Healing Benefits of Gelatin

Gelatin is a super food you can add to your smoothies, store bought broths and beverages to reduce inflammation, heal your gut, help detoxify your body, and prevent illness and disease.

Last week I woke up with slight toothache. By the next day I had pain all the way up into my gums and my cheek. Clearly I had some inflammation going on. Inflammation is a natural response to injury, pain, illness, or stress. The truth is the pain, swelling, redness and warmth we feel at the site of an injury or illness is there to help us heal.

Simply, this is how it works. Blood flow increases at the injury which warms the site, making it red and swollen. This is a good thing because the blood carries plasma and leukocytes to the site. The blood vessels become more permeable, allowing the plasma and leukocytes to flow through the vessel walls into the injured tissue to do the healing. The leukocytes clean up the injury site, moping up the pathogens and overseeing the inflammatory response. Problems occur when we have chronic inflammation.

Ok, back to my toothache. Since I am not one to run to the Dr or dentist immediately I decided I would give my body some help by reducing my intake of food, allowing my body to put its energy toward healing the injury instead of digestion.

I cut back on my diet eating only smoothies and soups. Since I also wanted to bring in some healing agents, I used bone broth in my soups and added gelatin to my teas and smoothies. Gelatin contains the concentrated healing power of bone broth, which reduces inflammation in our gut and throughout our body.

The next day my toothache, while not completely healed, was much better. I stayed on the limited diet for 3 more days until I was completely healed.

What is Gelatin

Gelatin is the active healing ingredient of bone broth.

Bone broth is the ultimate healing and comfort food. Many cultures have used bone broth for centuries for health and healing. Click here to read my article on Bone Broth.

If you make broths at home, you know when you refrigerate your broth it comes out looking like a giant jello. Gelatin is what makes the broth gel.

With our busy schedule, it is not always realistic to make bone broth.

If you want to make sure you are getting daily doses of gelatin to help detoxify your body, and prevent illness and disease, but your work schedule doesn’t allow for broth making you can buy gelatin from a good source. Vital Proteins Gelatin is one of them.

Gelatin soothes and heals the mucosal lining of the digestive tract. This is particularly helpful for reducing inflammation. It reduces any inflammatory particles from getting into our blood stream that don’t belong there. This is known a leaky gut.

Gelatin provides key raw materials that help the cells of the digestive system to regenerate. It also helps with the digestion of nutrients, providing additional healing. I recommend adding in gelatin if you are suffering from any type of inflammation either acute, like my toothache or chronic inflammation like joint pain.

Healing Benefits of Gelatin

Gelatin improves digestion ~ It naturally binds to water and helps food move through the digestive tract more easily.
Gelatin is loaded with protein~ With 6 grams of protein per tablespoon, it’s a great way to add more protein to your diet. Even though it is not a complete protein, it helps the body fully utilize the complete proteins that are taken in.
Gelatin can help heal food allergies and intolerances ~ Adding gelatin to your diet can heal the lining of your stomach and digestive tract. Since food allergies/intolerances are thought to come from a “leaky gut,” the idea is that when you heal your digestive tract you no longer have proteins and toxins that create health issues “leaching” into your body.
Gelatin is good for bone and joint health ~ Gelatin contains lots of amino acids important in helping to prevent the weakness and degeneration of cartilage in joints. Gelatin, with it’s anti-inflammatory properties, has also been shown to reduce the pain and inflammation of arthritis.
Gelatin helps your body release toxins ~ Glycine, an amino acid found in gelatin, assists the liver to efficiently remove toxins from our system.
Gelatin gives you better hair, nails, and teeth ~ Gelatin contains keratin, which is a very strong protein found in your hair, nails, teeth and skin.
Gelatin improves the elasticity of your skin ~ Gelatin is essentially cooked down collagen. Consuming it will help improve the look and feel of your skin much more effectively then hard- to- absorb collagen facial creams. Gelatin actually stimulates your body to produce more collagen.
Gelatin helps speed up wound healing ~ One of the amino acids found in gelatin is glycine, which is highly anti-inflammatory.