Free Radical Damage, and Protein Breakdown: The Cause of Aging

The reason for taking antioxidants stems from the fact that aging is caused by the accumulated errors of imprecise cell replication.  If you take a photocopy of a photocopy you will see that the copy undergoes some loss of quality. Multiply that slight loss by a thousand times and you will see that significant changes have occurred. The same thing happens with the cells of the body and skin. Free radicals damage cells, and damaged cells create equally damaged cells with an added loss. The accumulated damage slowly builds as cells live, reproduce, and die throughout one's lifetime, and that accumulated damage (error) is to blame for the cause of aging. 

Damaged cells also create damaged proteins and less of them. Collagen and elastin are the main proteins that hold cells together in the skin and internal organs. It is these damaged proteins that create changes to the characteristics of elasticity and thickness of skin. Lost elasticity is what causes wrinkles and sagging. The proteins in your skin (just like the proteins of your muscles) either stretch, or they tear if not elastic enough to stretch. Multiple tears and breaks in the collagen proteins of skin eventually turn into wrinkles. At the same time loss of elasticity means that skin fails to take up slack. Skin sags.

Does ingesting collagen in a tablet form help skin cells with the tedious task of assembling these large proteins? Experimental evidence supports that collagen taken as a dietary supplement does display positive results. However, it remains unknown the extent to which ingested collagen is damaged by stomach acids. At the same time, the quality of collagen used will vary significantly, because collagen is so large that it may break into numerous segments depending on the extraction processes it is subjected. Rigorous extraction processes yield fragmented segments of collagen proteins.

The efficacy of the Baltic Collagen product line displays results beyond that of any collagen product in circulation today. And that difference can be noted within 10 minutes of the first application. Attributed to the retention of its structural integrity, the collagen product remains biochemically active. Although the collagen molecule is too large to penetrate the skin as would a collagen injection acting as a filler, this biochemical activity allows the product to be pulled in more deeply within the cellular matrix of skin via hydrogen bonding, and correctly stack within the subcutaneous layers of skin. Although there is no intra-chain hydrogen bonding within the collagen molecule, there is hydrogen bonding interaction between the attached collagen structures of skin and the structurally integrity of the biochemically active collagen product.