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It’s the question I am asked the most
As a food and health journalist, the one thing I am asked about most frequently is collagen: have I looked into it, do I take it and is there any evidence that it works?
The beauty, wellness and longevity industries market collagen as an anti-ageing and anti-wrinkle superhero, which just happens to be able to improve joint health, too. You can access it in two ways: as a supplement or in skincare products, but both make similar claims – it can reverse the inevitable side effects of getting older. The collagen market is currently worth around $10 billion, and given its punchy annual growth rate of 11 per cent, forecasters think it will be worth $26 billion by 2033 – which is pretty impressive for a product that has been around for less than two decades and for which the evidence is, at best, light. If I wanted to get into supplements and get rich relatively quickly, I’d probably try to do it selling collagen.
I don’t much like collagen, for a lot of reasons. (I don’t take it.) Our bodies naturally produce it – it’s the most abundant protein in the human body. Made from amino acids – AKA the building blocks of protein – it forms part of our skin, joints, ligaments and cartilage, while also encasing certain organs and helping blood to clot. Without it, we would quite literally fall apart. Unlike certain vitamins and trace minerals, it’s not that difficult for our bodies to get, so seeing beautifully designed jars of it being hawked by mid-life influencers for £50 makes me wary. I also don’t like the idea that visible ageing is something to be fixed. If it really can help with things like joint pain, then I’m all for it, but the vast majority of both the marketing and purchasing is about not looking old rather than about avoiding pain. (Stick with me and this won’t be the last time you hear me say this: ageing is a privilege. I don’t love every element of the process, but I am beyond grateful to still be here when so many others do not get the chance to age.)
Because it’s pretty abundant in the animal world, collagen powder costs around 2.5 pence a gram if you’re buying it wholesale. It can only be made from animal products, but like us, they make a lot of it naturally, so the stuff you get in supplements is made from meat or fish industry waste streams – bones, skin, connective tissues, cartilage and some of the viscera left after butchering cows or filleting fish. There is no getting away from the fact that collagen supplements come from the same scraps and scrapings as pet food. Despite this, consumers certainly don’t get it for for 2.5 pence a gram.
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