Dr. Alan Whitfield

9g Collagen with Calcium, D3, K2 and Magnesium

Here are the three rules I give every patient who is losing weight fast. Most people follow the first two. The ones who skip rule three are the ones I see again, on my table, with a screw spinning in their hip. If you've lost 20 pounds or more this year, this is for you. I'm Dr. Alan Whitfield. I'm 58. I've been an orthopedic trauma surgeon for 26 years. I'm the one they call at 2am when a hip breaks. Bernice Voight skipped rule three. Nobody told her it existed. She was 64. A retired church secretary with a granddaughter getting married in June. She started one of the new weekly weight-loss shots in January of last year, and her doctor ran it carefully. She lost 61 pounds in 10 months. She did a lot right. 8,000 steps a day. Resistance bands at the senior center on Tuesdays. She bought new jeans twice. But breakfast was half a protein shake and black coffee. Lunch was 4 crackers. Dinner was 5 bites and the fork went down. I added it up later from what she told me. Maybe 30 grams of protein on a good day. Almost nothing for the frame of her bones. The calcium tablet she'd taken for years, and nothing else. Her doctor did nothing wrong. The shot did exactly what it was supposed to do. Nobody had asked her about the rest of her plate. On a Thursday last October she carried the recycling bin down the 2 steps off her deck. Her hip broke before she hit the patio. That happens more than people think. The neck of the thigh bone gives out under ordinary weight, and the fall comes after. The fall gets the blame. She lay on the pavers for 3 hours. Her phone was on the kitchen counter. It was 41 degrees. The mail carrier heard her calling at 2:40 in the afternoon. When she got to me, the skin over her right hip was scraped raw from dragging herself toward the door. The urine in her catheter bag was the color of strong tea. When you lie on a hard surface that long, muscle starts breaking down and spilling into the blood, and the kidneys take the hit. In the OR the next morning, I opened the hip. When a saw goes through bone, there's a smell. Burnt hair and hot chalk. 26 years and I still notice it. Healthy bone fights the blade. Hers didn't. The femoral neck had snapped clean across, and the inside looked like a sponge somebody had wrung out and left in the sun. I drove the first screw and felt it turn, and turn, and never bite. We pulled the screws, took the head of the femur out and cemented a metal stem down the shaft, because there was nothing left to grip. Two days later I asked her what she'd been eating. She told me, proudly. "Doc, I can barely eat. That's the whole point." Then she said the thing they all say. "I barely fell." She spent 23 days in rehab learning to walk with a frame. The therapist had her practice getting from a chair to the bed, 10 times, twice a day. She told me it was the hardest work she'd done in her life. Bernice watched her granddaughter's wedding on a tablet propped on a rehab tray table. She never drove again. She sold the house with the deck and moved into her daughter's den. The jeans she bought twice went in a donation bag. She lost 61 pounds. She also lost her house, her car and her June. Nobody told her. Here's what keeps me up. I'd met Bernice before. In 2012 her name was Corinne Haskins. She was 59. She lost 40 pounds the old way, cottage cheese and grapefruit and a lot of willpower. She asked me what to do about her bones, and I gave her one word. "Calcium." Then 2 more. "Walk more." She did both. A chalky white tablet every morning. 2 miles every evening. She never missed. Her husband said she'd walk in the rain with an umbrella before she'd skip a night. 3 years later she broke her hip kneeling in her tomato bed. She died 10 months later in a nursing home, of pneumonia. Her son was holding her hand. About 1 in 5 people over 65 who break a hip die within a year. About half of the ones who live never get their old independence back. Bernice did more than Corinne. Bands. Steps. A doctor watching her every month. Same hip. Same screw that wouldn't bite. Since 2004 I've kept a notebook in my desk drawer. One line for every patient over 50 I operate on after a minor fall. In April of last year I added a column: how much weight she'd lost, and how fast. Since then, 87 names have more than 30 pounds in that column. Bernice is one of them. So here are the rules. Write them down. Rule 1: Protein first. Every meal, before anything else on the plate. If you can only manage 6 bites, the first 4 are protein. Eggs, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, fish, chicken. Ask your doctor or a dietitian for your number. Here's why the order matters. On a weight-loss plan, your appetite runs