Collagen hits your digestive system. So collagen molecules are very large groups of amino acids and they’re actually specific amino acids. These amino acids are joined together with chemical bonds. Those chemical bonds that make up the collagen molecule are much too big to be absorbed intact.

(02:15):
So you could swallow all the collagen you want to, but the collagen must be broken down into amino acids or smaller peptides during digestion to absorb them through the wall of your gut. So you do not absorb collagen. Everybody got that. You absorb the amino acids if you’re lucky the collagen was made out of. So once those amino acids are pulled through the wall of your gut, you don’t believe it or not, have a system that says, Hey, this person just swallowed collagen and now I’ve got all the building blocks of collagen. I’ll rebuild collagen Uhuh. What you see on the other side of the wall is, oh look, I’ve got a bunch of amino acids. I can use amino acids as a fuel, I can turn them into sugar and feed my mitochondria. Or I could use amino acids to make muscle or bone, or I could use amino acids to make collagen if they’re in the right proportion.

(03:31):
But there’s no system. That said, when you swallowed collagen, you should make collagen out of the collagen you swallowed. So when you drink collagen, it’s not marching straight to your skin or your joints. It’s just becoming generic protein fuel. And yet the market for collagen powders and bone broth keeps booming. So what gives, quite frankly, both bone broth and collagen powders sell because of marketing, not science. In fact, if you look at almost all of collagen scientific papers published, almost all of them are paid for by collagen supplement companies. And if we know anything about how research unfortunately is funded now funding often drives what is determined and found in a research study. I’m sorry to tell you that, but that’s the truth. In fact, if collagen really worked the way people think it works, then everybody in the 1950s and sixties, like myself and my family who ate jello two or three times a week would’ve looked like Sophia Loren and Carrie Grant.

(04:57):
And in fact, they didn’t. So what’s jello? Jello is collagen. It’s yeah, that wonderful dessert is just ground up bone broth, ground up animal ligaments, and that’s what it is. It’s just gelatin in the end, advertising drove bone broths fame, not data advertising drove collagen’s fame, not data. Besides, one of the worries I have, particularly with beef bone broth is that it contains new five gc, which is a foreign sugar molecule to our body. It’s well shown to cause not only gut inflammation, but joint inflammation, brain inflammation, and heart inflammation. Now, if you’re really not convinced of any of this and still want your bone broth or your collagen powder, safer choices are pastured chicken broth, which contains new five ac, which is the same sugar molecule humans make, or fish protein, which has new five ac. Again, the same molecule that we make now, here’s what most people never hear.

(06:22):
Your body already knows how to make collagen. If it didn’t know how to make collagen, then collagen wouldn’t be the most abundant amino acid complex in your body. So it actually just needs the right ingredients, and we know what those ingredients are. The building blocks of collagen are the amino acids, glycine, proline, lysine, and hydroxyproline. That’s it for amino acids. But here’s what’s missing. You have to have vitamin C, which is a co-factor that actually ties collagen fibers together. Now, without vitamin C, those collagen strands stay weak and broken. Everybody probably remembers how vitamin C or the effects of vitamin C was discovered. Believe it or not, sailors on long ocean voyages, half the sailors died in long ocean voyages from scurvy. Now in scurvy, they literally bled to death internally. How come? Well, the lining of your blood vessels has collagen, and again, collagen is the rebar that holds your blood vessels together, that holds you together.

(07:46):
Unfortunately, vitamin C, that rebar is constantly breaking. And vitamin C REITs that rebar. So what was happening to these people is yeah, they had plenty of collagen, but they had absolutely no vitamin C in their diet. So with that bending and breaking without vitamin C, that collagen literally fell apart and they bled to death internally, 50% of people, sailors died on ocean voyages. And an interesting naval surgeon in Britain said, you know what’s missing is these sailors aren’t getting any fresh fruit and vegetables. So I wonder what would happen if we sent them on these long voyages with limes, with citrus. And sure enough, the sailors didn’t die of scurvy. They didn’t have cracks in their mouth, they didn’t have bleeding gums. Believe it or not, after that discovery, it took a hundred years for the British Navy to start putting limes and lemons onboard ships.

(08:58):
And to this day, British sailors are called limes because of the fact that they survived because they were having vitamin C. So the important part of collagen is yeah, you’ve gotta feed collagen production by getting the right amino acids into your system. You don’t need to eat collagen to do that. You just need the right amino acids. But the bad news is that most modern diets are terrible for collagen production. Here’s why. Past generations ate collagen rich foods like gristle, like gelatin, like skin on meats. So we always had a rich source of collagen in our diet. Sadly, as all of us know now, modern diets have processed foods, boneless, skinless chicken breasts, nobody cooks a pot roast to death anymore, which dissolves all that collagen. And quite frankly, not a whole lot of people are eating jello anymore. Antibiotics have killed off our microbiome.

(10:09):
Glyphosate has damaged our gut wall. All of this leads to leaky gut. The immune system is weak and proteins go to help the immune system not building collagen, just as an example, severe calorie restriction diet. The hair falls out. It’s the same principle. So we don’t have a collagen shortage in this country. We have a gut problem. So if you have poor gut health, you’ll have less collagen production because you’ll absorb less proteins for making collagen and you’ll see faster visible aging. I’ll give you one more example. So we know that smokers have a whole lot more wrinkles than non-smokers. Let’s with that, wrinkles are caused by breaks in collagen, your smile lines, your frown lines, those are breaks in collagen. It’s usually repaired when you have enough vitamin C in your diet to do that. But smoking actually uses up all the vitamin C in smokers in attacking oxidative stress.

