Do Collagen Supplements Work?

Why do dogs chew on bones? Well, many speculate that it’s mainly for keeping their teeth clean. But there’s another reason: it’s a collagen supplement!

Collagen is the strong yet supple and resilient material that connects your bones, keeps your skin looking youthful and healthy, and—as the most abundant protein in your body—serves as the structure that holds your body together. So let’s talk about this miracle tissue and why we need to include it in our diet.

Does Collagen Work?

People often ask me this question, usually meaning, do collagen supplements work? I’ll address that shortly. But first, let’s consider the question literally: Does collagen itself work?

Absolutely. Collagen works so well that it has become essential to human biology over hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, the use of fire for cooking may have evolved partly to help us extract more collagen from food.

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Collagen is the most abundant protein in the bodies of the kinds of animals we’ve hunted for millennia. It’s only found in animals, never plants. In Catching Fire, Richard Wrangham argues that fire allowed early humans to digest tough proteins like collagen more efficiently, boosting total protein intake. Collagen is incredibly strong — with tensile strength greater than steel — and also difficult to digest. Nature helped solve that challenge by giving us a larger, more capable digestive system.

The Invention of Fire Gave Us a Collagen Boost

When fire entered the picture, this flipped a key evolutionary switch. Fire softens collagen, making it soft enough for us to consume and digest with significantly less intestinal yardage. According to the “expensive tissue hypothesis,” less intestine allowed the same amount of protein to be devoted to building more brain. Our brain size has nearly tripled since the advent of fire, according to some estimates.

So necessary is collagen to human health that much of our dietary history has been devoted to its extraction and acquisition. From the ancient and intricate Argentinian open fire techniques made famous world-renowned chef Francis Mallmann, to Genghis Kahn’s army’s practice of tenderizing tough (collagen-rich) meat by riding all day with thin slices under their saddles, to the simple act of boiling bones and joint material in water to make soup—one could say that collagen is what holds the modern human’s nutritional story together. 

Until relatively recently, in fact, collagen was a major part of our diets. Fannie Farmer’s 1986 Cook Book has no fewer than six recipes for tripe, that collagen-rich, rubbery honeycombed part of a cow stomach that is a key ingredient to making Mexico’s national dish, Menudo. 

So saying that collagen works is, as you can see, a bit of an understatement. It works like air, water, sleep, and sunlight work. 

How Does Collagen Work?

Collagen has special health-giving powers thanks to compounds in collagen-rich tissues that are absent from the rest of the edible world. 

These compounds include glycosaminoglycans, hyaluronic acid, proteoglycans, and bioactive peptides all of which are unique to collagen-rich tissues. They have been laboratory tested individually and in various combinations and shown to have the capacity to pass through the digestive system, travel through the bloodstream to enter and activate fibroblasts, a type of cell in our skin, joints, bones, and other connective tissues that manufactures collagen. In other words, these compounds have hormone-like effects.

It’s not that our bodies stop making collagen if we don’t ingest it. It’s that we seem to make less of it. And given that collagen damage to our joints is the number one cause of age-related disability, and collagen damage in our arteries can cause fatal aneurysms, heart attacks, and strokes, I recommend you do everything you can to support your body’s ability to make as much collagen as it can.

Does Collagen Supplementation Work?

First, let’s define what we mean by supplementation. To supplement means to give your body something it needs but isn’t getting enough of. Most supplements fail this test. They offer synthetic versions of compounds your body is perfectly capable of making on its own. Supplements are often contaminated with byproducts of the extensive refining they undergo, so you get lead or aluminum, or microplastics–not what you need. Additionally, we have no physiologic need for many supplements on the market today, for example, chromium, or berberine, or picnoginol.

But collagen, we do need. Most Americans are severely lacking in collagen. That’s because our diets changed. For decades, so-called nutrition experts have steered us away from three essential elements of a healthy diet: collagen, natural fat, and salt. The result? Meals that used to nourish us — like a slow-roasted turkey leg with rich, homemade gravy — have been replaced with dry, boneless, skinless chicken breasts that lack the collagen-rich skin, tendons, and bone.

In the past, we naturally consumed large amounts of collagen and other connective tissue nutrients. Today, our low collagen intake makes us especially responsive to the benefits of supplementation.

Some animals, like gorillas, can still make enough collagen while eating mostly plants. We can’t. Just like we can’t make our own vitamin C — a task dogs and cats still handle easily. That means we must get collagen through our diet or, when that’s not possible, from supplements.

But wait…You normally recommend AGAINST protein powders. So why is collagen powder different?

Collagen is not like other protein powders. Unlike whey protein powder, pea protein, and other protein powders that I do not recommend, collagen powder resists oxidation. It comes down to chemisty.

Collagen does not become damaged under high heat because collagen comes from durable stuff, like bone. Whey protein powder, for example, loses its nutritional value quickly upon being dehydrated. Collagen doesn’t lose its nutritional value that quickly, perhaps not until it literally incinerates–which occurs at 1400-1800 degrees Fahrenheit. The reason for this has to do with the amino acid backbone of the two very different types of proteins.

