Why broth is beautiful
Nature's botox: eat your way to healthy skin and bones. (Recipe attached for paid subscribers ahead of tomorrow's bone broth class)
Message to paid members: If you’d like to join my bone broth class tomorrow (Friday 3pm UK time), and you haven’t already, please email me ASAP by replying to this email to get on the guest list. I’m sending out the Zoom link in the morning. And if you aren’t a subscriber yet, and would like to start attending these monthly meet-ups, there’s still time to join, button below. Hope to see you there, Jeannette
Did you know that a quarter of all the protein in the body is collagen? Collagen being the gluey scaffolding made of a bunch of small amino acid building blocks that hold stuff together. From our skin to our bones, joints, ligaments, cartilages, tendons to blood vessels.
As we age our collagen levels go down, and with it our skin and joints don’t hold as tightly together as they once did. Plus, our bones weaken.
So with this in mind, I try to dollop bone broth (aka as bone stock) into my meals wherever I can. I try to keep a jar of this gelatinous substance in my fridge at all times and add it to meals at every opportunity.
A good home-made broth should have a jelly-like wobbly consistency when refrigerated - a sign that you boiled the bones and skin enough to get the collagen out of them and into the liquid and hold it together.
Want a collagen snack? Heat a small cup and stir in a teaspoon of tasty fermented miso paste. Lunch? Open a bought-tomato soup, heat, and add a spoonful. Dinner? Whether it’s stir fry, pho, risotto, casserole, curry, or grains such as freekah, pearl barley or pilau rice, I add it to the water I boil them in. Over the course of a day I’m trying to keep my collagen levels topped up while eating deliciously at the same time.
As a side note, vitamin C foods are also needed alongside to build collagen (what’s known as a co-factor). So if you serve yourself a kiwi or tangerine for dessert you’ll help the amino acids build collagen in you.
When we boil the bones for several hours we also dislodge minerals like calcium, magnesium, and chromium into the broth. Plus all the amino acids which make up the scaffolding aka collagen - main players being glycine, proline, hydroxyproline, glycine, lysine, and hydroxylysine. These seep into the liquid, and become a tonic to help build us.
Bone broth may also be anti-inflammatory and prevent and reduce gut lining flares, plus help control type 2 diabetes. There aren’t big studies on bone broth - probably an unlucrative subject to fund I suspect. But I share below some of the interesting studies I found to guide us.
Back to making broth, I usually have a chicken one on the go made from an organic bird. It’s easy to make and I’ll share my method in this article. Beef bones according to studies may be more nutritious than chicken. So once you have perfected this, you could use this recipe with beef bones instead or as well.