 Hi, this is Dr. Ruscio, and anytime we can achieve healing with a dietary or food-based intervention, that is clearly a win. And thankfully, collagen shows promise in healing both intestinal tissue, joint tissue, skin tissue, and muscle tissue. And I'm happy to announce that we've just released a fish-based collagen. I'll come back to the importance of why fish is so critical in the sourcing of the collagen in a moment, but don't worry, there's no fishy odor or taste. Now regarding supplemental collagen, what does the research literature show? Because it's very important that we look to the research to help us decide if a given supplement or intervention is something that we should consider undergoing. And I'll put up here on the screen kind of a short synopsis of what the literature shows to date. As you can see here, collagen shows benefits to the skin, and these benefits are fairly well-established, including human trials showing an anti-aging effect, improving skin elasticity and moisture in three different trials. There is also evidence showing that collagen gives your joints and muscles support. There are, or there have been, a randomized control trial for both osteoarthritis and another for just generalized joint pain, both showing improvement in the joint pain and function. And remember, randomized control trials are one of the highest levels of scientific evidence. And also a human interventional trial showing benefits for muscle strength. And continuing here, regarding gut health, there is preliminary data. It is animal data, so we have to be a little bit cautious with how much we extract from this, but we can infer from these results that collagen is beneficial for the gut. And this was a, in this one particular study I want to show you here. In addition to other animal data, I think the most compelling data comes from a human cellular study, so it's be a petri dish or a cell line study, where they found that collagen significantly decreased dysfunction in the intestinal barrier. So we have some good evidence here showing that collagen can support various tissues of the body. I wish there was a bit more evidence showing support for the gut, but certainly we have some preliminary data there when combined with the fact that we see in the studies that have been done benefits for skin, for joints and for muscles. It seems a reasonable inference that collagen could help. Also when considering this is essentially a food supplement, I think it's fairly easy to make a case for at least trialing a supplemental collagen, especially when we consider, are you getting enough collagen in your diet? Now the main source of collagen in the diet can really be found in bone broth or from bone broth and or from gelatin. So if you're making a lot of soups that will essentially kind of cook out from the bone and connected tissue collagen and gelatin, then you're probably getting a good amount of collagen in your diet. But if you're like most people you may not be eating enough of these foods and this is where a simple collagen supplement can really help fill in that gap where you're not getting quite enough in dietarily. So again, consider adding collagen to your supplement protocol to help improve gut health, skin health, joint health, and muscle health. And I should mention that collagen can be added to our elemental heal powder for those who are looking to give their gut kind of a break or reset and use our elemental heal hypoallergenic meal replacement shake. If you add to this some of our marine collagen, it actually helps give a bit of a creamy consistency to the shake and it's actually a quite a nice pairing and it can be safely added. Now studies have not tested the FODMAP content of collagen so we don't know if it's low FODMAP for sure, but it's most likely going to be low FODMAP and there certainly seems to be a number of patients who are using or people who are using collagen who have sensitive digestion who really benefit from supplementing with it at least from an anecdotal perspective. Now another question that may arise here is why fish-based collagen over beef and this is a great question and something we should definitely expound upon. Now up here on the screen I want to share with you a very important and impactful study from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and this is a worldwide assessment of hunter-gatherer diets by Cordane and colleagues and to quote plant food markedly decreased with increasing latitude so we know as hunter-gatherers moved away from the equator they were able to eat less plants because less plants would naturally grow the colder it gets the farther away from the equator. So plant food markedly decreased or decreases with increasing latitude this is the key phrase the reduction in plant food subsistence is replaced by increased subsistence on fished animal foods the main food in the diet that increased as our hunter-gatherer ancestors moved away from the equator north and south to the poles where it was colder and less plant life was available was fish. I fear that many in the ancestral or paleo community are over consuming beef grass-fed beef butter beef byproduct beef collagen and it's not to say beef is bad I think that's a conflation on the other end of the spectrum that's incorrect lumping meat in red meat beef with things like processed foods and added sugar and then proclaiming aha the beef is what's causing the increase of obesity or cancer that I disagree with and that certainly I think is an unfair and incorrect conflation however it doesn't change the fact that it seems that many in the community are over consuming beef based foods and would do well to consider bringing in more fish based foods into their diet as this study by Cordane so eloquently points out and what about mercury well essentially if you eat the appropriate kind of fish fish that are not known to be hind mercury like tuna swordfish and shark then the selenium naturally occurring in the fish tends to buffer the effect our collagen product is tested for mercury to ensure it is devoid of mercury so there's no concern with mercury in using this product so I invite you to try our fish based marine collagen to improve your gut health skin health joint health and muscle health