Collagen Peptides: Should You Take Them?

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Collagen peptides, can they make you look younger and be healthier? Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman, and this is Science Versus.

We're the show that pits facts against fixing your body, and today we are diving into the science of collagen peptides, because it's huge right now. It feels like everyone wants to be bursting with collagen, and apparently, the way to do it is by scooping up that white powder of collagen peptides and guzzling it down. Do that, and according to the Wellfluencers, not only will your skin be as bouncy as a baby's bottom, but you'll also be stronger, and you'll heal from injuries faster.

Improve skin suppleness, better skin hydration,

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better elasticity, and even a reduction in wrinkles.

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You'll have less hair loss, your nails will be stronger, better digestion. When you work out, you'll have better recovery. You often will find studies that show statistically significant improvements in collagen composition and skin appearance. If you are a bodybuilder, taking collagen is a non-negotiable.

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But of course, not everyone is on the collagen train. There are the collagen haters out there who say, eating collagen? What a

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load of baloney. Oh, honestly, I've just been listening to a right load of old crap. I'll sum it up for you. Are there any health benefits to taking a collagen supplement? No, none. The biggest online scam I've seen in a while are collagen supplements. You can't produce collagen in your body by eating collagen. It doesn't work.

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So who's right? Are collagen peptides science-backed? Or just another supplement scam. And if you'd rather buy funner kinds of white powder with your cash, is there anything else you can do to boost your collagen? If you have someone in your life who is obsessed with skincare or really trying to heal from a sports injury and keeps wondering should they buy that collagen powder, send them this episode, cause I think it's gonna help.

Science versus collagen peptides is coming up next.

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Wendy here, let's find out if you should be taking collagen peptides. And to kick us off, I want you to meet Clare Collins. She's a professor of nutrition and dietetics at the University of Newcastle in Australia, and she has noticed the buzz around collagen.

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I think when you go on the internet, you almost go, gee, am I the only one who's not consuming collagen? So,

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collagen is a protein made up of amino acids, and you might not realize it, but you actually have collagen

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all over your body. So collagen's in your skin, it's your hair, it's your nails, it's your muscles, it's in your bones and tendons. When you get a Cut or a wound, and it's gotta heal, but you're walking around and moving all the time. How on earth can a cut actually heal up? It's because it gets filled up with collagen. Collagen is

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kinda like the glue that sticks a lot of our body together. Even the corneas of your eyes have collagen in them. It gives our joints elasticity and our skin structure. And collagen has the power to do all of this stuff across the body because

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of its really cool shape. It's kind of like, remember slinkies? Well, you can still get slinkies, but it's like a slinky, but three slinkies join together. So these slinkies

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stuck together are called a triple helix. And with collagen's stretchy, bouncy, slinky energy, it gives your joints the strength to withstand huge amounts of tension and then bounce back. And it keeps your skin bouncy too.

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So you think about, you know, a little baby with beautiful rosy cheeks and smooth, smooth skin, and you just want to pinch it and, you know, and not that you should, but, you know, if, if you touch their skin or squish in those gorgeous little soft cheeks, they just bounce straight back out. Whereas as you age, you know, you, you can wear your sunglasses and take them off, and you got marks from your sunglasses.

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I noticed that with my, helmet, my bike helmet. All of a sudden they take off my bike helmet, and I've still got marks ten minutes later. What's that doing there?

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Yeah, well, they're gonna take a bit longer than ten minutes to bounce back when you get older, but you know what? Who cares? It means that people go, wow, look at her, she, she loves riding her bike.

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But a lot of us do care. And the reason that my face isn't as squishy as baby Wendy's face is that as we get older, we make less and less collagen. You have less of the cells that make collagen, which are called fibroblasts, but also things like UV damage from the sun trigger this process that breaks down collagen in our skin. So it makes sense that we want more collagen, particularly as we get older.

How do we get it? The big thing right now is using collagen peptides, or what's really hydrolyzed collagen. Factories basically grind up animal parts, like skin from a cow or chicken bones, and then they'll use heat and acids to break down the collagen, turning it into a powder that you can eat, or you can put it into a face cream. So does it work? Let's start with whether collagen peptides can make your skin look younger.

First up. Rubbing collagen or collagen peptides onto your skin, say with a face cream, doesn't work. The peptide is too big to penetrate deep down to where our collagen lives. Here's how dermatologist Natalia Spierings put it.

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It's like an elephant trying to squeeze through like a dog, a dog door. Like a dog flap door, you know, in your, in your, in your patio door. It's like never gonna happen.

