Midway thru my keto journey, I started taking collagen. The actual visible results are undeniable. Of course, my nails and hair are stronger and grow much faster.
But…. Now the little chin hair issue some of us more “seasoned gals” deal with has become a thriving crop.
I’m also carni now for many months. So… collagen or carnivore?
carnivore
there was no collegan growing on trees that the natural Earth planet gave us. We got all from food intake. Simple as that to me…lol…and my hairs on my chinny chin chin say the same 
let the hormones balance and become normal again thru food intake and off the crap and maybe they get lower? less? but thank heavens for tweezers and my Flawless Hair remover, yes I got a monster supply of double A batteries for this little miracle!
when and where we enter zc is massive in that our bodies will do this or that, change as hormones increase or decrease obviously and I have never seen ‘all in old age studies’ that truly prove anything about what a body will do as it ages, we only see people aging and effects, but it is SO individualized that one can’t even pretend to think if I did this, or that, at the age of 60, 65, 78 will I? Well just me thinking like that but darn if older carnivores in their 60s ain’t changing their hair from growin in very gray back to a way darker gray growth and becoming that darker growth has to ‘show something’ for each of us in full pic truths!!..seen zc pics of ladies doing just that
and my hair, which is bleached blonde also is ‘not as gray’ coming in so…
Weee…
Yeah, you’re right. My grey hasn’t advanced at all (or retreated) but the rest is turning a much darker brown. Who knew?
yea weirdo things that longer term into keto hardcore and then into zc easily experience…well not easily, many have med issues that won’t ever promote this change, but for healthier types that come into this…yea there is real hardcore seen in your eyes change and I got it, you are getting it, so soldier on!
we all got ‘pasts’ that can’t ever reflect on our ‘aging’ future to be some kind of ‘given’ ya know…but key with carnivore, real food, real meat/fat protein and all its nutrition it carries is a real life on this planet deal you can have, but guessing of my chin hairs and more are just not gonna sway me to ‘go off real food’ against something manufactured and I ‘might think I need’ cause for me, it truly is all about food and darn if we got perks we are seeing, don’t be overly seconding quessing it.
go get a Flawless HAHA
I love that darn thing lol
you said this: but the rest is turning a much darker brown. Who knew?
then you are seeing real change, you want more, I sure get that, lol, but let the real food change you as much as it can for you at this stage in our lives. for me personally, I am going just in that direction and so far so good
tell ya one thing I want, my 21 yr old body back 
can’t seem to achieve it 
…well, just yet 
I wish I knew back then when I was invincible that to keep the 21 yr old body I needed to take action from that day I turned 21 
ugh me did not do that at all 
@Fangs You got that right! And I’m really not complaining about my little lady goatee. All my girlfriends know if I ever end up in long term care or get dementia… their job is to come pluck me. I don’t want to be called the bearded lady in bed A. LOL
But I’ll take it. any badge I wear that comes from living to be this age, is a welcome sight.
I’d say it’s more likely that it is a combination of not eating carbohydrate and eating to satiety, thus getting abundant nutrition.
I notice that my hair, beard, fingernails, and toenails all grow much, much faster on an ad libitum ketogenic diet than they used to when I was a carb-burner.
Ya’ll are convincing me to stop the collagen. maybe I will start taking 1/2 each day until it’s gone. But if my hair starts falling out and my wrinkles and age spots return, I’m coming for YOU, @PaulL!
Sadly, my hair and nail is just as weak as ever. Nothing changed on keto, this would be the exception? It isn’t. My hair is pretty and silky and everything good except the split ends and grow like crazy, just like on carbs (though I never could grow it long and now it’s below waist, maybe there are some connection? or I just stopped cutting it every year? but I remember it always grew back the several cms and then just stopped for more than half a year…? and now it keeps growing and that poses every kinds of problems, I broke my hand mixer and almost broke my… the tiny hand held lawnmower, I keep forgetting the English name, I actually call it lawnmower in my own language too. but I could fix that. of course my hair goes into everything especially paint… but it’s LONG and that’s so, so cool, I never had it this long).
