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The Collagen Cure: The Forgotten Role of Glycine and Collagen for Optimal Health and Longevity
Collagen is the most abundant protein in the human body making up approximately 30% of all your protein by mass. It makes up your hair, teeth, skin, nails, organs, arteries, cartilage, bones, tendons, and ligaments. Thus, collagen is very important for anti-aging. The loss of collagen can start an entire decade prior to the loss of muscle. Beginning at the age of 20, you lose just under 10% of your skin’s collagen content every decade. So why do we lose so much collagen as we age? One of the main reasons is that we don’t get enough glycine. This book will walk you through everything you need to know about collagen and glycine. You will also learn how to optimally support collagen health through diet, exercise, supplements, and biohacking tools. The Collagen Cure will teach you about the unrecognized role of collagen and glycine for optimal longevity, vitality and anti-aging.
572 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 19, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 27, 2023
I read this book while rolling around in the palm of my hand a coke-rock sized pinch of salt. My bullshit-O-meter blared its horn more manically than the Benny Hill theme song. This, ladies and gents, is how authors ought to lose their reputations: by churning out unreadable cookie-cutter crud with reference lists of unread references longer than the accreditation acronyms strung out after their name like anal beads out of a prolapse.
But if James DiNicolantonio is skilled at anything, it's churning out unreadable cookie-cut crud: this book is merely one of nearly a dozen, which, if their reviews are to be believed, are every bit as poorly written and edited as this one. Yet far from finding that his reputation has diminished, this ill-recommended strategy, previously reserved only for Instagram gurus, of skimming PubMed and copy-pasting article conclusions in an endless series, seems instead to be the foundation stone of DiNicolantonio's celebrity.
Go figure!
Now that my inner satirist has dropped his load and been tucked into bed for a powernap, let's get down to the nitty-gritty. As mentioned above, this book has nearly 900 separate citations. There is absolutely no way that DiNicolantonio has read and vetted every single one of these citations. At least some, and I'd wager most, of these references had their abstracts and conclusions skimmed before being added as merely one more one-dollar note in this book's bulging citations-wallet. But perhaps his co-author, Siim Land, was the researcher-vetter. Perhaps! But I question the conscientiousness of any researcher who after apparently wading through the morass of research isn't able to synthesise it and present it in a simple, clear, linear narrative as proof that they've understood what they've read.
This last thing is what both authors manifestly failed to do. It's what contributed more than any other factor to my extreme scepticism of many of the author's claims. The Collagen Cure is one of the most poorly-edited books I've ever read. It repeats itself, sometimes literally verbatim, via obvious copy-pasting. They drop lists where none are needed: for example, they'll start talking about a mineral compound and then, randomly, without warning, invite us to read a list of foods with large concentrations of that mineral. And they do this over and over and over again. They jump rapidly between subjects and go off on irrelevant tangents. They use a vast amount of undefined scientific jargon (and thus reveal that they didn't write with a target audience in mind--if this for laypeople or practicing physicians?--which is yet another indication that they wrote without a plan, aim, foresight, or care). They layer acronyms on acronyms until you begin to doubt that you know your ABCs. And never once at any point do you feel like this book is anything more than a braindump. There's no scaffolding, no story, no narrative, no direction to this dumpster fire of a book.
The editing is so bad--so lazy, so unscrupulous, so indifferent--that it made me wonder if the authors treated the rest of the book the same way. Maybe their research was equally as lazy and unscrupulous. Maybe they're so lazy that I should doubt that they've read all the works they cite. Maybe the fact that they repeat themselves and jump aimlessly from topic to topic suggests that they themselves worked in this fashion, that they didn't ingest and synthesise their knowledge slowly but instead, so to speak, they chewed some speed, raced through the conclusions of a large number of papers, and jotted down their one- or two-sentence thoughts of each paper as they went, until voila! eventually they had enough content to fill a book.
But I digress.
Despite all my squabbles, I took lots of important stuff from this book, stuff that I hope will change my life. However, one last caveat: because, for the reasons aforementioned, I so thoroughly question the reliability of the authors' research, I intend to subject everything I take away from this book to thorough independent review. I plan to factcheck everything. That said, I learned the following:
That the body makes its own glycine, but that it only makes ~3 grams per day.
That the body could use vastly more glycine per day than 3 grams: by some estimates, it could use 10x as much.
That your body uses glycine to make heme, creatine, glutathione, collagen, elastin;
That glycine is shuttled into teeth, hair, skin, nails, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, arteries, capillaries, muscles, etc.; it's a globetrotting adventurer running all around the body;
That it methylates methionine and thus mimics methionine restriction, one of the most effective anti-ageing processes;
That it improves insulin sensitivity and softens blood sugar spikes after the consumption of food;
That inflammatory proteins, such as C-reactive proteins, are rich in glycine, and thus that inflammation depletes our already naturally low glycine stores;
That it's an inhibitory amino acid similar to GABA (thus its use as a sleep aid), which can be of use to people suffering excitatory conditions such as OCD;
That is strengthens the tight junctions of the gut, improving a swathe of gut-health issues such as celiac disease;
and much, much more!
Collagen and glycine deficiencies aren't life-threatening. Their effects mostly show up in old age, and when you're younger merely present as ageing skin and maybe joint pain. Think of their absence as similar to low-grade chronic inflammation: it's a systematic problem that makes every other problem worse. But, similarly, the benefits of supplementing collagen and especially glycine will be systematic, whole-of-body, and profound.
I've started supplementing 5 grams minimum of both compounds every day and think of them, and of glycine especially, the way I think of caffeine and creatine: cheap daily essentials.
