I’m convinced that eating an ounce of collagen a day — in the form of hydrolyzed collagen powder — greatly speeds the recovery of my hips and knees following a strenuous mountain day-hike.
Sample size of one person. Five hikes so far. Two with collagen, three without. Notably faster recovery to pain-free walking. Three+ days, for the last one without; one day, for the first one with. FWIW.
But several things are also telling me I probably shouldn’t eat that much, of that stuff, in the long run.
This post is about why I think I need to dial this back, and how I can do that most effectively.
No surprise that this works. Much surprise at the speed.
The theory behind this is reasonable. Weight-bearing exercise beats up your leg joints. Collagen makes up the majority of (the dry weight of) ligaments, tendons, cartilage, and other joint-adjacent tissues. You can repair your damaged collagen faster if you give your body an abundance of the amino acids needed to make collagen. Most proteins — and here I particularly point out dairy-derived whey, often consumed to good effect by weight-lifters for muscle gain — do not provide much of the key amino acids needed to build collagen, e.g., glycine. By contrast, eating collagen (or its derivatives) provides you with the right amino acid “feed stock” for building new collagen.
Moreover, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that it works, in helping with exercise-induced joint pain, and so presumably for repairing the wear-and-tear of athletic exercise. Everything from demonstrating that consumption of collagen (whole or fragments) stimulates the body’s collagen production, to months-long controlled trials of (typically) college athletes and self-reported joint pain.
The huge surprise is the time scale. It works immediately to speed repair of acute wear-and-tear injury, post-exercise.
Nothing in the scholarly literature suggested that this strategy works in the acute recovery phase. However, the most relevant literature focused on college athletes. For that population — with daily strenuous exercise — it may not have been clear that consumption of collagen greatly affected the level of pain (say) the day after exercise. Presumably, college athletes exercised every day, or close enough to it. Their joints were continuously recovering from exercise-induced wear-and-tear. But pain was typically only measured after 12 weeks of intervention. The collagen-eaters reported having less joint pain, at that time. Case closed. They would not have been able to separate out pain reduction due to faster acute recovery of the joint, versus some ill-defined long-term remodeling of the joint (e.g., the mythical and long-sought “thicker cartilage”).
I figured this would take weeks to months to have an effect. Same time-scale as, say, an expected improvement in your fingernails, from some diet change. Those tissues grow slowly, and so … it takes time to see improvement.
In any case, for me, this helps in the immediately-post-exercise period. It greatly speeds recovery from the acute wear-and-tear injury inflicted on hips and knees, from mountain hiking. No clue whether it has any effects at all, beyond that.
This immediate effect? Doesn’t that conflict with conventional wisdom that these tissues only grow slowly. E.g., cartilage injuries take a long time to heal.
It surely seems to conflict.
I have no clue as to what cells are doing what, exactly, to make the pain in your joints fade a few days after strenuous exercise. All I know that, whoever they are, whatever they are doing, this stuff seems to hustle them along.
It’s unproven as to whether long-term, it does any more than that. Right now, I’m guessing not. I do rapidly improve to something I’d consider normal baseline joint pain. But no better. That baseline doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. But maybe that’s what takes months and months. Or maybe not.
Do I need to dial this back? Yes.
This gets a little personal. It makes my poop stink. Specifically, as if I’d been eating beef, and lots of it.
A minor annoyance, you might say. An oddity, no more.
Think again.
- Meat-poop-stink is sometimes attributed to “sulfur compounds” in the meat, and sometimes attributed to byproducts of bacterial fermentation (putrefaction) of undigested protein fragments, in the colon. I scoff at the sulfur compounds theory, and for purposes of this discussion accept the protein-putrefaction to be the true and correct explanation of meat-poop-stink in the typical case.
- Collagen is a difficult-to-digest protein molecule, at least for some individuals. No surprise, as collagen is a tough organic polymer (chain) of about 1000 amino acid units. It’s a first-cousin to spider silk, e.g.