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When you put that fancy moisturizer onto your skin, the collagen will just stay there until it eventually washes away. Injecting it also doesn't work. Natalia says the collagen will just hang out in your dermis like a filler until your body breaks it down. But what about eating collagen peptides? By giving your body collagen, it can get to your skin and give you those baby cheeks.

Well, there's been about two dozen studies looking at this exact question. And here's what they do. They'll get a group of people to take collagen peptides, sometimes with other stuff like vitamin C, which is important because your body needs vitamin C to make collagen. Fun fact, this is why scurvy gets so festy. No vitamin C, no collagen, gums bleeding.

Back to the skincare studies. So, folks will take collagen peptides, sometimes with vitamin C, often for say 6 to 12 weeks, and at the beginning and end of the study, researchers will measure things like moisture, elasticity, and wrinkles in the skin. And one of my favorite ways that they can measure this is with a device that sucks up the skin, and then researchers basically see how the skin droops back.

Natalia told me a common way to measure wrinkles is getting silicone and slapping it on your face.

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And often they'll use like silicone replicas to like look at the topography of the skin, like, for depths of lines. Like a

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map, so they can see like a map. The creases and the hills and the bumps. Yes.

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Yeah, yeah. And that's to look at like, does wrinkle depth change? And then they use all these devices to measure the exact like micrometer or whatever. What do they tend to find?

Okay, so this is where it gets interesting. So, they tend to find, and we have, so I'm going to say this, but you have to listen to the rest of the podcast before you say, oh, yes, I'm going to go buy them. So they, everyone is listening. So they'll show a signal that is statistically significant. So it'll show an increase in, say, hydration levels over eight to 12 weeks with taking the supplementation.

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Yeah. So a couple of recent review papers that pooled together the research in this space concluded that eating collagen peptides Showed an improvement in wrinkles, elasticity, and hydration, one that was statistically significant. And these are the studies that various influencers like Andrew Huberman point to, to say, hey, this stuff can work.

And it sounds amazing, right? It sounds like your skin is going to look way better. But there's a few wrinkles here.

So even though these studies look fancy and legit, when you really read them closely, a bunch of them are actually a mess, kind of like the collagen in my face. Anyway, sometimes the changes that these researchers find to the skin are so tiny, Natalia says you might not even notice them on your face. At other times, these studies don't properly account for the placebo effect or don't have a placebo group at all.

Which you really need to do, even if you're using some fancy objective tool, because

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the placebo effect for skincare and for skin treatments is so high.

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In one study, after taking a gummy pill, people said their skin was more supple and had fewer wrinkles. Other studies have found that using objective measurements, taking a placebo reduced the amount of water getting lost in their skin through evaporation and improved elasticity. And it's

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amazing how that happens. You'll find that the placebo does have an improving effect. And they do have amazing things.

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But what made me really skeptical here was this super helpful review that came out recently from South Korea. And here, researchers took 23 studies in this space, which included more than 1,400 participants. And they separated out the studies based on the quality. Now, when they just zoomed in on those high quality studies, studies that really considered the placebo effect, stuff like that, collagen didn't work anymore.

They couldn't even find a statistically significant benefit of eating collagen supplements for your skin. By the way, the researchers also separated out the studies by who had industry funding. And when they just looked at the research that hadn't been funded by the skincare industry, so we're talking no skin in the game, collagen supplements didn't do anything for your skin.

Here's Natalia.

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And it was a clear demarcation that the ones that were not funded did not show a, a significant difference, but the funded ones did, and you can read that as you want to read it. Yeah, but obviously you want. How.

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Get a positive result, though.

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We don't know what they are doing, you know, so, and you have to remember this industry is currently worth about five billion US dollars. These companies aren't poor. They have the money to do various fun things with trials. The, the sales and marketing of these products has gone way before any evidence of efficacy. So they're selling you a promise that's never been realized in reality.

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The researchers of that review paper from South Korea concluded, quote, There is currently no clinical evidence to support the use of collagen supplements to prevent or treat skin aging, such as skin hydration, elasticity, or wrinkles. If you're worried about collagen in your skin, Natalia says one of the best things you can try is tretinoin, which is sometimes sold as Retin-A.

No miracles here, but Natalia says one of the ways that it works is by preventing the breakdown of collagen in our skin. Sunscreen can also protect you from UV rays, which like I mentioned, leads to collagen breakdown. But my next question was, why doesn't eating collagen work? Why doesn't the collagen that you guzzle down end up in your face? And to understand that, you need to know exactly what collagen is doing as it moves from your gullet into the rest of your body.

