Mikkipedia | Fasting Claims, Collagen for Cellulite, and Who to Trust in Women's Health

Episode Summary

A solo Mini-Mikkipedia. Mikki is often asked how to tell whether someone in the women's health space is worth following, and in this episode she answers it by working through two examples of what she thinks has gone wrong: practitioners who build large audiences on free information and then, in her view, monetise their followers' insecurities.

The first half is physiology. Mikki takes two specific claims made about fasting — that it preserves muscle through growth hormone, and that it raises GLP-1 enough to make a medication unnecessary — and explains why she thinks both are wrong: the anabolic effect needs IGF-1, which needs protein and energy, and GLP-1 is a nutrient-sensing hormone that responds to food arriving in the gut. She is careful to separate that from where she thinks fasting genuinely earns its place, and to state the version of the GLP-1 claim that can be defended. The second half looks at a collagen supplement marketed for cellulite: what the one cellulite trial actually found, what a 2025 review found once industry-funded trials were separated out, and why she thinks cellulite is the wrong thing to be selling women anything for. She closes with the people she does think are worth following. Mikki is explicit that this is her opinion — "I'm just telling you what I think" — and equally explicit that she is not making a supplement of her own.

Key Topics

How to judge whether someone in the women's health space is worth following, and the pattern Mikki looks for: free information that turns out to be a funnel
Why Mikki fact-checked Fast Like a Girl and concluded the evidence base was mechanistic, preclinical or wrong, and what she has seen in clients who followed the protocol
Where fasting genuinely earns its place — severe insulin resistance, some gut issues, and as a researched adjunct in cancer treatment — and why 12 hours overnight is not really fasting
The growth hormone argument: why an increase in growth hormone without an increase in IGF-1 does not build or protect muscle, and why the reported percentage increases are inflated by a near-zero baseline
Why fasting cannot raise GLP-1, since GLP-1 is secreted by enteroendocrine L-cells in response to protein, fat and fermentable fibre arriving in the gut — and the one version of the claim that can be defended
The collagen supplement marketed on the back of a story about cellulite, and Mikki's objection to the marketing rather than to collagen itself
What the cellulite trial actually found: 105 women, 2.5 g of collagen peptides daily for six months, a 9% reduction in cellulite score at normal BMI and 4% above BMI 25 — and nothing replicating it in the decade since
The 2025 review of 23 trials where collagen improved skin hydration, elasticity and wrinkles overall, but showed no effect in the trials without industry funding
Why Mikki thinks cellulite is the wrong focus altogether, and her answer to the pushback that she talks about women's bodies herself
Who she suggests following instead, and why she has turned down several approaches to make her own supplement

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Fast Like a Girl
03:15 Where fasting is genuinely useful
05:33 Growth hormone, IGF-1 and the GLP-1 claim
09:46 Mary Claire Haver's cellulite supplement
13:20 Collagen, funding and the wrong focus
16:55 Who to follow in women's health

Guest / Resources

Guest

No guest — a solo Mini-Mikkipedia episode.

People discussed

Dr Mindy Pelz — author of the Fast Like a Girl system, discussed critically throughout the first half
Dr Mary Claire Haver — discussed in relation to a collagen supplement marketed for cellulite
Dom D'Agostino — referenced for his research on ketogenic diets and fasting, including fasting as an adjunct to cancer treatment

People Mikki recommends following

Hailey Babcock — Hailey Happens Fitness, strength training and nutrition for women in midlife
Dr Abbie Smith-Ryan — Professor of Exercise Physiology and Nutrition, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dr Stacy Sims — exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist, known for her work on female athletes
Jen Kirsch and Holly Nicholson — also named by Mikki as people worth following