out early. Whatever you eat first is often all you eat. If the first 4 bites are toast, the protein never makes it. Frances Kidd skipped this one. She was 59, a retired travel agent, down 38 pounds on a weekly shot. Her protein for a whole day was a cup of yogurt and some soup. She told me she felt lighter than she had since college. At 7 months she couldn't open her own car door against the wind. At 8 months she reached for a gallon of milk on the top shelf of the fridge, lost her balance, and caught herself on the counter with her left hand. Her wrist broke in 3 places. Her doctor had given her a protein number. She'd never once hit it. She thought the scale going down meant she was doing it right. The weight she lost wasn't only fat. Nobody had asked what she was keeping. One warning I give everyone here. Collagen isn't a complete protein, and it doesn't replace protein-rich meals. It doesn't count toward rule 1. Eggs first. Rule 2: Lift something, and practice the floor. Twice a week, if your doctor says you can. Bands, dumbbells, a backpack full of canned soup. Muscle and bone both respond to load. Lifting tells your body what to keep. Then practice sitting down on the floor and getting back up, beside a sturdy chair. In a large study in Brazil, researchers scored adults between about 50 and 80 from 0 to 10 on that one move, taking a point off for every hand or knee they needed. The score predicted who was still alive years later. Thea Lindqvist skipped this one. She was 68, down 35 pounds. She walked, but she'd never lifted anything heavier than her purse. One night she slid off the edge of her bed reaching for her phone charger. Nothing broke. She just couldn't get up. Her arms shook. Her knees wouldn't take her. She lay on her bedroom carpet for 4 hours until her daughter let herself in on the way to work. She'd crawled to the dresser and tried to pull herself up on the knob. The drawer came out and landed on her foot. After that she just waited, watching the clock on the cable box go from 1:52 to 5:50. She came to my clinic the next week for her shoulder, and she cried telling me about it. Not about the shoulder. About the 4 hours. Practice it like it matters. It does. Rule 3: Replace what your plate stopped giving you. This is the one people skip. Weight loss, especially fast, can include lean tissue as well as fat. And bone is living tissue. Your body replaces most of your skeleton about every 10 years, and it builds the new bone out of what you eat. Eat a third of what you used to, and far fewer nutrients reach the skeleton. Think about what you're keeping, not just what you're losing. You don't feel it. You feel lighter and better than you have in a decade. Bone loss has no symptoms. The fracture is often the first sign. Here's what most people get wrong about rule 3. They hear "bones" and think one word. Calcium. Calcium matters. It helps build and maintain strong bones. But it's the mineral. Bone also has a frame, and the frame is collagen. Collagen is about 90% of bone's organic structure. The calcium sits on it like concrete poured over rebar. Concrete without rebar looks solid. Until it's asked to bend. Your body makes less collagen every year, and it drops faster after menopause. Then you cut your food by two thirds. And calcium on its own doesn't get far. Without enough vitamin D3, you absorb only a small fraction of it. K2, the MK-7 form, activates osteocalcin, a protein that helps bind calcium into bone. Vitamin C is needed to form collagen. Copper links the fibers together. About 60% of your body's magnesium is in your bones. And studies on collagen peptides commonly use 2.5 to 15 grams a day. That's what your plate stopped giving you. All of it. Now here's what my patients bring me when they try to do rule 3 on their own. A calcium tablet. Corinne took one every morning for 3 years. Mineral, no frame. A pink tub of collagen with a woman's face on the label. For skin. No minerals at all. A "joint" pill that lists collagen on the front. On the back, a sprinkle, a fraction of a gram, near the bottom of the label. Or 5 bottles. Calcium, D3, K2, magnesium and a collagen powder. Most of them are forgotten by Thursday. One retired school nurse brought me her 5 bottles in a grocery bag at her follow-up. She's the most organized patient I have. She'd made a chart for them, with boxes to tick. The chart had 4 full days on it, then nothing. And some mornings the shot leaves my patients queasy. Nobody wants to swallow horse pills on an empty stomach. Wrong form. Wrong frame. Forgotten by Thursday. What I tell patients now is what my scrub nurse, Gloria, has stirred into her coffee every morning for 2 years, since her sister broke her wrist. DensiaPlus. 