But if James DiNicolantonio is skilled at anything, it's churning out unreadable cookie-cut crud: this book is merely one of nearly a dozen, which, if their reviews are to be believed, are every bit as poorly written and edited as this one. Yet far from finding that his reputation has diminished, this ill-recommended strategy, previously reserved only for Instagram gurus, of skimming PubMed and copy-pasting article conclusions in an endless series, seems instead to be the foundation stone of DiNicolantonio's celebrity.
Go figure!
Now that my inner satirist has dropped his load and been tucked into bed for a powernap, let's get down to the nitty-gritty. As mentioned above, this book has nearly 900 separate citations. There is absolutely no way that DiNicolantonio has read and vetted every single one of these citations. At least some, and I'd wager most, of these references had their abstracts and conclusions skimmed before being added as merely one more one-dollar note in this book's bulging citations-wallet. But perhaps his co-author, Siim Land, was the researcher-vetter. Perhaps! But I question the conscientiousness of any researcher who after apparently wading through the morass of research isn't able to synthesise it and present it in a simple, clear, linear narrative as proof that they've understood what they've read.
This last thing is what both authors manifestly failed to do. It's what contributed more than any other factor to my extreme scepticism of many of the author's claims. The Collagen Cure is one of the most poorly-edited books I've ever read. It repeats itself, sometimes literally verbatim, via obvious copy-pasting. They drop lists where none are needed: for example, they'll start talking about a mineral compound and then, randomly, without warning, invite us to read a list of foods with large concentrations of that mineral. And they do this over and over and over again. They jump rapidly between subjects and go off on irrelevant tangents. They use a vast amount of undefined scientific jargon (and thus reveal that they didn't write with a target audience in mind--if this for laypeople or practicing physicians?--which is yet another indication that they wrote without a plan, aim, foresight, or care). They layer acronyms on acronyms until you begin to doubt that you know your ABCs. And never once at any point do you feel like this book is anything more than a braindump. There's no scaffolding, no story, no narrative, no direction to this dumpster fire of a book.
The editing is so bad--so lazy, so unscrupulous, so indifferent--that it made me wonder if the authors treated the rest of the book the same way. Maybe their research was equally as lazy and unscrupulous. Maybe they're so lazy that I should doubt that they've read all the works they cite. Maybe the fact that they repeat themselves and jump aimlessly from topic to topic suggests that they themselves worked in this fashion, that they didn't ingest and synthesise their knowledge slowly but instead, so to speak, they chewed some speed, raced through the conclusions of a large number of papers, and jotted down their one- or two-sentence thoughts of each paper as they went, until voila! eventually they had enough content to fill a book.
But I digress.
Despite all my squabbles, I took lots of important stuff from this book, stuff that I hope will change my life. However, one last caveat: because, for the reasons aforementioned, I so thoroughly question the reliability of the authors' research, I intend to subject everything I take away from this book to thorough independent review. I plan to factcheck everything. That said, I learned the following:
That the body makes its own glycine, but that it only makes ~3 grams per day.
That the body could use vastly more glycine per day than 3 grams: by some estimates, it could use 10x as much.
That your body uses glycine to make heme, creatine, glutathione, collagen, elastin;
That glycine is shuttled into teeth, hair, skin, nails, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, arteries, capillaries, muscles, etc.; it's a globetrotting adventurer running all around the body;
That it methylates methionine and thus mimics methionine restriction, one of the most effective anti-ageing processes;
That it improves insulin sensitivity and softens blood sugar spikes after the consumption of food;
That inflammatory proteins, such as C-reactive proteins, are rich in glycine, and thus that inflammation depletes our already naturally low glycine stores;
That it's an inhibitory amino acid similar to GABA (thus its use as a sleep aid), which can be of use to people suffering excitatory conditions such as OCD;
That is strengthens the tight junctions of the gut, improving a swathe of gut-health issues such as celiac disease;
and much, much more!
Collagen and glycine deficiencies aren't life-threatening. Their effects mostly show up in old age, and when you're younger merely present as ageing skin and maybe joint pain. Think of their absence as similar to low-grade chronic inflammation: it's a systematic problem that makes every other problem worse. But, similarly, the benefits of supplementing collagen and especially glycine will be systematic, whole-of-body, and profound.
I've started supplementing 5 grams minimum of both compounds every day and think of them, and of glycine especially, the way I think of caffeine and creatine: cheap daily essentials.
August 25, 2023
I've realized that I need to read everything that Dr DiNicolantonio writes... it's all at least interspersed with gold.
This one is about collagen, of course, as the title implies... but what I got out of it was more of a deep dive into the minutiae of glycine and why it's critically important. The two bottom line takeaways for me are that it's a primary building block for both glutathione and collagen, AND most of us are deeply deficient. It was worth the price of the book just for that.
This one is about collagen, of course, as the title implies... but what I got out of it was more of a deep dive into the minutiae of glycine and why it's critically important. The two bottom line takeaways for me are that it's a primary building block for both glutathione and collagen, AND most of us are deeply deficient. It was worth the price of the book just for that.
January 9, 2023
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to take the next step to optimal health. Dr. James DiNicolantonio does an amazing job at educating the need to know information and then even suggest routines at the end.
June 24, 2023
Nice and very information short book about collagen.
September 2, 2023
good data
This book was very well researched. Half of the book is footnote sources. I thought there would be specific recommendations for brands, but there was not.
This book was very well researched. Half of the book is footnote sources. I thought there would be specific recommendations for brands, but there was not.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews