Enter the WABAC: Gelatin

Join me on this journey as I travel throughout time to explore humans in regard to health, food, and training. Sometimes good, mostly bad, but always entertaining.

Next up on our journey in the WABAC machine we travel to the days when people were going gaga (for good reason) for gelatin, especially in the form of jello. Gelatin has a host of benefits for overall health and health of hair, skin, nails, recovery, muscle development, fat loss, digestion and much much more. Many early recipe books called for gelatin in different dishes and desserts. Bone broth (and gelatin) was a very popular food that seems to have been slowly forgotten or pushed away as time progressed to now.

“A high protein diet, of about 100 grams of good protein daily, is protective, and protein deficiency is a common cause of hypothyroidism. But too much emphasis on the muscle meats, including fish fillets, chicken breast or legs, and the usual steak and chops, can be anti-thyroid by providing too much tryptophan. That can be offset by using gelatin liberally (chicken soup and ox-tail soup contains lots of gelatin from the bones and connective tissues), because gelatin contains no tryptophan. Whey, which is sold as a protein supplement, and egg whites contain too much tryptophan and can be antithyroid if used excessively.” Raymond Peat, PhD, “Thyroiditis. Some confusions and causes of “autoimmune disease””

“Gelatin (the cooked form of collagen) makes up about 50% of the protein in an animal, but a much smaller percentage in the more active tissues, such as brain, muscle, and liver. 35% of the amino acids in gelatin are glycine, 11% alanine, and 21% proline and hydroxyproline.

In the industrialized societies, the consumption of gelatin has decreased, relative to the foods that contain an inappropriately high proportion of the antimetabolic amino acids, especially tryptophan and cysteine.

The degenerative and inflammatory diseases can often be corrected by the use of gelatin-rich foods.

When we eat animal proteins in the traditional ways (for example, eating fish head soup, as well as the muscles, or “head-cheese” as well as pork chops, and chicken-foot soup as well as drumsticks), we assimilate a large amount of glycine and gelatin. This whole-animal balance of amino acids supports all sorts of biological process, including a balanced growth of children’s tissues and organs.

When only the muscle meats are eaten, the amino acid balance entering our blood stream is the same as that produced by extreme stress, when cortisol excess causes our muscles to be broken down to provide energy and material for repair. The formation of serotonin is increased by the excess tryptophan in muscle, and serotonin stimulates the formation of more cortisol, while the tryptophan itself, along with the excess muscle-derived cysteine, suppresses the thyroid function.

A generous supply of glycine/gelatin, against a balanced background of amino acids, has a great variety of antistress actions. Glycine is recognized as an “inhibitory” neurotransmitter, and promotes natural sleep. Used as a supplement, it has helped to promote recovery from strokes and seizures, and to improve learning and memory. But in every type of cell, it apparently has the same kind of quieting, protective antistress action. The range of injuries produced by an excess of tryptophan and serotonin seems to be prevented or corrected by a generous supply of glycine. Fibrosis, free radical damage, inflammation, cell death from ATP depletion or calcium overload, mitochondrial damage, diabetes, etc., can be prevented or alleviated by glycine.

Some types of cell damage are prevented almost as well by alanine and proline as by glycine, so the use of gelatin, rather than glycine, is preferable, especially when the gelatin is associated with its normal biochemicals. For example, skin is a rich source of steroid hormones, and cartilage contains “Mead acid,” which is itself antiinflammatory.” Raymond Peat, PhD, “Gelatin, stress, longevity“