Let's Fascia the Facts!

The one in which we explore how to support the connective tissue that holds you together with Bovine Collagen Peptides.

You better watch out for the skin deep …

There’s no doubt that choosing to supplement your body’s production of collagen can feel like you’ve stumbled into a mystically enchanted world where you can ride unicorns and drink the elixir of eternal youth from a crystal fountain.   

Even with the merest smattering of research, you’ll have noticed pretty amazing things about this glue of life (at WillPowders, with bovine collagen peptides, you could call our glue moo glue!), particularly how it supports skin, hair, nails and has a role in the building of muscle mass.  If you know the gifts that Type III collagen brings, then you can add in hollow organs like blood vessels, the gut and uterus.  We don’t deny that reversal, revival and restorative are three useful adjectives to describe what some collagen supplements can do and there’s plenty of underpinning scholarly research - yay!  From plumply hydrated skin through to strong nails and hair,  collagen’s virtually nirvana in a supplement for our outer body.  But, is that fundamentally all it’s good for?

While we do love science at WillPowders, we also realise that, as a discipline in the past, science has overlooked some rudimentaries that were right under its nose.  Take, for example, the fact that for a long time science insisted on separating out and dissecting parts of the body separately from observing the living whole.  Maybe this is why much of the marine collagen industry directs your focus to the epidermis, your outermost layer of skin, rather than the foundational factors which lie beneath?   However, when it comes to collagen, we prefer to understand human beings as whole beings, rather than a sum of parts.    

The eighteenth century gave birth to the surgeon Sir Erasmus Wilson.   Don’t say we don’t bring the history!  Wilson is also widely understood to be the first dermatologist.  This placed him in an ideal position to observe the link between the skin and its connection to all other tissues in the body.  Just like we WillPowderers, Wilson realised that the skin did not exist in isolation from the body as a whole.  He paid attention to the white flexible tissue that, beneath the epidermis, surrounded muscles and, deeper into the body, also surrounded organs and bone, keeping these tissues in place and connected to each other.   He called this white, supple tissue ‘the natural bandage’ thus firmly establishing the interconnection between everything in our body and our skin.  You could say that Wilson firmly debunked the myth that we wear a skin suit.   For him and us at WillPowders today, the skin was a natural continuum of the internal body, the seamless finish that signifies where we end and the rest of the world begins.   

During much of the history of anatomical research, this strong, stretchy connective tissue was cut off and thrown away so anatomers could study what they considered to be the real business of the body, such things as organs and muscles.  If you watch a butcher preparing cuts of meat, they’ll spend time cutting this white fibrous tissue away because it’s tough.  For a long time, scientists seemed to fail to join the dots and notice that whole swathes of the study of the human body and our accumulating knowledge about it was gained from conducting observations on dead tissues, stripped of their natural bandage, so the opportunity for optimum study of this ubiquitous interconnective material was lost.  Today this natural bandage is known to run throughout the body in one continuum and is known as the fascia.   

According to the Fascia Research Society, the ‘fascial system consists of the three-dimensional continuum of soft, collagen containing, loose and dense fibrous connective tissues that permeate the body … [it] surrounds, interweaves between, and interpenetrates all organs, muscles, bones and nerve fibres, endowing the body with a functional structure, and providing an environment that enables all body systems to operate in an integrated manner’.  Truly not just skin deep, then.   

The more you learn of the fascia, the more you will want to provide collagen peptide support to what turns out not to be an inert piece of ‘natural bandage’ wrapping, not least because it is believed by the most cutting edge hypotheses that it may, amongst other things, operate at a quantum level, employing Einstein’s principle of Spooky Entanglement at a Distance.   Oh, how we love cutting edge science where it begins to seemingly turn to magick!  We might confess to being so excited that a little bit of wee came out when we found out that each of the fascia’s cells,  ‘communicates with the other cells by sending and receiving signals; this concept is a part of quantum physics and it is known as quantum entanglement’.   

None of us mere mortals at WillPowders are ready for the vastness and complexity that is quantum physics just yet (believe us, we’ve spoken to a quantum mechanic and we needed a lie down in a darkened room afterwards) so let’s understand the quantum theory surrounding the fascia through an analogy, albeit a rather clunky one.   If you’ve seen Avatar, you’ll know that the big blue couple, Jake and Neytiri of the Na'vi, plug into the wispy strands from the Tree of Souls.  Their tails, a continuation of the spine and nervous system, communicate with all other beings and sense everything that is going on for all the living things on Pandora, including the health of Pandora herself.  What happens to one individual being in the Na’vi happens to the whole as all particles are entangled.  The Na’vi have found a way to experience this outside of themselves, but our fascia operates in this way across our body within, sensing and communicating across the whole fascia as a sensory organ but also sensing information from other tissues, clusters of specialised cells that are gathered together to make bones and muscles and organs.  If you are being pummelled or palpated by the physiotherapist on the outside of your skin, then the fascia is relaying that information to the internal structures across your body and it is believed this is part of the healing process.  And we thought it was just that they were digging into our muscles to get them to relax!  Science is on the verge of viewing the fascia in the same way it views quantum particles, that what happens in one part of the fascia affects other areas in the fascia at the same time, no matter the distance between the points.  It’s a fascinating idea that our fascia is like a connecting dark matter (except it’s white, of course) in our internal cosmos.  Homage must be paid to its biological intelligence!  