Studies and research discussed

Schunck M, Zague V, Oesser S, Proksch E. Dietary Supplementation with Specific Collagen Peptides Has a Body Mass Index-Dependent Beneficial Effect on Cellulite Morphology. Journal of Medicinal Food, 2015;18(12):1340–1348. The cellulite trial Mikki describes: 105 women aged 24–50 with moderate cellulite, randomised to 2.5 g bioactive collagen peptides or placebo daily for six months
Myung S-K, Park Y. Effects of Collagen Supplements on Skin Aging: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. The American Journal of Medicine, 2025. 23 randomised controlled trials, 1,474 participants. Collagen improved skin hydration, elasticity and wrinkles overall, but trials without industry funding showed no effect on any of the three
Collagen peptides, pain and function in active adults — research from Michael Ormsbee's lab at Florida State University, in physically active adults aged 40–65, using 10 g of collagen peptides daily for six months. This is the pain and function work Mikki refers to, and the source of the 10 g comparison she draws

Ingredients discussed

Fortibone — collagen peptide type discussed for bone and tendon health
Verisol — collagen peptide type studied for skin, and used in the cellulite trial above

Concepts covered

GLP-1 and enteroendocrine L-cells · growth hormone and IGF-1 · insulin resistance · time-restricted eating · mechanistic and preclinical versus clinical evidence · industry funding and publication bias

Contact Mikki:
https://mikkiwilliden.com/
https://www.facebook.com/mikkiwillidennutrition
https://www.instagram.com/mikkiwilliden/
https://linktr.ee/mikkiwilliden
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Creators and Guests

Host

Mikki Williden

What is Mikkipedia?

Mikkipedia is an exploration in all things health, well being, fitness, food and nutrition. I sit down with scientists, doctors, professors, practitioners and people who have a wealth of experience and have a conversation that takes a deep dive into their area of expertise. I love translating science into a language that people understand, so while some of the conversations will be pretty in-depth, you will come away with some practical tips that can be instigated into your everyday life. I hope you enjoy the show!

Hey everybody, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mini-Mikkipedia on a Monday, and today I just want to share my thoughts and feelings around other people in the women's health space.

You know, I am often asked how one might determine whether somebody is worth a follow and whether we should take what they're saying as being sort of useful information.

And I have to say that some people sort of appear on our screens and they seem pretty legit, but then when you get to the heart of what they're all about, it's actually just really to sell you stuff and prey on your insecurities and under the guise of trying to help you and lift you up.

And this is what absolutely grinds my gears, so I thought I'd do a little Mini-Mikkipedia on it.

So, you know, I just want to mention a couple of things.

You guys, I feel like you know how...

What I sort of think of...

I'm just going to say Dr. Mindy Peltz, right?

So she's got this whole system, fast like a girl, eat like a girl, age like a girl.

I'm not quite sure what her last book is called, actually.

And I was mildly curious as to the fasting like a girl, thinking that, you know, maybe she knows, she's come across research that others aren't familiar with.

And this was certainly in the, I suppose, maybe the height of my own interest in fasting as a healthist.

Which, I will say right now, eating has done so much more for me than fasting ever did as a very active 49-year-old woman.

However, I bought her book, I opened it up, and I started reading it.

And then I just started fact-checking all of the things that she was saying, and none of it came to fruition.

Much of the research that she cited was mechanistic, i.e. from like a test tube.

People...

Or it was preclinical.

So they were rodent and mice models.

Now, these are very important ways with which research is conducted.

You know, you want to try and find a mechanism to then see how it plays out in a human clinical trial, if that is possible, because it isn't always.

But regardless, a lot of her research that she was drawing on was either mechanistic or preclinical, or just was plain wrong.

Like, a complete misunderstanding of how hormones worked.

And I've got friends who are very knowledgeable on hormones.

It's their absolute area of expertise.

And they were, like, shaking their heads in disbelief as to some of the claims that was being made.

Now, I'm often asked about Dr. Mindy Peltz's Fast Like a Girl, and there is absolutely nothing to support what she is talking about in the book.

And many individual clients have come to me to try to...

resolve some of their hormonal challenges and some of their challenges, and have questions about that fasting protocol, or who have said that they've done it.

And it's really just sort of put them in a bit of a metabolic hole.

I do wonder whether some of the information out there, it's just, it's reaching an audience that it should never reach.

So just to, I guess, back the truck up a little bit around the fasting thing.

So please don't misunderstand me in terms...