- Hydrolyzed collagen powder gives you pieces of collagen molecules (“peptides”), but they’re still fairly big pieces. Maybe averaging 50 amino acids each, but with some significant range of variation.
- So it’s a fair guess that eating a big dose of hydrolyzed collagen powder probably passes a high level of undigested protein fragments on to my colonic bacteria. In that regard, it’s just like eating a high-meat (or maybe high-red-meat) diet. And so produces the same characteristic meat-poop-stink smell, via my now-cheerful and well-fed meat-protein-fragment-eating colonic bacteria.
- Separately, scientists speculate that the association between colon cancer and a diet high in red meat may be due, in part, to the “toxicity” of some of those bacterial protein-putrefaction by-products.
Briefly, at an ounce a day, this is plausibly as big a colon-cancer risk as a high-red-meat diet.
In any case, it smells like it. My opinion, in both cases.
Enough said.
Reasons 2 – 10
2: I took the one-ounce dose level from controlled trials in the clinical literature, none of which exceeded 12 weeks’ duration. No obvious ill effects were reported in that time frame. But the same would have been said for an all-meat diet.
3: I’m arguably taking more than the manufacturer recommends, in that the scoop that came with the bag of powder provides a 10-gram (one-third-ounce) scoop.
4: If I can get down to one dose a day, I can make this routine and convenient, instead of having to work at getting three doses a day.
5: There’s some possibility that I’m exceeding my digestive system’s capacity to deal with collagen fragments. So taking a much smaller divided dose might result in less ending up you-know-where.
6: Similarly, it’s possible I’m exceeding my joints’ collagen-generating capacity, so the excess glycine etc. is doing me no good.
7: I’m arguably “eating more collagen” than I would on an all-meat diet. Muscle tissue is only about 6% collagen, as I recall. So if I’m getting my 4 ounces of protein a day, in the form of 16 ounces of steak a day, I’d be eating slightly less than an ounce of collagen.
8, 9, 10: I lied. Once I realized #7 that pretty much clinched it.
Bottom line: I’m eating a crapload of collagen. I should cut back.
How do you titrate the dose on something this variable?
You guess. Joint pain is like mood. Many things affect it, and it’s difficult to quantify in the best of circumstances. The idea that I’m somehow going to dial my dose downward, until I hit some clear optimum, is nonsense.
One option is to use this for acute recovery only. Take my ounce-a-day, but only in the period immediately before and after a hike. I know that works. And I probably will do something like that.
The question is, what’s a reasonable long-term dose, to see if this does somehow “remodel” the joint tissues, for the better, in the long run?
One benchmark is the meat (or perhaps red meat) level of the average American diet. I have to believe that a) that’s adequate, and b) that should set an upper bound. Paleo/keto fans aside, there’s a fair consensus that the standard American diet is too meat-heavy for best health. One benchmark would be to take in no more collagen than I would expect to, from an average meat-heavy American diet.
Depending on your data source, the average American adult eats more than a half-pound of meat a day. Per #7 above, that suggests a half-ounce of hydrolyzed collagen a day as an upper limit. But Americans eat too much meat. And half-an-ounce is within striking distance of the 10-gram (third-ounce) scoop, provided by the manufacturer, to measure out “a serving” of the powder.
The upshot is that the manufacturer’s recommendation for “a serving” is a bit less than the collagen in the average American’s meat consumption.
Which I’m going to guess is plenty, for joint health, absent extreme exercise.
For the time being, then, I’m cutting back to one scoop (10 grams) a day. But bumping it up to the full ounce a day when I hike. A heaping cutlery teaspoon of it is about 7 grams. I can figure it out from there.
Addendum: A few notes on collagen.
This is a section of collagen-related factoids that I’ve stumbled across in my reading. No citations as to sources.
The word “collagen” is from the Greek for “makes glue”. In a prior post, I noted that any spilled hydrolyzed collagen powder acted like water-activated hide glue, and stuck tight to my stone countertops. Apparently this was not my imagination.