In this way, it is fast becoming a focus in the understanding of chronic pain that seemingly doesn’t have its genesis in the musculoskeletal system but in disruptions in the fascia, for example due to the deterioration of the assembly of collagen through age, injury, a sugary diet or smoking and vaping,  so that this disruption in the fascia is experienced as transferred pain in the musculoskeletal system.   Our quantum point is that a ‘physical system [like us humans] cannot be described individually [for example, by discussing just what our skin does], but only as a juxtaposition of multiple systems [all the rest of us]’.  It’s this very interconnectedness that is a watchword at WillPowders.   Phew! Not a living doll in sight!

It makes sense then to help maintain the integrity of this fundamental collagen based sense organ by giving our body’s collagen the amino acids it requires and in collagen, whether that’s Type I or III, and, of course WillPowders' Award Winning Bovine Collagen Peptides support both types, glycine is always present as one of the strands in its triple helix.  

It has various states of being in its continuum - both solid and liquid as is necessary - and it provides the slip and glide that all the things in your body have over each other.   If we are going to start anywhere with why your collagen supplement needs to be WillPowders' Award Winning Bovine Collagen Peptides, it’s for this reason:  in the fascia, you’ll find collagen Types I and III and those are exactly the two types of collagen that our bovine collagen peptides support.   Giving your body the best chance to continue forming optimum collagen is, surely, fundamentally, a given once we understand that the fascia relies partly on Type I and III collagen.

When a company is selling you collagen for your skin, they would have you believe that, somehow, collagen has a one way ticket through a barren landscape between your gut and your epidermis and, eventually, those brave peptide travellers will come to nestle just beneath your skin, plumping it out, or in your nail beds where it will enrol itself in the manufacture of strong nails, similarly, it could cross those lands of tumbleweed you have inside, heading off to your scalp, across the vacuum of internal space to tighten things up there so that your hair is cinched in at the follicle, preventing hair fall.   Of course, ‘hollow’ space inside us is a nonsense concept and we all know it.  This is why we’ve challenged parts of this industry to stop treating people as if their intellect is as empty as a bobblehead doll.  

For long enough, the wellbeing industry, particularly the beauty wellbeing sector, has chopped us up into the sum of our parts (just like science did for a long time, discarding the prevalence and holistic nature of the fascia by cutting it off and throwing it away in order to subdivide the body in to parts) so that our self-image has become disjointed, so much so that when we look in the mirror, it can feel like we are being asked to assess our well-being as if it were the produce in a surreal butcher’s shop window:  Get your lovely lean muscle here!  Bulging biceps for sale.  A pound of firm flesh for you lovely ladies!  

But our bodies didn’t assemble in separate parts like an AirFix kit when we were in utero.  And, besides, if you are aiming to build muscle mass, you would do well to add bone broth nutrition to your diet alongside collagen peptides.   Luckily, WillPowders support you with this too and you can peruse our delicious Scandinavian Protein Powder Range here.  It seems that fascia tissue is present in an embryo at two to three weeks.  The fascial net, with its Type I and III collagen, develops first and then bone, blood, cartilage, adipose tissue, lymphatic tissue and collections of specialised cells that form organs and muscle are inserted into it.  The fascia has ‘no discontinuity in its path’ but instead its different characteristics and layers overlap.  In the order of making you, it’s not a matter of which came first, the chicken or the egg, but a matter of fascia first with all else following.  

Just look at how wondrously it operates in our adulthood, ‘The fascial continuum is the result of the evolution of the perfect synergy among different tissues, capable of supporting, dividing, penetrating and connecting all the districts of the body, from the epidermis to the bone, involving all the functions and organic structures.  The continuum constantly transmits and receives mechanometabolic information that can influence the shape and function of the entire body’.

Fascia Anatomy & Physiology - The Fascia Guide includes a modern definition of the fascia that we have drawn on here

The Awareness of the Fascial System - PMC (nih.gov) includes a discussion of the quantum nature of interconnectedness of cells and the fascia

Anatomy, Fascia - StatPearls - NCBI Bookshelf (nih.gov) includes discussion of body image and emotional disturbances linked with the fascia

Fascia Research Society for helpful understand of the fascia and the modern interpretation thereof