And I don’t have a beard just a few hairs since I split my chin on the road running from wild dogs (early morning, slope, rough road with pebbles and whatnot)… I lost the skin from my chin and palms and when I look at my palms, I only saw a fat layer 
It wasn’t sooo bad just inconvenient as I had to save everything (like my sketchbooks) from my fat. I don’t have bad memories but stupid 3 hairs subtly annoy me since decades. I have a scar too but I never had any problem with scars.
I want strong nails too 
They too easily go below zero and that’s painful. But it would be prettier long, it has practical uses and well, I like to be even healthier… That’s a motivation I guess - but I try to do my comfortable best already 
Yay for everyone’s better hair and nail though
My hormones are cute I guess, I never notice anything about them, they must work normally always.
And I am too young to have more than the very occasional white hairs yet Or my genes are good for that, I don’t know.
I don’t want my 21 year old body back… I was weak, my problematic points (like my eyes) were already bad enough… I want to be stronger than that. Way more muscles and stuff.
(And my hair is longer, it’s cool… I wanna dye it red and I keep forgetting since half a year. Oh well. I like my normal hair color and it’s good as it barely changes when died, my hair is SUPER stubborn. hard to change its color, hard to make it not straight and no one can tell it where to go. waist long hair has the benefit not to be able to stand completely up. it does its best though).
So…(somewhat off topic)
Just short of six months ago, I got whacked by a power tool and partially amputated the end of my right index finger. Split the nail and kind took off the skin on the top, but didn’t cut through the skin on the bottom. Split that little bone that’s under the nail.
A surgeon re attached it and I almost have a nail again. It’s like 3/4 of a nail long. And while the finger is full length, it still feels kind of odd, so it doesn’t work as well as before.
The surgeon recommended Biotin to help the nail grow. I told her I’d tried it before while trying to improve my nails for fingerstyle guitar and it did nothing, but decided to take a mega-dose amount of Biotin. 10,000 mcg. I think I have about a month of that Biotin left but thoughts of collagen keep coming up.
Does collagen work better than Biotin? I tried collagen to improve my nails about two years ago (for guitar, again). I think I was taking the MDR for Biotin and a couple of scoops of collagen in my coffee.
Collagen or carnivore or biotin? Pick two out of three? All three? The annoyance is it takes a long time for nails to grow enough to see if the stuff is helping.
I vote for neither. Age and the hormonal changes it brings can do that. I’ve solved the problem with electrolysis. Painful and expensive, but for me it meant a lot.
Good luck.
holy moly that had to hurt and be a PIA to have handled…wow.
glad you got all your surgery and more behind you and are healing.
I don’t know biotin, can’t help ya there.
keep eating carnivore, lol.
for me guys I am lucky cause I got fingernails of literal rocks. My nails are so strong it is insanity. I got long dagger killer nails, if I didn’t call myself Fangs on the board for chomping meat, I would have called myself Claws for my deadly nails. I have to watch them to not hurt people HAHA but farming takes care of it when they just snap off like trees in a hurricane when I hit one wrong on something. My poor car driver side is all scratched up from my thumbnail being so darn long. I saw those scratches around my handle and thought WTH? how/what/huh? and then I put my hand on the door and saw my nails just scratching the crazy out of that handle area…oh well.
I always had strong nails but they got tons stronger on I went very low carb near 7-8 yrs ago so I guess with being on VLC and zc for all these years have made them even stronger.
ahh, just jawing for the sake of jawing
I sliced the tip of my right index finger to the bone about ten years ago. For years after the wound healed, that fingertip was numb, but now, after five years on a ketogenic diet, I seem to have regained almost all of the sensitivity in that area. A similar spot on the tip of my right thumb encountered a cheese slicer about six or eight months ago, and it is now almost as well-healed as my fingertip. The thumb tissue still hurts a bit when I press on it but I still have most of the feeling; by contrast, the fingertip stopped hurting years before I started keto but was completely numb. Now it just feels a bit weird.
