Collagen - Artery 'Rebar'

  Many people are surprised when they find out that heart attack and stroke is extremely rare among animals.  Regardless of the animal's diet, level of activity or cholesterol intake, they don’t get cardiovascular diseases.  Yet cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in all the industrialized world.

   For years this was just thought to be an abnomality until scientists realized that animals produce all the vitamin C they need.  Humans have to consume foods with vitamin C in them!  Not only do animals produce all the vitamin C they need, but they also produce far more than we typically take for ourselves (an interesting point to be discussed later).

   Why is vitamin C so important?  Well, one of the most important functions of vitamin C in the body is the production of collagen and elastin.  If we don't get enough vitamin C, our bodies cannot produce enough collagen elastin.  Collagen is essential because it is the major connective tissue in your body.  Collagen molecules are like the steel rebar in concrete.  It is the supporting grid that assures the strength and stability of arteries.  In fact, collagen controls the shape of every cell in your body.  When you get cut, it's collagen that glues the tissues back together again.  Your skin is 75% collagen.  Collagen literally holds your body, and artery walls, together. 

   This is essential for our arteries!  Collagen molecules form the structure of the entire cardiovascular system.  It gives strength and stability to the veins, arteries and other blood vessels.  This is especially important with the inner layer of your arteries, which is held in place by a sheet of collagen.

   Now we know that vitamin C is essential to the production of collagen.  Without sufficient vitamin C, collagen production falls off.  Without enough collagen, your blood vessels begin to lose their structural integrity.  It takes time but, without enough vitamin C, the artery vessel walls begin to deteriate. 

   This is actually similar to what happens in scurvy.  Many people have wondered why not getting vitamin vitamin C, and scurvy from it, is such a big deal.  After all, it is only one vitamin.  Well, our body requires vitamin C to make collagen.  When collagen isn’t being produced, all the bodily tissues begin to lose strength.  The first symptom, bleeding gums, is simply the blood vessel walls breaking down.  If the lack of collagen continues, the internal structure of the entire body begins to break down.  We are no longer able to contain blood as it is pumped through arteries and cells. Eventually, internal bleeding causes death.

   Scurvy is not very exciting.  However, that is what is happening, slowly over the years, to the blood vessels if the body is not getting enough vitamin C.

   One of the hallmarks of aging is the loss of collagen supporting structure throughout the body.  Collagen reduction is visible and presents itself in the form of wrinkles on our face and skin surfaces during the aging process.  Our blood vessels are also structurally supported by collagen.  As this collagen structure deteriorates, stiffening of the arteries occurs.  Science has long confirmed that stiff arteries are associated with an increased incidence of major cardiovascular events and increase in blood pressure.

How the Body Wants to Heal Arteries

   To maintain and repair your arteries, your body needs a lot of vitamin C (and vitamin E, glycine, proline, lysine and other nutrients we put in our supplements), but vitamin C is the biggie!  Without enough of these nutrients and, especially vitamin C, the interior lining of the arteries can begin to have little lesions or tears.  In addition, free radicals and homocysteines have greatly increased in our modern environment.  They can also damage the interior lining of the arteries.  (We will also look more at them later.)

   As a result, tiny lesions develop in the vessel walls and the blood vessels lose elasticity.  Your body can tell when the interior of the arteries are tearing and will try to repair the damage.  Your body will want to simply repair the damage by manufacturing collagen fibers.  These will make your arteries as good as new.  To make collagen fibers, the body adds the vitamin C to amino acids glycine and proline, with lysine to tie them together.  This makes some tiny, but very strong and elastic molecular fibers or “strings”.  These collagen fibers strengthens the arteries and as a sheath to line the interior of the artery walls.  

   But what happens if the body doesn’t have enough nutrients and vitamin C to do complete these repairs?  To solve the problem, our body will try to repair the damage with whatever materials in the blood stream that it can use.  It is important to understand that… 

Artery failure is a life-threatening situation.
Your body will do anything it can to solve it! 

   (Even use cholesterol patches.)  There is more information in other articles but this may give you an idea why we emphasis our arteries and place the nutrients we do in our supplements.