in my kitchen, around the farm

collagen & lemon curd & the pie

I’d like to propose a theory. It goes a little like this: we’re not getting enough of the precious high collagen/gelatin foods into our diets. It’s causing issues. That’s it. That’s all I wanted to say. Thanks for your attention.

Okay, maybe a bit more. Longtime readers will have heard me going on about this before, but I think it’s worth revisiting. It really is that important. We so often get bogged down in the minutia when there are bigger things we can be doing to move the needle on our health. I think how we approach the proteins in our diet is one of those things. Muscle meats are great. We need the methionine and the protein and the abundant amino acids it provides. But we also need glycine and that, my friends, is to be found, in reasonable amounts, elsewhere in the animal. Specifically, glycine is found in connective tissue like the tendons, ligaments, joints, and cartilage of animals.

Handy little diagram via Weston A. Price Foundation article, “Beyond Good and Evil”.

Powdered collagen is typically made by the rendering down of cattle hides in big vats. Those hides may have been “grass fed” (every cow on planet earth has been grass fed at some point in their lives so the term is absolutely meaningless), but they may also have been vaccinated, given synthetic hormones, finished with genetically engineered feed saturated in pesticides/herbicides, and, likely, had topical pharmaceuticals put directly on those hides to control parasites. It’s pretty standard industry practice. If you want to use powdered collagen ask the manufacturer for third party testing to ensure those things aren’t present in the finished product. But is that really where we want to get the necessary collagen from in our diets? There are much better ways.

Successful traditional diets provided muscle meats together with organ meats and gelatinous materials such as bones, gristle and other connective tissue. These combinations provided a healthy balance between the methionine found in muscle meats, the B vitamins found in organ meats, and the glycine found in connective tissue. Modern diets, by contrast, provide abundant quantities of methionine-rich muscle meats while organs and connective tissue have fallen by the wayside. The result of this imbalance is that methionine is unable to fulfill its proper cellular functions and generates toxic byproducts instead, while the supply of glycine is depleted. Together, these changes are likely to contribute to reduced longevity and chronic disease. - Chris Masterjohn

I think our population is pretty much deficient in glycine and these other critical nutrients. It’s just not something that’s widely understood. It does take concentrated effort to ensure that we’re getting enough, but it’s worth it. Soon enough, practice becomes habit and next thing we know, we couldn’t imagine any other way. That is, after all, exactly how you got to wherever you are today.

Glycine is necessary for muscle building, mental health, gut health, for the functioning of our joints, the regulation of blood sugar, sound sleep, aging with grace (yes, it’s so important for the quality of our skin), and a whole lot more. Collagen makes up 30% of your bones and is a potent neurotransmitter that plays a key role in digestion and gut motility. You can sit on PubMed for days just reading about the importance of glycine, proline, and the other precious nutrients found in these oddball foods absent in our diets or you could just start cooking.

Back in the day when bone marrow came in little crocks and was used as medicine for “children and invalids”. Imagine Pfizer doing such a thing now? We’re meant to see this as simplistic and naive. Imagine thinking chemicals are superior? We’ve been duped. p.s. I collect these so if you see one priced for dirt cheap pick it up for me, would ya? I’ll pay you back 😉

In our family, I aim to get in gelatin/collagen rich foods every day. There are a few easy ways to do this including making bone broth in batches and drinking some every day. Or, of course, making soup with it, or using it to braise your stews, is good, too. I also cook some of my bone broth down to a thick syrup and cool it into molds or pans I cut up. Sometimes I’ll add even more gelatin to this mixture as it cooks so it has a big wallup of glycine in it. You can make fruit gummies with the gelatin, too.

If you do go the bone broth route, make sure you’re using joints in your broth. The marrow bones are good and yummy, but not the best when it comes to what we’re