Or maybe I just wasn't clear.

So this is my, this is my take on fasting.

It is a very helpful therapeutic tool for someone who may be severely insulin resistant, for people who might have gut related issues.

And, you know, like there is certainly research around using fasting as a tool to help sensitize cancer cells to treatment and help protect healthy cells.

Dom D'Agostino talks a lot about that.

He's an absolute legend in research around ketogenic diets and fasting.

So, yeah, I think it's a really helpful tool.

I think it's a really helpful tool.

Fasting therapies is adjuncts to your standard therapy.

But fasting as a rule for women who are active is just, don't think there's, I just think almost no one benefits from it, actually.

And I'm not talking about 12 hours.

I mean, 12 hours in and of itself shouldn't really be considered fasting.

Really, like if you're finishing dinner by 7pm and not having breakfast till like 8 the next morning, no big deal.

If you're...

If you're super active, you're probably better off having something before you train if you train in the morning.

So your eating window might actually be a little longer.

The benefits of exercise will far outweigh any potential benefit that an extended fasting window would give you anyway.

They're very similar in terms of the benefits you can get from fasting and exercise.

And if you are like me, who is very active, fasting will just put you in a metabolic hole way faster than you can imagine.

So, yeah.

Certainly not my go-to.

But I do know it has utility.

All that said, Mindy is another person.

Dr. Mindy is a person that just really, she toes the line between positioning herself as a super helpful person, putting out all of this free information.

But then just trying to make a buck, which obviously as a business person, I also want to make a living doing my business, doing what I love.

But I try to do it with integrity based on sound information.

And I just like, I just feel like this line.

It gets very easily blurred when you've got massive audiences and you are sort of spouting some information.

And Dr. Mindy also says that fasting increases growth hormone and therefore it's preserving muscle mass.

It raises, you know, testosterone and it, you know, in a good way.

And it helps protect muscle during a fast.

However, what you need to help build muscle and get that anabolic.

Switch is also a shift or an increase in IGF-1.

And IGF-1 actually needs protein and energy to help enhance its action or actually, you know, work properly.

So fasting actually lowers IGF-1.

So you might get this increase in growth hormone, but you're not getting the subsequent increase in IGF-1, which would therefore promote muscle building.

So fasting absolutely does not protect muscle the way that she says.

So that's just.

It's like completely false.

And I don't know whether it's just this ignorance as to how physiology works or if it's directly misleading people.

If you want the anabolic effects of growth hormone, you need IGF-1 and IGF-1 needs that protein and energy.

So, you know, she talks about these massive percentages of sort of increase between change, change from baseline to a change in growth hormone.

After a fast.

But those numbers are so, so incredibly small that it's more an artifact of dividing by a near zero baseline, actually.

So, yeah.

One last thing I will say about Dr. Mindy before turning my attention to someone else, just one other person, is and you guys know I'm hot on GLPs and I'm a huge fan of them.

And I really enjoy looking at the research and helping people sort of navigate that ever increasing field of work.

Weight loss because it's becoming much more popular.

Something else that Dr. Mindy says is that fasting raises GLP-1 and therefore you shouldn't need to and should not desire to take a medication because you can work with your body's own physiology and increase its own GLP-1.

So fasting does not and cannot raise GLP-1 because GLP-1 is a nutrient sensing hormone.

So I don't even know where this claim comes from.

So GLP-1, as you know, is secretive.

It's activated by enteroendocrine L-cells in the distal small intestine and colon in response to nutrients arriving in the gut lumen.

So protein, fat, fermentable fiber, these are the main triggers.

If you remove food, you remove that stimulus.

So if there is a pitch saying that your body produces a powerful fat burning hormone called GLP-1 and fasting activates it, the right food amplifies it.

Those second and third.

Clauses absolutely contradict each other.

The foods amplify it.

Absolutely.

The fasting is really like the absolute trough between each ability to amplify that GLP-1, i.e.

between every time you eat.

So what can be defended is that fasting or time restricted eating might improve that L-cell responsiveness so that when you do eat, you get a more robust GLP-1 signaling response.