And that means we need this guy.

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I'm Luc van Loon. I, I hold a chair in the physiology of exercise and nutrition at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Very small country.

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Luc does these crazy experiments where he takes an amino acid that he's tagged with a tracer, so he can kind of track where it's going in the body. And sometimes, get this, he'll inject it into a cow. Yeah, so the cow then uses the amino acid to make milk, and Luc gives the proteins from the milk to people. And then he can basically watch as the amino acid moves into the blood and then their muscles.

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Which is very cool, because then basically it's a very expensive and invasive way to show that your mom was right, that you are what you eat.

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So I asked Luc. What happens when you eat collagen? Where does it go? Because he's done experiments using collagen too. Forget the cow. He'll give people a scoop full of collagen peptides and then track where the devil the collagen is going. And here's what he's found. The collagen he gives people goes into the gut where it's broken down into amino acids.

So about an hour after guzzling down collagen, when he gets blood samples from his participants, he can see this bump of amino acids from the collagen he gave people

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floating in their blood. The increase in amino acids is coming from the collagen you ingested.

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Professor Keith Baar at the University of California, Davis has seen this too.

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When we see them in the blood, they're not peptides, they are amino acids.

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Online, the way some influencers talk about collagen peptides, it's as if it's gonna get absorbed by your body and then end up on your face. But that's not how it works. Here's Keith and Luke.

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So, none of the things that we eat, if I eat a steak, that doesn't mean that I'm gonna build muscle because I take the muscle from the cow, and I've taken that chunk of muscle from the cow and I'm gonna shove it into my quadricep muscle. It means that I've broken it down into the building blocks, the amino acids, and then I've given those building blocks to the muscle that then can use them to build more muscle protein.

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Drinking the blood of a, of a, of a tiger doesn't give you the strength of a tiger and all of these things.

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So, the reason that when you eat collagen, it doesn't end up bursting out of your skin is because your gut is breaking that collagen down into amino acids. And then, your body is gonna use those amino acids For so many different things. Here's how Professor Clare Collins

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put it. If you eat collagen, it doesn't automatically mean you will make more collagen. It'll build your muscles, it'll make, enzymes that are needed in every single chemical reaction of your body. It'll help replace the new cells you need in your kidneys and your lungs and your eyes. Basically,

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you eat collagen, your body gets amino acids, and it does what it does with them, and you have no control over that. It's like if you give your kid a cool Back to the Future DeLorean Lego set, because you want to build the DeLorean on the pack, right? But then, they just take it, and they mix it up with their other Lego, and they build some Stegosaurus car.

I don't even know what that is. In other words. You eat your collagen, you let those amino acids fly, and there's no reason to think that they're gonna head over to your face to make it look like a baby's bottom, or go into your hair, or your nails for that matter. And if you're hoping to build a ton of muscle eating collagen supplements, forget that too.

Collagen is packed with these very particular kinds of amino acids, like proline and glycine. And to grow muscles, you need other amino acids as well. So I asked Natalia, the dermatologist. So Natalia, do you take collagen supplements?

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No. Do you?

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I, I had a knee injury that was taking a while to heal, so I did start taking it for that,

but we'll find out if that works after the break.

Okay, I know this sounds

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crazy after everything I've told you, but several months ago, I hurt my knee running, and it was pretty bad. I could barely use the stairs. And so, I started taking collagen peptides, because some scientists I spoke to haven't given up hope here. They reckon they've found a way to hack this whole system, and with the magic of science, get us to turn the collagen that we've eaten into more collagen in our bodies.

And at times, they themselves take collagen peptides.

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Well, I take hydrolyzed collagen. I

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do.

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I do.

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Doc, we may get our DeLorean after all. Plus, how to get collagen without the supplements, up next.

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Speaker 1

Today, we're finding out if collagen peptides can make us healthier, or if it's just hype, collagened up by influencers and their affiliate codes. The research was looking pretty saggy, and that's because when you eat collagen peptides, your stomach breaks it down into amino acids, which can go and do any number of things in your body. But, I've promised you a potential hack, a way to whisper to your body to say, use the amino acids.

To make more collagen, please. And to understand how this works, I want you to meet Dr. Rob Erskine, who researches neuromuscular physiology at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.

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The crux of it, you know, I'm, I'm all about the muscle and the tendon and the physiology of those tissues.

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Being all about the muscle and the tendon, which is the stuff that connects the muscle to the bone, Rob did a series of studies that made me think about keeping my collagen powder.