9 grams of collagen peptides for the frame, with vitamin C and copper, which your body needs to make and link collagen. Calcium and magnesium for the mineral. D3 so you absorb the calcium. K2 to help bind it into bone. Zinc and boron. Unflavored. It dissolves in the coffee you're probably still drinking even if you've stopped eating breakfast. Here's how I tell patients to check any rule 3 product, this one included. Turn it over and look for 7 things. Collagen, in grams, not milligrams. Vitamin C. Copper. Calcium. Magnesium. Vitamin D3. Vitamin K2. If one is missing, the frame or the mineral is going without. If the collagen is listed in milligrams, it's a sprinkle. This one has all 7, in one scoop. That's rule 3 in one scoop. It doesn't touch rules 1 and 2. Nothing does. You still eat the eggs and you still lift. And it doesn't touch your prescription. Your doctor runs that. Keep taking whatever you've been prescribed. I take it myself, every morning. I'm 58. I've seen what's on the other side of "I barely fell." Gloria told me about it at the scrub sink after a case where the screw spun. She didn't make a speech. She said she was tired of watching it happen to women her age. The way to make rule 3 stick is the way she does it. Put the bag next to the coffee maker. Same cup, same time, before anything else. Don't make it a new habit. Hang it on an old one. Last month I saw Rosemary Ferro in clinic for a knee consult. She's 66, on a weekly shot, down 44 pounds. Before I said hello she handed me an index card. Her sister had gotten my 3 rules from me and copied them out for her. Eggs before anything. Bands in the garage on Tuesdays and Saturdays. A scoop in her coffee every morning, and she hasn't missed one since July. She'd taped the card inside her kitchen cabinet, next to the coffee mugs, so she'd see it before her first cup. Her sister had underlined rule 3 twice. I asked her to sit on the floor and get up. She did it with one hand on her knee, the chair beside her untouched. She carried her own bag out to the car. I don't know what her bones will do. Nobody can promise that. But she's counting what she keeps, not only what comes off. Frances does rule 1 now. She sets an alarm for protein at lunch, because she says her appetite will never remind her. Her wrist healed in a cast. She lifts soup cans at the kitchen counter while the kettle heats. Thea does rule 2. Her daughter bought her a yoga mat, and she gets down on it and back up 10 times every night before bed, with a dining chair beside her. She keeps her phone in her robe pocket. Both of them added rule 3 the week they heard about it. Bernice eats her eggs first now, in her daughter's den, and does her chair-to-bed practice every night. She uses a walker. She calls me every few months to ask whether I've told anyone about rule 3 yet. Bernice asked me to tell people about rule 3. She said, "Tell them before the recycling bin." Count what you keep. If you're on a shot and breakfast is coffee now. If your plate is half empty and you're proud of it. If you've lost 20, 30, 50 pounds and nobody has asked what your bones are getting. If you grab the counter to get up from a low chair. If you've stopped kneeling in the garden because you're not sure you'll get back up. If your rings spin on your fingers and the nurse measured you a little shorter this year. I'm asking. Write the 3 rules on a card tonight. Protein first. Lift and practice the floor. Replace what your plate stopped giving you. Tape it where you make your coffee. Follow rules 1 and 2. And don't do rule 3 the way my patients did at first. 5 bottles nobody takes. A skin powder with no minerals. A calcium pill with no frame. I don't want to read your name in my notebook. I don't want to hear you tell me "I barely fell." DensiaPlus is 9 grams of collagen peptides with calcium, magnesium, vitamin D3, vitamin K2 (MK-7), vitamin C, zinc, copper and boron. One scoop a day, stirred into coffee, tea or water. That's the whole routine. Right now it's up to 70% off: buy 2 bags, get 1 free, or buy 3, get 2 free. Every bag comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, empty or full. Lose the weight. Feed the frame. Dr. Alan Whitfield, 58, orthopedic trauma surgeon P.S. If you take a blood thinner like warfarin, talk to your doctor before starting anything with vitamin K, this included. Calcium can affect how some medications are absorbed, so ask your doctor or pharmacist about timing. Keep taking everything you've been prescribed. P.P.S. Bernice lost 61 pounds and nobody told her about rule 3. Rosemary lost 44 and carries an index card with all 3 on it. Copy them out for someone you love. P.P.P.S. Up to 70% off: buy 2, get 1 free, or buy 3, get 2 free. 90-day money-back guarantee, empty or full.