But to claim that fasting enhances GLP-1 to the point that it acts like a medication, as she implies, is just flat out misleading and false.

And this is what she is selling.

And I just have to say that she's a smart woman.

My brain goes to, well, maybe she just doesn't realize that her physiology is wrong.

But actually, I don't believe that for a second.

Dr. Mindy is smart.

She has built an empire.

She has over.

A million, maybe even closer to 1.5 million women following her and taking her advice.

And she's deliberately misleading them to sell products.

And that is not done on the back of ignorance.

She is deliberately misleading them.

So that just really bloody, it just grinds my gears.

And the reason I got on this rant in the first place, which brings me to my second person.

And don't worry, it's not going to be that long.

It's bloody Dr. Mary-Claire Haver.

I just happened to land on an advert for her this morning that said that she'll never

forget the day that her daughter was complaining about her cellulite.

So she made it her mission to look into the research and find what it was that would help

her daughter resolve her cellulite.

And I'm like, what the hell?

And I see that Dr. Mary-Claire Haver, one of her best-selling supplements, is this mixture

of two different types of collagen, fortabone, and verisol.

Both of them have been attractive.

They're attributed as showing beneficial effects for both bone and for skin.

And so Dr. Mary-Claire's answer to her daughter's worries about her cellulite isn't to take

her aside and say, there are way more important things that you need to be worried about.

Let's focus on something meaningful.

Let's go for a run and have a workout and really discuss things that are going to help

further you and not burden yourself with these hyper-focus on some body part.

No, no.

She develops a supplement.

So that's my main, that's, you know, I have a big beef with that, actually.

Like, again, another woman who reports to be out there to lift women's health up and

to sort of be at the forefront of perimenopausal and menopausal woman challenges and help them

rise above this time in life and really thrive is, in a heartbeat, selling supplements because

we should all be worried about cellulite.

I've got the solution to your issue with cellulite.

It's her response rather than, shit, you do not need to be worried about cellulite.

Anyway, I went looking in the literature for this.

Now, ForteBone, amazing.

There's a lot of good clinical data to show its impacts on bone health, on tendon health.

There are clinical trials.

There's preclinical trials.

There are case studies.

You've got Mike Ormsby's lab who has found that in middle-aged athletes like us, it helps

reduce perception.

It helps relieve pain.

And so, I mean, that's a huge outcome if you are as active as we are.

So ForteBone, great.

Verisol is another type of collagen that's been studied for its impact on skin health.

And there has been one study, and it was 10 years ago in the Journal of Medicinal Food,

not sure what impact factor that has, on 105 women who have normal weight BMI, and they

had moderate cellulite.

I'm not sure how they determine what your cellulite.

And they were randomized to receive 2.5 grams of bioactive collagen peptides or a placebo

daily for six months.

And over the course of that six months, these women showed a 9% mean reduction in cellulite

scores versus the placebo.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I read that wrong.

In fact, there was a mixture of both normal weight BMI participants and participants with

a BMI over 25.

So that would place them in an overweight category.

And they, in fact, had a 4% decrease in cellulite, apparently, in cellulite score.

So there is one trial to show that the appearance of cellulite was reduced when you took 2.5

grams of these collagen peptides, that type that I just mentioned, Verisol.

The thing is, though, there has been one trial over the last 10 years, 11 years at this point.

Nothing has ever come close to replicating that.

And in fact, the wider collagen.

The literature apparently has a bit of a funding problem, and I didn't realize this.

Now, this is purely looking at the skin related information around collagen, which I was

actually like, oh, yeah, there's a lot of research on skin and how it can really help

improve the elasticity and the appearance of skin.

But you know what?

These researchers, Mayang and Parks, in 2025 in the American Journal of Medicine, they

pulled 23 randomized control trials with close to 1500 participants.

And whilst they found collagen significantly improved skin hydration, elasticity and wrinkles,

they also found that trials without pharmaceutical or supplement industry funding showed no

effect on any of those three things.

So the only trials that find benefit for collagen for skin are trials that are funded by the

manufacturers of those products.

