How Collagen Can Help Protect You From Alzheimer’s

Yes it’s great for skin, hair and nails. But it’s even better for your brain.

image

Cast your mind back to a previous life, one that was lived before the age of the supermarket, before food was stripped down to its constituent parts and sold in tidy plastic containers. You bought meat from the local butcher, or perhaps reared your own animals. Nose-to-tail eating was the norm and nothing was wasted.

During that life you almost certainly consumed a lot of collagen, found in the parts of the animal that today are routinely discarded: cartilage, skin, bones and all the gristly bits that fail to make the grade and are instead incorporated into pet food and cosmetics.

Lucky pets and lucky cosmetics industry. This cheap by-product is crammed into as many creams, serums, potions and supplements as humanly possible. It is the secret elixir that makes skin glow with youthful radiance, and hair thick and lustrous.

For once, all the marketing claims are not as absurd as they appear. It’s just a shame that collagen’s main purpose in life — to make us strong and healthy — has been relegated to second place.

What is this wonder stuff?