(11:26):
So what happens is that when you smile or frown, the collagen in your skin breaks. Now, if you have enough vitamin C that collagen can repair in smokers, however, all of their vitamin C is actually used up in handling the oxidative stress of smoking. And so there isn’t any vitamin C to repair those cracks. And that’s why smokers have so many wrinkles and such poor looking skin. So we do not manufacture vitamin C. We’re one of the few animals that don’t, and we have to obtain vitamin C from our diet. Long ago, we used to obtain so much vitamin C in our diet because we were living in the forest and getting lots of vitamin C rich foods. But most of us have very deficient vitamin Cs. So collagen powders really aren’t the answer. So if it’s not, what if, well, you could actually help your body build it naturally.

(12:33):
There are sources of collagen and collagen precursors like aged or A two dairy like Parmesan, absolutely take time to release vitamin C or chew small doses throughout the day. Bill Sarty, one of the great vitamin C researchers, who’s unfortunately uh, passed away from COVID, showed that if you chewed 500 milligrams of vitamin C four times a day, you would duplicate the needs for vitamin C uh, in your diet. Now also, you need other co-factors for making collagen work. Silica, which is sand and biotin, which is vitamin B seven, will help the collagen in hair and nails. Also, polyphenols have been shown to protect collagen from UV light and oxidative stress. So like I like to tell my people, eat your sunscreen. Think of polyphenols as your edible sunscreen, and they actually help your collagen last longer. Now here’s the piece again that most people miss.

(13:42):
Collagen health starts in the gut. If you have a healthy gut wall, your collagen will be protected in two ways. First of all, as we get older, the surface area of our gut where we can absorb amino acids, proteins that go into making collagen goes from the surface area of a tennis court to a surface area of a ping pong table. That’s why you hear, well, the older you get, if you’re over 65, you have to increase your protein because your protein needs go up. No, your protein needs don’t go up. The wall of your gut is getting smaller and smaller to absorb protein. So if you fix the wall of your gut miraculously, your protein needs do not go up. In fact, I’ve shown the opposite in my patients. Fix the gut, their protein needs go down, not up. Even older adults fix the gut.

(14:47):
The rest follows. Remember, leaky shows up as collagen breakdown. It shows up with wrinkles, joint issues, and fatigue. So what’s the answer? So the answer is if you have a healthy gut, you get healthy skin and it’s that simple. So that’s exactly why I developed phyto collagen to help your body make and protect its own collagen naturally. And it’s a great way to make collagen. So what I propose to you is a collagen reset, and it’s actually a three-part system. First of all, you wanna build a collagen. Now, I’m a big fan of plant-based aminos, and this was developed and it’s called vlog. It’s 18 collagen, pre cursing aminos, which are pre-digested and fermented, and they’re all plant-based. Let me stop for a second and make you think animals have collagen. Plants don’t have collagen. So you’re thinking, oh, I have to eat animals to get collagen because collagen is in animals and if I eat plants, I won’t have any collagen.

(16:10):
Stop for a second. And think about where all those animals got their collagen from. They were eating leaves and were grass. Your cow was not eating other cows. They made collagen from the amino acids in plants. So you can make collagen like all other animals do by eating amino acids from plants. So that’s number one. Number two, you’ve got to assemble collagen with the help of vitamin C. Now, finally, you’ve gotta have polyphenols. And in this we’ve got Beba, Elli, mackay, tart, cherry, and Juba. These polyphenols are what protect the collagen you’re making from degradation. So instead of giving you animal collagen, which most people can’t absorb directly, it gives your body everything it needs to make and keep collagen naturally. So remember, you don’t need to eat collagen to look or feel younger. You just need to make it by giving your body the right tools, focus on nourishing your gut, fueling your cells, and protecting the collagen you already have.

(17:37):
That’s the real secret to healthy skin, strong joints, and lasting vitality. So that’s all for today. Drink up question of the week. This question comes from Matt Lee Wagner over on YouTube on my episode about energy snacks. She asked, what do you think about smelling salts? I tried it once before an early morning workout, and it really helped me focus, but then I felt like I was doing something weird to my brain. Thoughts are smelling salts gut friendly or not? Well, that’s a great question. Smelling salts are basically ammonia. And if you’ve ever smelled ammonia, it makes you kind of gasp and smelling salts actually make you gasp, and it sends actually a lot of oxygen to your brain. However, the folklore surrounding smelling salts as a boost for athletic performance has been debunked, and it’s probably a placebo effect. So it’s not gonna hurt you, but it’s really not gonna improve your exercise performance. And if you like smelling ammonia well, um, good for you. Now it’s time for the review of the week. This review comes from at Keith Scott, 1, 6, 6 7 over on YouTube on my episode, about which foods to eat to stay healthy in 2026. They said, very happy to have Dr. Gundry as my doctor. He is helping me live longer, happier, and healthier. The easy. Well, well, thanks Keith. Scott, I don’t like to tell patients names, but you, uh, did yourself and happy to have you as a patient. And thanks for the shout out.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast. If you did, please share this with family and friends. You never know how one of these health tips can completely transform someone’s life when you take the time to share it with them. There’s also the Dr. Gundry Podcast YouTube channel, where we have tens of thousands of free health insights that can help you and your loved ones live a long, vital life. Let’s do this together.