The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson

and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

Ten Reasons to Eat More Collagen.

For years, the bodybuilding protein gorgeing community has maligned

collagen for its inessentiality and lack of input into the muscle protein synthesis process.

From their perspective, it sort of makes sense. Why bother with a low-quality protein like

gelatin or collagen when you can pound the way, eat the

meat, and focus on other sources of essential amino acids directly involved in building muscle?

Except that research is showing that these non-essential proteins are actually pretty darn useful.

A while back, I suffered an Achilles injury during one of my

ultimate Frisbee matches. In my attempt to speed recovery time, I did some research and started

supplementing with collagen. The results in my personal N-Equels-1 experiment were pretty dramatic.

Once I added collagen to the mix, my healing kicked into overdrive.

As I've dug deeper into this topic to uncover the many benefits dietary collagen can bestow upon us,

I'm convinced that collagen slash gelatin is an essential part of the human diet.

And yes, even, or especially, bodybuilders, power lifters, and other athletes

concerned with performance, muscles, and optimizing swollenness can benefit from eating more

collagen. But why? Number one, we don't make enough glycine to cover our body's needs.

Most people view amino acids in one of two ways.

Either they're essential, meaning our bodies can't synthesize them, or they're

inessential, meaning our bodies can't. In actuality, there's a third category.

Amino acids can be conditionally essential. Glycine, the primary amino acid in collagen, is synthesized from the

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