So first off, here's what he did. He got 10 guys in their 20s.

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Like, I mean, first thing in the morning, at 8 o'clock, they were given a beverage to drink.

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They actually came into the lab three times. One time, their drink had no collagen in it, just a placebo. Another time, it had 15 grams of collagen. And then there was the big boy dose, 30 grams. And 30 grams, quite a lot. That's like, that's three scoops of that goopy stuff.

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Well, it depends on which goopy stuff you're, you're using.

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I mean, I did, no offense to your goopy

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stuff. Well, we, for that particular study, I don't think we use any goopy stuff. We, we used a, a powder.

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That powder was mixed up with some water, as well as vitamin C, and all the drinks were matched for taste, so the participants couldn't tell what they were drinking. They slammed it down, and about an hour later, they did squats with a barbell on their back. And throughout this experiment, Rob's team took blood samples, and in the blood, they were looking for these specific markers that show the body is making collagen.

So here's what he found. Let's start with what happened when the guys did the squats. But didn't drink any collagen.

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We saw a big effect of the resistance exercise alone on collagen synthesis.

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That's it. Just doing the squats, not drinking any collagen powders, that was enough to drive the body to make more collagen. And study after study has found this. Weights and exercise more generally can increase the amount of collagen that your body makes.

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So resistance exercise, strength training, it stimulates the muscle and the tendon to increase collagen production.

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When you're doing weights, you're putting stress and stretching the muscle. And cells within the muscle fiber will sense that and send out signals to say, we need to get bigger. And this creates a domino effect, where to deal with this extra force, your tendon starts getting thicker too, and making more collagen. And your tendon, it has a ton of collagen in it.

So if your tendon is getting thicker, you are making more collagen. So this collagen that you're making, it isn't on your face, it's boosting collagen in your tendons, which could be important for preventing injuries, or maybe even healing from them. But let's go back to Rob's study, because he really wanted to know if when he gave the guys hydrolyzed collagen while they were doing their exercise, could he encourage those tendons to make even more collagen than they already were? The idea was that if you're giving your body the exact kinds of amino acids that it needs to make collagen, the proline, the glycine, the correct building blocks, and you're doing a squat, so

you're already making collagen, maybe you can nudge the body to make a little more. To go back to the Lego analogy, you're already building the DeLorean, just add the plutonium chamber too.

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It's more likely, isn't it? It's more likely for the, for the tissues to utilize those, those amino acids that are floating around in the blood when those tissues are producing new collagen on their own, and, and they need more building blocks, more amino acids to do that.

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And when the guys took that big boy dose, 30 grams of hydrolyzed collagen, it worked in the blood. Rob could see there was a roughly 20% increase in the amount of collagen being made, compared with when the guys did the exercise, but didn't drink collagen. Rob has since done other studies, like one in professional field hockey players, women this time, and he found similar things.

Now, not all studies in this space find an effect, but most do. If you take the supplements and then do exercise, you can coax your body to make a bit more collagen. Here's Rob.

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I think it comes back to which of the tissues are in need of it more. It's the ones that have been stressed and are trying to produce more collagen. They're going to be look, they're going to be soaking up those amino acids more readily.

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Do you think if you just had collagen and didn't do the exercises, Do you think that would help your tendon?

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The short answer to your question is, is probably not. I think you need to have, the tissue needs to be stressed.

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So, Rob and others are saying that they can make collagen supplements, do what we want them to do, to help us get more collagen into our bodies. But I wanted to know, does it actually affect performance? This is Dr. Dana Lis, she's a performance nutritionist, who used to work for the Golden State Warriors. That little basketball team,

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the Golden State Warriors. That little basketball team. Yes. So, yeah, I've worked across, gosh, probably about 24 different sports in the last, in the last two decades. So, a few years ago, Dana did this

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study to find out if doing all of this stuff, you know, taking the collagen and the vitamin C and then doing the exercises, if it actually made people better athletes. She got 50 athletes, like male college football players or guys in an elite military training group, and similar to Rob, got them to take the supplements an hour before training or a placebo, and then

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it was time to work out. Three weeks of like explosive power-based training, so like, drop jumps. That's where you jump off a height

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and then jump back up as fast as you can. They also did an isometric squat hold, which is basically where you hold a bar behind your back, squat and hold it.

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We were like, we never want to say hold, hold, hold again.

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Dana and her team then tested to see, did the guys who drank the collagen do better on any of these tests? And what they saw is that the group taking collagen supplements did better on this specific measurement that's called eccentric

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deceleration force. When I looked at that first, I was like, what is, I don't even know what that is. but if you think about, like, you're just standing there and you drop down into a squat and jump up. So it's like the, your ability to, like, absorb, break that phase of the movement. So slow down and redirect that force until, like, jumping up.

