Why I Don’t Take Collagen and Don’t Recommend It

“Dear GreenSmoothieGirl: what collagen supplement do you take, and why?”

I want to explain why I’ve watched the rise of popularity of collagen supplements and have never taken one, and don’t plan to.

I read a meta-analysis recently of 19 studies on collagen, and 17 of them were funded by the supplement or collagen industry. That doesn’t mean we have to completely disregard these studies funded by people with a profit motive, that tend to be manipulated and cherry picked.

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It just means that we should be observant of manipulated statistics, cherry picking, and my personal pet peeve, the ABSTRACT, or one-paragraph summary of a scientific paper, where the abstract or summary often doesn’t accurately represent the data in the study itself, which scientists and marketers know almost nobody reads.

Including the doctors and influencers who are affiliates for collagen products, for instance, or they private label them.

So eating the gristle, ligaments, tendons, and skin of animals for better bones, hair, skin and tendons in your own body–is like eating eyeballs hoping to have better eyesight, or eating brains hoping to be smarter.

The thing is, collagen is the most common protein in the human body. It’s a large molecule, made up of 6 amino acids, and if you eat collagen directly, your GI tract has to break it down and digest it. It has to break collagen down to its essential components like it digests everything else.

It’s not like collagen goes in your mouth and straight to a joint where it instantly becomes cartilage, or straight to your skin where it hydrates and makes youthful, elastic skin.

Your digestion has to break ANY food or supplement down to its component parts, like it does all your food–or, it discards something it may not recognize as food and then it could end up in your bloodstream or clogging up an organ of elimination. I actually read a study showing that collagen products aren’t digested by the human body.

It was just one study, though, so let’s go back to the whole idea that if you eat a collagen product, it’s silly and kind of profoundly scientifically unaware to think that eating tendons and skin of animals improves YOUR tendons and skin. Plus these highly processed products have a bunch of other ingredients, most of which are not listed on the label, because they are solvents and metals used in the manufacturing process, so they aren’t technically ingredients.

Eating highly processed gristle and throwaway products of the meat industry doesn’t actually work to give you beautiful skin or healthy joints. Collagen products are a mega billion dollar industry. And one of the issues I found in looking at the meta analysis of 19 research studies, where 17 of them were funded by the collagen industry–is that most of these products had a bunch of other stuff added to the product. It wasn’t just collagen.

Why would they add stuff? Well, for the human body to make its own collagen, it ALSO needs vitamin C, vitamin E, zinc, copper, and other nutrients. And after collagen supplements were out there for a decade or so, people started making a lot of noise about how silly it is to think that just eating animals’ tendons and skin or applying it topically, causes YOUR body to have more collagen.

So these supplement companies, which by the way are mostly divisions of the big pharmaceutical companies, and they sell to brands that you’ll like better – they’ll be happy to sell your drugs OR pills you think are natura l– are adding synthetic compounds to the synthetic collagen “chewable” or shampoo or pill or facial cream–like a compound that you THINK is Vitamin C, for instance.

I don’t want to go too far off track, but the ascorbic acid that they put into a product and call it “Vitamin C,” though, actually you can go learn in PubChem that it’s not actually Vitamin C, it is a derivative of GMO corn using chemical solvents and heavy metals, ascorbic acid is an industrial waste product that they put in products so that you THINK you’re getting Vitamin C, but it’s not at all what is in lemons and limes and cherries and red bell peppers.

Anyway, most dermatologists laugh at the idea of a synthetic derivative of animals’ collagen applied to your skin having any value for the health of your skin. But, a few of them and literally hundreds of people who make a lot of money selling the unsuspecting public collagen supplements, are on YouTube using a lot of scientific sounding words to tell you a story that will get you to buy their collagen product.

Fact is, it’s a brilliant marketing play, since for instance gelatin made from horses’ hooves is a VERY cheap industrial byproduct of the meat industry … and it has been key in the children’s junk food known as Jell-O for many decades now.

Jell-O would basically be just Kool-Aid except that the thickener from horses’ hooves made it a fun finger food. Or maybe I should say “food-like substance.”

Anyway, so many of the most heavily marketed products are actually doing nothing for our health but marketers put a lot of emphasis on them because they’re so cheap to obtain the raw materials. Because the raw materials are byproducts of some industry, so the industry may actually pay the company to take their horses’ hooves and chicken skin and beef tendons and gristle.

For instance, I sometimes talk about how calcium supplements are ground-up rocks, which is brilliant for making money, because you can obtain rocks pretty much for free, you just have to be able to grind them up. The cost is just in grinding up the rocks.

They are indeed high in minerals! They just aren’t absorbed by the human body, and people who take the ground-up rocks called calcium supplements often have health issues from that substance accumulating in their blood.

So back to collagen, you’re basically paying big bucks for synthetic derivatives of throwaway products like the skin of chickens and the hide and hooves of cows, PLUS to convince you that you’re getting a more “complete” product, some synthetic substances with similarities to Vitamin C and zinc and other things…

…but after observing and learning about this for years, my conclusion is that my body makes collagen on its own with a healthy whole-foods diet. The only animal product I eat is GreenSmoothieGirl’s Bone Broth protein, which does not use hooves or hide of beef as most collagen and even bone broth products do, we’ve had it third-party tested multiple times to make sure it’s free of toxins often found in bone broth products…

…and it’s not a synthetic expensive Jell-O; it’s a real food and doesn’t cause the death of the animal, just boils the bones of grass-fed beef already sent to the slaughterhouse, boils them into a broth, as people have done for hundreds of years.

Besides that, my conclusion after over 25 years of research is to stick to almost entirely whole, plant-based foods.

I know this won’t be too popular with people who take collagen supplements OR people who sell them, but my goal is to do the research most don’t have the time to do or don’t know how to do, and make it simple and quick and understandable for you. I know we’d all love a cream or a pill to make us look 37 when we’re 57 … but, the evidence does not support that, for collagen products. I hope this is useful to you!

Thank you for your support of this Substack blog! Many people are taking synthetic collagen supplements for healthy skin, joints and ligaments, when the real food of bone broth is so much more effective.