Now, I can’t claim that keto restored the nerve tissue in my finger, but my thumb tip is definitely healing a great deal faster than my finger did, and the two injuries were equally serious. That rapid healing can be ascribed to keto, I think. And the fact that I have almost as much sensation in my thumb tip as I ever did can also be ascribed to keto, perhaps. I suspect it has something to do both with lack of interference from glucose and insulin, and also to an abundance of energy from eating to satiety and not trying to cut calories.
And for the record, I have never taken a collagen or biotin supplement, just gotten whatever amounts were in my food.
I take collagen. I started seeing stronger, faster growing nails in a few months. I’ve been told, and it’s probably true, that I no longer need it. BUT… you know… if you are doing three things and everything is working, it’s hard to stop one of the things.
I also had a spell of significant hair loss and started taking biotin and keratin. After I started collagen latter and saw such a big difference, I dropped the other two. But if I had something like you, I would take everything. But that’s how I roll. It’s only money, right?
I have the opposite. My nails are thin and they all have fault lines that grow in along the length. Then they break at those fault lines if I touch just about anything. I did the biotin and collagen experiment to make them tough enough so that they extend just a little past the end of my finger, enough to play guitar with them. If you’re not a guitarist you won’t know this, but there are different, less hard strings for playing that way. Nylon cores for the three lower notes and just nylon monofilament (like fishing line) for the higher notes. Electric and acoustic guitars that people try to play loudly use steel cores which are rougher on your nails.
Edit Forgot to add:
holy moly that had to hurt and be a PIA to have handled…wow.
Of course it hurt, but the really unsettling part is looking down and seeing the end of your finger kind of dangling there, no longer attached.
geez I feel ya cause being a farmer I had to deal with tons of issues on pain and ICK and OMGs to the max, not on me but the darn livestock…ugh…feel for everyone in massive pain and crazy issues like this one for ya!!
I never ‘been hurt’ bad, cracked ribs were my worst off my horse but I never had that ‘bleed incident and amputation’ that would freak me the heck out to the ultimate!!!
on the guitar note, don’t picks do for this issue, you use a pick for that cord strike you require? no clue on it, lol, I played the flute and never required a nail for any of that HA
True, it’s only money. But the real question is what do the blood levels of some of these substances mean? Are they the causes of problems, or the results? Does manipulating these levels help improve our health, or does taking supplements fool us into ignoring some real, underlying problem?
In the case of potassium, for example, we know that too little and too much are both potentially fatal, and we know this as the result of many unfortunate medical cases. But in the case of other supplements, we don’t really know what the levels mean.
In some cases, diet can even render a vitamin unnecessary. For example, no one knows why a diet of fresh meat prevents scurvy, but if you eat such a diet, you don’t need to get any of the traditional sources of Vitamin C at all. (I say “no one knows,” but actually, some recent research by Eric Verdin into the effects of β-hydroxybutyrate on the body appears to have yielded the explanation.)
Not only that, but some fascinating studies have shown that the effects of various minerals and vitamins, when they occur naturally in the foods we eat, can be much more beneficial to our health than the effects of taking the same minerals and vitamins in the form of supplements. Nobody can explain why that should be, but it is clearly the case.
Fresh meat from animals which make their own vitamin C (which most animals do) contains enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy, and even partly treat it if one goes into scurvy issues. In some cases (notably French soldiers eating fresh horse meat), it was discovered that meat alone, even partly cooked meat, could alleviate scurvy.
the C is in the meat…very low amts but all the body requires to prevent scurvy point blank. It is known actually. It is natural food intake point blank from what life should be…but when big travel and salted meats and bad food was on those scurvy ships? then the troubles began to be known thru human exploration comes human ill health. When one then eats XYZ that can change/unbalance hormones/other vits/mins in reactions does your C level drop into unknown levels thru that food intake, hence making that ‘bit of C thru fresh meat’ not ‘maybe enough’ which is what food intake is all about in present days now
against real natural foods and fat, fresh meat do we see all the ‘issues coming into play’ that work against each other.
fresh animal meats provides all ‘til ya monkey’ with it LOL