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That was actually improved by the collagen. Yeah. And by the way, Dana's study was industry funded, but Rob found something similar on his non-industry funded study of hockey players. But it's worth pointing out that in both Rob and Dana's study, a lot of the things that they measured when it came to performance looked exactly the same between the groups.

So, for example, the sports players couldn't jump any higher, they couldn't hold, hold, hold, hold for longer. Here's

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Dana. No miracles. No, and I'd say most of the, most of the measures we did were, yeah, pretty similar between the group. So I asked Dana, what are we to make of this? Should we be taking

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collagen or not? And she said, think about the bump of collagen you're getting after exercising and taking supplements, like a birthday cake. Exercise is actually the whole

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cake. And the collagen, it's like the, the sprinkles on the icing on the cake. They, you know,

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may, may, may help. Whereas the way social media is talking about it is as if it's the cake. You know, this is the magic bullet that's gonna drive.

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Yeah, exactly. Peptides, people are looking for, you know, quick fixes and miracles and, when really the evidence is still, you know, pretty, pretty, like, equivocal, you

Speaker 1

know? Knowing all the research in this space, Professor Keith Baar, who works with Dana, told me this.

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Well, I take hydrolyzed collagen.

Speaker 1

What do you take it for? Your skin looks lovely.

Speaker 10

Oh, thank you. I, I don't take it for my skin because, yeah, there's less evidence for the skin, there's better evidence for kind of joint health. And so anytime that I want to make sure that I give sufficient building blocks so that when my cells do need to make collagen, that they have what they need in order to do that.

Speaker 1

But Keith also told me that you don't need to buy the powders. You can get some animal bones, maybe from your Sunday chicken roast or at a local butcher. Boil it up and let it sit. And that gelatinous goop is actually collagen peptides. It's all the amino acids, the glycine and proline and whatnot, that your body needs to go on to make collagen with it.

Professor Clare Collins says that you can also get these amino acids from lots of different foods. So the flesh of meat, including fish, but also mushrooms, soybeans, legumes, asparagus, sunflower seeds, peanuts, and egg whites. Add an orange for vitamin C, and your body will do the rest. Here's Clare.

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So I think we have to be careful not to brainwash people into thinking the only way to get those amino acids is to actually eat collagen powder. You don't need to do that. You can eat all these other foods. So do you take collagen supplements, Clare?

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No way. When Clare looked at the price of these collagen powders per kilo, she

Speaker 6

actually figured, screw this. I'm having lamb chops for dinner tonight, and I think that that's a bargain. So,

Speaker 1

should you take collagen supplements or not?

Well, they're pretty harmless. I mean, research has found arsenic and lead in some samples, which is because heavy metals can build up in bones and other tissues that tend to have a lot of collagen in them. But generally speaking, researchers say that if you're eating these powders at the recommended doses, they'd be safe.

Now, whether or not this is a waste of money or not, probably depends on what you're taking these peptides for. It's not gonna make your skin look like a baby's bottom, it's not gonna hulk you up, but if you've got a tendon or ligament injury that you're struggling with, and you're heading into the gym to do exercises like squats, taking some collagen peptides plus vitamin C an hour beforehand, maybe might help you.

That's what I started doing, and five months after go to the gym, my knee is way better. Thanks for asking. So what did it? My guess is the month of squats plus the magic of time did a whole lot more than the collagen supplements, but maybe they helped to put a little pep in my step. Sprinkles, people, sprinkles. That's science versus. By the way, there are 69 citations in this week's episode, so if you want to know more about the science that I talked about and you want to look at a study, read it for yourself, please do.

You can find the transcript in the description box or the show notes. There's a link right there, and you can see all the studies that I talked about. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend. If you like science versus, tell the people you love. Bring science into their lives. What says love better than science? Thanks for listening.

This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zukerman, with help from Rose Rimler, Akemi Foster-Keyes, Meryl Horne, and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Marlo Starling. Additional research by Isabel Hill. Video editing and sound mix by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord.

Thanks to all of the researchers I spoke to. Really, really appreciate all of your time. Plus, a big thanks to Joseph Lavelle Wilson and the Zukerman family. Science versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Wendy Zukerman. Back to you next time.

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Speaker 6

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AT&T extended Wi-Fi coverage service required. Limited availability. Visit att.com forward slash internet to learn more.