So, look, we need funding and research.

Funding will come from everywhere.

So I'm not saying that.

I'm not suggesting, no, I am actually, I am suggesting that that's going to bias the

data to show that collagen is, in fact, helpful for skin.

I just think we need to take the skin related benefits to collagen with a grain of salt.

I'm not suggesting that you're not going to notice a benefit, but the research doesn't

really sort of support it.

And for what it's worth, if you are after the cellulite appearance benefits of collagen,

nine percent is probably not going to make a difference.

Actually, you're probably not going to notice a difference in your cellulite appearance if

nine percent is all you've got to work for.

And for what it's worth, two and a half grams of collagen is not that much compared to the

10 grams that Ormsby's lab used to help with that reduction in pain from that sort of

fortabone collagen.

So I like collagen.

I'm a little bit on the fence now about its benefits for skin.

And I 100 percent do not recommend you take collagen to help improve your appearance of

your cellulite.

Because I just really wish that you just didn't even care about that anyway.

Now, look, I am not in your body.

I do not know what you go through day to day.

So I do appreciate that fact.

But it's just such a meaningless, meaningless thing to worry about.

There are just so many other things that you could be thinking about other than the appearance

of your cellulite.

Like, think about this is a thing with women's health is that for decades, we have been worried

about body size, body shape, cellulite, how close.

All of these things.

And what about all the other things that we could be thinking about?

Like, I don't know, world peace or, you know, building the next something that's going to

like make our lives a whole lot more simple.

I don't know.

But this is something which has probably held women back for decades at this point.

So why are we even talking about cellulite now?

And I do think it's different.

You know, I did get some pushback from people when I posted about this on social media saying,

hey, Mikki, come on, you talk about women's bodies all of the time.

And that is true because I work with so many women who just want to feel better.

They want to look different.

They want to lean out and they want to feel good in their genes, et cetera.

And so everyone has these aesthetic goals.

And I'm here for the aesthetic goals, but I am not here for the hyper focus on things

that we can't do much about to then on the back of that sell you a supplement.

Like, I would never do that.

And I think it says something about a woman's health expert that they do.

I really do think that says something about them.

So if you want to know who you should follow in terms of things of women's health and who

is really there to lift up women, I don't think it's either of these two, actually.

I think you want to look to Hayley Happens, Hayley Babcock.

She's amazing.

She really cares about you.

Look for Dr.

Abby Smith-Ryan.

She absolutely just wants to lift women up.

And Stacey Sims, Dr.

Stacey has done a ton for women in the space.

And you will love her.

You will never hear these women talk about cellulite at all.

Like, it is the furthest thing from their mind.

But there are so many other people that I could name here.

Jen Kirsch, Holly Nicholson.

You know, I'm thinking about my business peeps.

I don't give a shit about cellulite and neither should you.

And you should certainly not buy that supplement.

And I'm not going to turn around and tell you to buy my supplement because I'm not going to make a supplement.

Like, I decided that a while ago, actually, that, you know, I've been approached several times.

And it's I just.

Don't think that I would.

I don't trust myself, actually, that I would be able to draw a line in the sand for being able to promote something which I with integrity and then make a buck on the side.

Like, I don't know.

Like, I don't just think it's such a blurred line.

And I just wouldn't want to be in the position where I had to sort of cross it or not, you know.

So anyway, these are my thoughts.

These are my thoughts on drifting in the woman's health space.

And these are just two very small examples.

There are probably a million.

There are a million others anyway.

So, you know, feel free to share your thoughts.

I don't you can totally disagree with me if you like.

I honestly, I'm just telling you what I what I think.

So I'm over on Instagram.

Threads and X at Mikki Williden.

I'm on Facebook at Mikki Williden nutrition.

We'll head to my website, Mikki Williden dot com.

Scroll down to the bottom, pop your name on the email list.

And and then you can get all of these thoughts and feelings and research and things that are actually backed by real data in your inbox every Monday.

Because that's what I'm about.

I'm about integrity.

I'm about lifting you up and making you be your best self.

Anyway, you guys have a great day.

See you later.