Keep Your Face from Looking Like an Old Catcher's Mitt

The collagen user's manual.

I used to malign the protein known as collagen:

“Why Mongo eat collagen? Collagen not grow muscle like slab of ox that Mongo eat for breakfast. “

Back then I might have argued that collagen lacks certain essential amino acids, that it was an incomplete protein and even the amino acids it does contain are in too short a supply to build muscle.

I also use to repeatedly pointed out that protein bar companies often jam collagen into their products (mostly for taste and texture) but then include it, kind of disingenuously, in the grams of protein advertised on the label.

Oh, and I never failed to mention that collagen makes up the bulk of gummy bears, for crissake, and gummy bears are hardly something you store in your supplement drawer, but I now regard my mischaracterizations of collagen as misdemeanors instead of a capital crimes.

So yeah, I’ve done a bit of an about face in regards to collagen. The truth is, I think collagen as a supplement might have some value -- not for any muscle building properties -- but for a host of other reasons, chief among them the following:

• Restoring lost collagen in ligaments, tendons, and cartilage.

• Restoring lost collagen in skin, thereby keeping you from looking like one of those dried apple sculptures.

• Reducing joint pain.

• Potentially speeding up wound healing.

• Potentially helping to heal damaged digestive tracts and leaky guts.

• Sparing protein. (Collagen lacks certain essential amino acids and sufficient amounts of others, making it an incomplete protein. Even so, it can still augment your total amino acid intake and thereby help facilitate muscle growth.)

Even so, the reason it facilitates these things is pretty simple. More on that later.

What Exactly is Collagen?

Collagen is a family of proteins that forms the “cabling” in ligaments, tendons, cartilage, and skin. The protein contains 20 amino acids and chief among them are three specific ones: glycine, proline, and hydroxproline.

These three amino acids form part of three-dimensional triple helixes that generally consists of two identical chains and a third chain that’s slightly different in chemical composition.

For instance, typical amino acid sequences in collagen are glycine-proline-x and glycine-x-hydroxyproline, where “x” is any amino acid other than glycine, proline, or hydroxyproline.

All told, these collagen molecules constitute about 33% of all protein in the body.

Normally, humans make their own collagen, but that super power diminishes as we grow older. Excess stress, sunlight, booze, or even sugar can also muck up production, eventually leading to achy joints and the “bag of bones” physio-type that can often be seen nursing their cups of coffee in McDonald’s on weekday mornings.

Why Not Just Eat a Lot of Regular Protein Instead of Ingesting Collagen?

I used to think that eating another animal’s collagen to make more of your own collagen was a ridiculous notion. My thinking was that proteins, regardless of the type, would all be broken down by the digestive system into their constituent amino acids and then used by the body to make the proteins it needs.

For example, the body would take amino acids from the whey or casein or chicken salad you ate earlier and use them to form whatever tissues it needed, including collagen.

While this is of course true, it also seems that specific collagen peptides – small chains of amino acids that pass into the blood stream through the digestive system – are able to initiate collagen production more efficiently than forcing the body to forage for individual amino acids.

Further, oral ingestion of some of these collagen di-peptides, e.g. proline-hydroxyproline, can stimulate fibroblasts to produce hyaluronic acid, which is the same stuff often injected by skincare specialists as a cosmetic filler.

What Do the Studies Show?

• A review paper that analyzed 19 studies on collagen concluded that taking collagen supplements seemed to decrease skin wrinkling.

• 57 men were randomly and double-blindedly divided into a collagen peptide group and a placebo group. Each was given 15 grams of hydrolyzed collagen or placebo each day for 12 weeks. All subjects engaged in the same training program.

The collagen group showed a significant increase in fat-free mass while the placebo group showed a significant increase in body-fat. However, both groups showed equal levels of muscle fiber hypertrophy, causing the researchers to postulate that the collagen group’s increase in fat-free mass was the result of thickened connective tissues, courtesy of the collagen.

• 40 grams of hydrolyzed collagen supplementation a day for 4 months improved knee range-of-motion from 73.2 degrees to 81 degrees while the placebo group showed no improvement in range of motion.

• Taking 10 mg. of hydrolyzed collagen every day for 24 weeks reduced knee pain associated with osteoarthritis.

• 40 mg. of undenatured collagen a day worked better in improving joint health than a combo of 1500 mg. of glucosamine and 1200 mg. of chondroitin.

• Aussies recruited a group of 18 runners with injured Achilles tendons and divided them into two groups. Both groups did a series of eccentric exercises for their injured tendons twice a day for 6 months. For the first 3 months, one group also received a daily 2.5-gram dose of hydrolyzed collagen while the other group got a placebo. The collagen group healed much faster.

How Much Should I Take?