About a third of the protein in your body is collagen. That’s what they say. Collagen makes up 70% to 80% of the dry weight of ligaments, tendons and skin; maybe 60% of the dry weight of cartilage, and 30% of the dry weight of bone. Your muscles are glued together with collagen fibers. Plus miscellaneous tissues like your cornea, heart valves, … .
Gelatin is collagen that has been broken down (“hydrolyzed), but only somewhat. Gelatin — the protein — is why home-made chicken broth gels. You’ve
“hydrolyzed” some of the collagen in the chicken tissues merely by boiling it. The resulting gelatin molecules are small enough to dissolve in water (with coaxing), but large enough that they will form a gel.
Like Jell-O. Same stuff, basically.
Weirdly, the scholarly literature vastly understates how “thinly” the gelatin protein may be spread within the gel. I just note for the record that the 0.3 oz per-packet weight of standard sugarless Jell-O, mixed per directions, makes a gel that is more than 98% water, and less than 2 percent protein (and artificial sweetening, coloring, flavoring). If I start with the instructions for Knox unflavored gelatin, an ounce of Knox is enough to gel a gallon (16 cups) of water, resulting in a gel that’s more than 99% water, less than 1% gelatin protein.
“Hydrolyzed collagen peptides” is collagen that has been broken down further, beyond the gelatin stage. Broken down to protein fragments (peptides) whose average size is about 1/20th the length of the original collagen molecule. If “a collagen molecule” contains about 1000 amino acids strung together, a typical hydrolyzed collagen peptide has about 50. (Gelatin presumably falls somewhere in-between.)
The resulting protein fragments dissolve in water much more easily than gelatin, and they won’t gel. These properties make it a lot easier to use as a dietary supplement, compared to gelatin. It’s a snap to stir this stuff into hot chicken broth, soup, or cold V8 juice.
I suspect that all that additional processing, to break the collagen up into such tiny pieces, also allows for the use of cruder original feedstocks. But I don’t know that, and I don’t like pondering where this stuff comes from. So any questions along that line are out-of-scope.
Near as I can tell, all three edible substances — collagen, gelatin, or hydrolyzed collagen peptides — provide your body with the exact same set of amino acids. They all get broken down to individual amino acids (with the possibility that the body might also absorb significant amounts of two- and three-amino-acid peptides. Either way, little tiny bits.) To digest this or any other protein, your body has to break it up into its individual amino acids, or at least to little clumps of two or three amino acids.
There is some sense that collagen (eaten as, say, actual animal connective tissue, such as chicken skin) is somehow less easily or less fully digested than gelatin, which in turn is less easily digested than hydrolyzed collagen peptides. But as far as I can tell, for a healthy person, within the range of normal human diets and normal human food, any differences in how well the protein can be digested, and the resulting amino acids made available for your body to use, are modest.
And, to the point, any such difference is small, in the context of adding an ounce of the protein to your diet, per day. That is, if the hydrolyzed collagen peptides are somehow 25% more “digestible” than the protein in chicken skin, that hardly matters. All three substances — collagen, gelatin, and hydrolyzed collagen peptides — have the same amino acid profile. All three are heavy in glycine and a handful of other amino acids that are key to building new collagen.
There’s a lot of research suggesting that eating collagen (or the associated collagen-derived proteins) stimulates your body to build its own collagen. How much, to what end, with what improvement in pain or functionality of the joints, or appearance of the skin, is somewhat ill-defined.
By contrast, research has also established that whey protein does nothing to stimulate collagen growth. Which it shouldn’t, because it is almost entirely lacking in the key amino acid glycine. This matters to me, as I rely on whey protein powder for about half the protein in my diet. Long term, this may have resulted in a diet deficient in glycine, and a resulting slowing in the replacement of connective tissue in my body. And so, a long healing time for my leg joints, after my last hike.
Instead, whey protein has been shown to aid in building muscle mass. Which is what it did for me.
In theory, if I’m determined to eat some amount of collagen-derived protein every day, since they all are made from the same set of underlying amino acids, I don’t care what form it takes. Pork rinds should be as useful as chicken wings or Jell-O or this fancy hydrolyzed collagen peptide powder. As long as as get the same amount of amino acids out of it, in the same proportion.
