The Truth About Collagen Supplements

Collagen Supplements Have no Scientific Evidence Supporting Their Purported Health Benefits

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Having been in the fitness space for a little over a half-decade now, I’ve seen trends in nutrition come and go. Keto, paleo, intermittent fasting, the carnivore diet — all have been all the rage at some point. After a while, however, they aren’t necessarily shunned or spoken about as being wrong. Rather, they simply disappear into a void. No one talks about them anymore and everyone stops following these protocols out of the blue.

Another candidate to enter into this void is collagen supplementation. In my article on testosterone boosters, I wrote that if a company is selling a testosterone boosting product, you probably should not trust them. Another product that falls under the exact same category is collagen, and specifically, collagen protein.

Last year, I interviewed Kurtis Frank, the current Director of Research at Legion Athletics and the Co-Founder of Examine.com. Kurtis probably knows more about supplementation than most scientists ever will, considering he has sifted through several thousands of scientific papers in order to develop the most comprehensive supplement-science database on the internet.

When I asked Kurtis which supplements are overhyped for purposes of recovering from injuries, this was his response:

Another one is collagen peptides. This has been becoming very popular recently, and I suspect that it is primarily due to finances. If you go to a slaughterhouse, you take the scraps of meat that are not used for consumption and repurpose it for something useful. Some chefs use the bone broth but, generally speaking, the cartilage is thrown out. To take this cartilage, dehydrate it and turn it into a supplement is profoundly cheap to do. It is analogous to selling what is worth 40 cents for 50 dollars. The way in which it is marketed, likewise, is tiered towards purporting specific benefits due to its containing a matrix of type I, II and III collagen. Type I will not help your joints, as all it contains is glycine. Type II peptides, when unprocessed — which is not common to collagen supplements — can help with rheumatism. Type III does essentially nothing. In short, collagen supplements for joints and injuries is beyond overhyped.

Given all of the hype surrounding collagen, this might be shocking to some. But the reality is that you are getting ripped off paying for your collagen supplements.

Don’t believe me or Kurtis? Well, the science agrees with us.

Data shows collagen supplements are basically useless

Firstly, we need to express why people believe that collagen is worth buying in the first place. It is advertised that collagen supplementation can help restore the body’s collagen stores, and by doing so, it can improve the health of joints, hair, skin, nails, bones, muscle growth, and recovery.

On all of these fronts, however, the research bears out that collagen is next to useless, if not simply useless.

One study on collagen’s effects on joint health and functionality showed that it doesn’t perform well against placebos and it is very likely that something like curcumin would work a lot better for joint health and functionality.

The studies used to validate collagen’s utility for improving skin, hair, and nail health is a study in which no blind group existed: which is to say, there was no placebo group. No double-blind placebo study that is repeatable exists to prove collagen’s validity in improving skin, hair, and nail health.

What about building muscle? As we saw Kurtis Frank say above, collagen supplements use the scraps of dead cows. These scraps do not have a good amino acid profile. When it comes to building muscle, the most important amino acid is leucine; collagen protein only consists of 2.7% leucine — compare this to whey (the best-absorbed form of protein) which consists of 10% leucine. Likewise, any study done on its efficacy is poorly designed — we don’t know how much protein participants are consuming in these studies, for example. There is no proof that collagen protein is superior for muscle building purposes; indeed, by all accounts, the data suggests that it is inferior as a protein for this purpose.

Is any form of collagen worth taking?

The short answer: for the most part, no. There is one form, however, that is worth taking. This is known as type-II undenatured collagen. To quote from Legion Athletics, “Undenatured collagen, however, is a more natural form of the substance, and studies show it’s highly effective for regulating the immune response that inflames joints and destroys cartilage and bone.”

Type-II undenatured collagen, however, is not what you normally see advertised as collagen. Rather, the very low quality — and basically useless — collagen protein, is.

The supposed — and basically disproven — benefits of collagen protein are much better saught in a high-quality multi-vitamin. A high-quality multi-vitamin will not only reap such benefits and improve your health, but it will also save you money! Collagen protein is usually priced starting at $50, whereas a high-quality multi-vitamin is usually priced starting at $30. The difference here is between what is cheaper and actually works, and what is over-priced and over-rated.