While suggested dosages are all over the place, 20 grams a day of a collagen blend seems to be a pretty good sweet spot (unless you employ the efficiency-enhancing hacks I explain a few paragraphs down, in which case 10 grams a day would suffice).

You could, however, choose to go the gelatin route instead. Yeah, Jell-O or its unflavored and unsweetened cousins. The raw gelatin powder contains virtually the same amount of collagen as a collagen supplement, so they’re virtually interchangeable. Of course, you’d have to eat a substantial amount of it.

Here’s How to Supercharge Your Collagen

Here’s where I confuse things a little. Remember how earlier I implied there was something different about ingesting collagen, something that couldn’t be duplicated by eating whole, non-collagen proteins?

Well, it may be that most of collagen’s “magic” comes from its high concentration of the amino acids glycine and proline (and possibly a little help from two other amino acids -- hydroxyproline, and lysine), concentrations that aren’t seen in other forms of protein. If that’s true, could you reap the benefits of collagen by supplementing with those two amino acids instead of ingesting collagen?

Or maybe just eat more complete proteins in general (chicken, fish, meat, whey or casein-based protein powders) and eventually consume enough glycine and proline to make up the difference? Maybe.

Spanish scientists decided to figure out the comparative contributions of those amino acids in synthesizing cartilage. To do so, they cultured bovine chondrocytes (the cells responsible for collagen formation) and exposed them to varying concentrations of those amino acids.

Both proline and lysine enhanced the synthesis of collagen, but the effects decayed before reaching 1.0 mM (a measure of the concentration of a chemical in solution). Glycine also enhanced the synthesis of collagen, but the effects didn’t decay before reaching a 1.0 mM concentration. In fact, glycine continued to increase collagen synthesis by 60-75%.

The researchers involved in that study concluded the following:

“Thus, increasing glycine in the diet may well be a strategy for helping cartilage regeneration by enhancing collagen resynthesis, which could contribute to the treatment and prevention of osteoarthritis.” [And presumably do all the other good stuff that collagen supplementation is purported to do.]

Does that mean I think you should ditch the collagen and just supplement with glycine? One study isn’t enough to cause me to adjust course just yet. However, I do think the evidence merits adding a couple of daily grams of glycine and proline to your collagen intake, but that’s a huge pain in the ass.

A Simpler Way…

I don’t want to biohack this whole thing to death, but there’s an easy thing you can do to get the most out of your collagen or collagen/glycine supplementation: Scientists found that adding 15 grams of vitamin C to a gelatin mix (which, as you recall, is almost pure collagen) increased circulating levels of glycine, proline, hydroxyproline, and hydroxylysine, peaking 1 hour after the supplement was given.

In fact, subjects who took 15 grams of gelatin/vitamin C one hour before exercise “showed double the amino-terminal propeptide of collagen in their blood, indicating increased collagen synthesis.”

Again, it’s just one study, but it has the smell of truth and it’s an easy hack (especially since you don’t need to take that much vitamin C to make it work).

Recommendations

Here are my current, best, collagen recommendations:

1.Take 10 grams a day of a reputable collagen supplement and add a hit of vitamin C powder (1-2 grams or so) to make it more potent. (You don’t need to use 15 grams like the pilot study suggested.) Alternately, take a vitamin C tablet or two and just wash it down with whatever you mixed your collagen in (water, juice, whatever).

2. Optional: Augment that 10 grams of collagen with at least 2 grams of supplemental glycine to increase collagen production even further.

3. If, however, you don’t want to use these last two hacks to enhance your collagen, just stick with straight collagen powder but increase the daily dosage to 20 grams a day instead of 10.

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References:

Praet, Stephan, et al. “Oral Supplementation of Specific Collagen Peptides Combined with Calf-Strengthening Exercises Enhances Function and Reduces Pain in Achilles Tendinopathy Patients,” Nutrients 2019, 11(1).

James P. Lugo, Zainulabedin M. Saiyed, Nancy E. Lane, “Efficacy and tolerability of an undenatured type II collagen supplement in modulating knee osteoarthritis symptoms: a multicenter randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study.” Nutrition Journal, 29 January 2016.

de Paz-Lugo P1,2, Lupiáñez JA3, Meléndez-Hevia E4, “High glycine concentration increases collagen synthesis by articular chondrocytes in vitro: acute glycine deficiency could be an important cause of osteoarthritis,” Amino Acids, 2018 Jul 13.

D.C. Crowley, et al. “Safety and efficacy of undenatured type II collagen in the treatment of osteoarthritis of the knee: a clinical trial,” Int. Journal of Med Sciences, 2009; Volume 6, pp. 312-321.

Shaw G, Lee-Barthel A, Ross ML, Wang B4, Baar K. “Vitamin C-enriched gelatin supplementation before intermittent activity augments collagen synthesis,” Am J Clin Nutr. 2017 Jan;105(1):136-143.