The collagen tissues support the formation of bones, tendons, and cartilage that form depending on the level of mineralization. However, an individual can lose collagen components in the body due to exposure to ultraviolet light, tobacco, excessive intake of sugar, and aging.
Your body begins to lose collagen when you turn 30. The effects become noticeable after several years. Even though this is a natural process, it's possible to speed it up with UV exposure, pollution, bad habits, and poor diet choices. While it's possible to accelerate collagen loss, it's also possible to slow it down.
As a clinical manifestation of severe vitamin C deficiency, scurvy is caused by ascorbic acid's role in collagen synthesis.
The good news is, though you may not be able to bring back the lost collagen, there are ways to help get things moving and slow further loss. With the right skin care products and treatments outside and in, there's so much you can do to get back that spring back in your skin.
Eating foods that contain vitamin C and antioxidants, avoiding smoking, limiting caffeine intake, and protecting the skin from sunlight may all help preserve collagen or boost its production.
What Hurts Your Collagen Levels? Besides time, three main things will lower your collagen levels: sunlight, smoking, and sugar. Too much exposure to ultraviolet light makes its fibers unravel. This can lead to sun damage, such as wrinkles.
A noteworthy group of maladies of unknown origin which primarily involve connective tissue has been termed collagen diseases. These include the conditions known as periarteritis nodosa or polyarteritis, dermatomyositis, scleroderma, and disseminated lupus erythematosus.
Eat a healthy diet high in nutrients including vitamins A11 and C. Follow a daily skin care routine that includes sunscreen and topical retinol. Avoid smoking, as research shows that tobacco smoke reduces the production of collagen and elastin.
Over time, continued stress can have adverse impacts on your skin and other body systems. For example, excess cortisol can accelerate loss of collagen and elastin, the proteins responsible for youthful skin texture. This can lead to premature wrinkling and sagging skin.
So caffeine is a collagen killer and we should steer clear? Not exactly. "It's worth remembering that coffee doesn't destroy collagen, it inhibits its production," says nutritional therapist at the Pulse Light Clinic, Lisa Borg.
Goodpasture syndrome (or anti-GBM disease) is a rare, life-threatening autoimmune disease that affects the lungs and the kidneys. It happens when the immune system mistakenly attacks a protein called collagen because it recognizes it as a foreign substance.
Scleroderma is an autoimmune connective tissue and rheumatic disease that causes inflammation in the skin and other areas of the body. When an immune response tricks tissues into thinking they are injured, it causes inflammation, and the body makes too much collagen, leading to scleroderma.
Thalidomide is a medication that has been shown to stimulate an immune response that reduces the body's synthesis of collagen, the main component of connective tissue.
Vitamin C has an essential role in connective tissue healing, being a cofactor for prolyl hydroxylase and lysyl hydroxylase.
Loss of skin elasticity is known officially as elastosis – the degeneration of skin tissue due to ageing and other factors. And solar elastosis occurs to areas of the skin which have too much exposure to the sun and appear more weathered as a result.
How vitamin D deficiency leads to accelerated skin aging isn't fully understood. However, some experts suspect it has something to do with vitamin D's protective and antioxidant properties on the skin.