Whey protein contains many sulfur-containing amino acids (methionine and cysteine) and aromatic amino acids (tryptophan, tyrosine, phenylalanine, and histidine). These molecules oxidize quickly. Collagen protein contains many of the amino acids glycine, proline, and alanine, which resist oxidation. [citation for this here]

So collagen is kind of like the saturated fat of proteins, where whey protein and so on are more like the PUFA of proteins.

But not all supplements are created equal — and how a collagen supplement is made matters.

Are Collagen Powders Containing Peptides Effective?

All collagen powders are composed mostly of collagen peptides. Peptides are defined by two or more (up to fifty) amino acids linked together. Link a bunch of peptides together, and you get a protein. 

>So the big question is, If you take in collagen in the form of peptides, can your body use these building-block peptides to construct collagenous tissue? Studies strongly suggest that, yes, collagen peptides, which can be processed to a powder form easily dissolvable in water or included as an ingredient in collagen bars and other food products, can be taken up by the body and utilized to protect, build and maintain the connective tissues that makeup joints and skin. 

I’ve included just a sampling of the research here to show what we’ve found about the answers to these questions:

Do Collagen Supplements Work for Skin?

There is a lot of research in this area. This is just one of a number of articles showing the beneficial effects of collagen supplements on the skin, specifically the skin cells called fibroblasts responsible for creating the collagen that holds your skin cells together. The more collagen you have in your skin, the more supple and puncture-resistant your skin.

Do Collagen Supplements Work For Skin? This article suggests they do. It shows that after 4 days we see a 40% increase in growth in skin cells. Source “Food-Derived Collagen Peptides, Prolyl-Hydroxyproline (Pro-Hyp), and Hydroxyprolyl-Glycine (Hyp-Gly) Enhance Growth of Primary Cultured Mouse Skin Fibroblast Using Fetal Bovine Serum Free from Hydroxyprolyl Peptide” Figure 1, from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6982277/[/caption]

Do Collagen Supplements Work for Joints?

There’s also tons of research in this area. Interestingly, there’s more research on collagen for joint health in veterinary medicine than there is for us humans thanks to medical advances for thoroughbred horses and the fact that dogs participate in medical research more often than people do. As is the case for skin, components of collagen supplements including collagen hydrolysate, glycosaminoglycans, and hyaluronic acid, among others, have been shown to support fibroblast cells in various joint tissues in the same manner as with skin. (See Select Research on Collagen, below)

Can collagen supplements have similar results as eating foods with collagen?

>If you’ve read my books, Deep Nutrition, Food Rules, and The Fatburn Fix, you already know that my instinct is to say that nothing can begin to compare to getting all your essential nutrition from a nutrient-dense diet based on the four pillars of traditional, ancestral foods. When I introduced homemade bone stock to the LA Lakers, only the trainers and the head chef, Sandra Padilla, appreciated its benefits. But then, when Kobe Bryant and other stars publicly vocalized their belief in the palpable benefits of collagen-rich stock, the NBA—and the larger pro-sports community—got fully on board, everything changed. Bone stock became the new superfood, the ancestral elixir every bit as necessary for growth and recovery as protein. 

>That said, collagen supplements, it turns out, can offer similar benefits to the collagen, and other attendant soft-tissue-building compounds, as grandma’s homemade stock. And there is a raft of scientific studies that bear this out. 

But as with any supplement, the method of processing must be considered. Processing must protect the integrity of each individual compound that will wind up in the collagen supplement. 

>The best collagen supplements, therefore, begin with a whole-food product, like skin or joint material, and then employ gentle heat to break down (hydrolyze) the long, tough collagen molecules into shorter, easily digested chains, replicating the same processes that human being have used to maintain their joints, their skin and their overall health for millennia. 

Collagen has been almost entirely removed from our diets. But make no mistake, it is essential. If there were anything worthy of the title of “youth serum,” collagen, and its associated compounds (like glucosamine and hyaluronic acid) would be it. 

>So whether it’s from bone stock or a top-tier collagen supplement (like what CB Supplements offer), my recommendation on collagen is simple: Get it in you. 

You can save $5 on CB Supplements multi collagen protein when you use the coupon code “drcate”.

It’s the only supplement of any kind that I actually support and endorse.

Select Research on Collagen

Collagen is 5-10X stronger than steel: http://web.mit.edu/mbuehler/www/research/Collagen/summary_PNAS_Aug15.pdf

Proprietary blend shown to improve the appearance of aged skin: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170231886A1/en

Proprietary blend shown to improve joint function

https://patents.google.com/patent/US8778422B2/en

Literature review from 2006 on collagen for joint health

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17076983/

A controlled human trial on knee joint symptoms

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33562729/

A controlled human trial on ankle joint symptoms

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5950747/

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