But in practice, it’s hard to eat large amounts of animal-derived collagen and stay within (e.g.) calorie limits or palatability. For example, you can get collagen from chicken skin. But because chicken skin is only 3.5% collagen by weight, you’d have to eat a couple of pounds of it, per day, to eat an ounce of collagen protein. Pork rinds? At best, 10% collagen by weight. You’d have eat 10 ounces of pork rinds a day to get an ounce of collagen (which would then amount to about 1500 calories in pork rinds, per day).
So, as with whey protein, consuming the pure protein (in this case, the hydrolyzed collagen peptides) has some big dietary advantages, compared to eating the underlying foods.
Whey protein (typically used by weighlifters) has the wrong mix of amino acids for building collagen. In particular, the main building block of collagen (the amino acid glycine) is all-but-absent in whey protein (or in milk proteins in general). Unsurprisingly, the research literature suggests that ingesting whey protein does nothing to stimulate your body’s own collagen production, and by inference, does nothing to help your joints, skin, or fingernails.
This certainly matches my observation. Steady consumption of significant amounts of whey protein daily has not made my brittle fingernails any better.
Proteins are made from amino acids. An amino acid is about the size of a sugar molecule, with a typical molecular weight of around 100.
These days, you’re supposed to say 100 daltons, not molecular weight. For all intents and purposes, a hydrogen atom weighs one dalton. So weight (in daltons) is more-or-less identical to what use to be called simply molecular weight.
The term “protein” is reserved for molecules that weigh at least 10 kilodaltons. So, typically, a protein is a polymer of 100 or more amino acids. Smaller chunks of the same stuff are “peptides”.
A single molecule of collagen weighs about 100 kilodaltons. Or, restated, contains about 1000 amino acids.
Collagen strands are polymers, just like starch and cellulose are polymers. That is, it is built up by chaining together a lot of identical sub-units. But where collagen is a polymer of amino acid molecules, starch is a polymer of sugar molecules. Collagen first self-assembles into three-molecule strands, then those strands are spliced together into long fibers, mesh nets, and other structures.
The digestive system will not allow whole protein molecules to pass from your food into your bloodstream. Except by rare accident. Your entire immune system is keyed to keeping foreign proteins out of your tissues. If it allowed whole proteins to pass, willy-nilly, in the small intestine, the resulting allergic reaction would kill you.
(But for completeness, I note that considerable quantities of large protein fragments, up to and including intact bacteria, routinely pass through the wall of your colon. Your immune system spends a lot of effort dealing with that, the results of which are a probable root cause of a lot of cases of autoimmune disease, where the bacterial cell wall proteins are too close a match for proteins in the body. This, much the same way that a persistent strep throat can trigger rheumatic heart disease. Google London AS Diet to understand the probable “molecular mimicry” mechanism of action. In any case, those aren’t food, they are mistakes. Your immune system spends a lot of its effort dealing with them.)
As a consequence, we all know that there’s no such thing as eating collagen and having that intact protein molecule incorporated in your own collagen. “You are what you eat” doesn’t work that way.
Protein has to be broken down to be absorbed.
How big a chunk of a protein molecule can I absorb? Proteins are made from amino acids. As I now understand it, you can absorb chunks of up to three linked amino acids, a.k.a., up to a three-amino peptide. (Although, I have to say, a lot of reputable sources say amino acids only. So, individual amino acids, for sure, and maybe chunks of up to three aminos at a time.)
This factoid — that you can absorb small peptides, in addition to individual amino acids — appears to have led to a huge amount of marketing hype, and not much else. That is, the fact that you do absorb some two- and three-amino chunks (peptides) leads to all kinds of claims that this-or-that protein source is superior for this-or-than intended end-use in the body.
There may or may not be something to some of the weirder claims (e.g., that some of these small peptides are biologically active in other ways, e.g., “mood elevating”). But in terms of building ligaments and cartilage, near as I could tell, all proteins that have the same amino acid mix work exactly the same, for promoting collagen growth.
