When you think about looking after your heart, chances are a few familiar things come to mind. Exercise, blood pressure, stress, connection. And while these are all important considerations, there's so much more to cardiovascular health than we tend to talk about. Your heart doesn't work in isolation. It's part of an extraordinary network of blood vessels, supported by structural proteins, specialised cells and countless biochemical processes that help keep blood moving around your body.

What does collagen have to do with your heart?

We tend to associate collagen with skin, wrinkles and perhaps joint health. Yet collagen is one of the most abundant proteins in the human body, and its role extends far beyond these more familiar functions. Your blood vessels rely on collagen for structural strength and integrity.

Think about what your arteries do every moment of every day. With each heartbeat, they experience the pressure of blood being pumped through them. Their walls need to be strong enough to withstand that pressure, while also having the capacity to expand and recoil. Collagen helps provide that structural strength, while another protein called elastin contributes to their ability to stretch and recoil. Both are essential components of healthy blood vessel walls – and here's where nutrition comes in.

Your body needs the raw materials to make collagen

Collagen is a protein made up of amino acids, particularly glycine, proline and hydroxyproline. To produce collagen, your body needs an adequate supply of amino acids from dietary protein, but that doesn't mean you need to take a collagen supplement. When you consume collagen, your digestive system breaks it down into amino acids and smaller peptides. These are absorbed and used by your body according to its needs. Some may contribute to collagen production, but others will be used for entirely different purposes. Taking collagen doesn't guarantee your body will turn it into collagen. And having the building blocks available is only part of the picture. Your body also needs specific nutrients to support the collagen production process itself.

Vitamin C is essential for the hydroxylation of proline and lysine, a crucial part of the process that helps stabilise collagen's characteristic triple-helix structure. Think of it as vitamin C allowing it all to lock together and without it, collagen is weak and breaks down easily. Vitamin C also directly stimulates fibroblasts, a type of skin cell, to turn on genes that build new collagen.

Iron is also required by the enzymes responsible for the structure stabilisation reactions. Without sufficient iron, collagen synthesis is interrupted.

Copper plays a different but equally important role. It's needed by an enzyme called lysyl oxidase, which helps form the cross-links that give collagen fibres their strength and stability.

Zinc deserves an honourable mention here too. Although it isn't a direct cofactor for the main collagen-forming hydroxylases, it contributes to normal protein synthesis, tissue repair and wound healing,

And all of this is happening continuously throughout your body, not just in your skin.

And the story doesn't end there

Your blood vessels have a remarkably active inner lining. Inside every blood vessel is a thin layer of specialised cells called the endothelium. You might imagine this as simply a lining that separates your blood from the vessel wall. In reality, it's an incredibly active tissue with a significant influence on cardiovascular function. One of its important jobs is helping regulate blood vessel tone, which influences how easily blood can flow. It does this partly through the production and regulation of substances such as nitric oxide, a molecule that signals the smooth muscle in blood vessel walls to relax.

When these processes function well, blood vessels can respond appropriately to the body's changing needs.  But endothelial function is influenced by far more than one molecule or nutrient. Blood glucose regulation, insulin sensitivity, inflammation, oxidative stress and numerous lifestyle factors all play a part. Which brings us to another important consideration.

Your metabolic health matters to your heart

We often separate cardiovascular health and metabolic health into different conversations. Yet they're deeply intertwined. Take insulin resistance, for example. Insulin is a hormone that helps regulate blood glucose, but its actions extend beyond glucose metabolism. Insulin signalling also interacts with pathways involved in blood vessel function. When insulin resistance develops, these signalling pathways can become disrupted. Over time, the metabolic changes that often accompany insulin resistance can contribute to endothelial dysfunction and increased cardiovascular risk.

Persistently elevated blood glucose can also hurt proteins and tissues through processes such as glycation, while contributing to oxidative stress. This is why supporting healthy blood glucose regulation is about so much more than avoiding type 2 diabetes. Movement, maintaining muscle mass, quality sleep and nourishing food all have important roles to play in metabolic health, which in turn influences cardiovascular health.

Antioxidant protection is another piece of the picture

Your body naturally produces free radicals as part of normal metabolism. This isn't inherently a problem. In fact, some of these molecules have important signalling functions. The concern arises when the production of reactive molecules far exceeds the body's capacity to nullify them, contributing to oxidative stress. Oxidative stress can damage cells throughout the body, including those within your cardiovascular system. This is where your antioxidant defence systems come in. Vitamin C is one of the nutrients that contributes to antioxidant protection. Other nutrients, including vitamin E, also contribute to antioxidant defence, while minerals such as zinc, copper and selenium are also involved in the healthy management of oxidative stress.

Rather than focusing on one antioxidant in isolation, I encourage you to think about the broader nutritional picture. Your body relies on a range of nutrients working together to support its robust functions. And this is one of the many reasons why the quality and variety of the foods we eat matter.

Looking after your heart means looking at the whole body

Your cardiovascular system is remarkable in its complexity. Its function depends not only on the strength of your heart muscle, but also on the structure of your blood vessels, the health of their inner lining, your metabolic health and the availability of nutrients involved in maintaining these systems. So yes, keep moving your body. Pay attention to your blood pressure, stress, and connection with others. These remain important. Yet, don't overlook the quieter processes happening behind the scenes. Because when we understand just how interconnected the body really is, we can begin to appreciate why caring for our cardiovascular health involves so much more than exercise.