Are collagen supplements effective and worth taking? | Peter Attia and Luc van Loon

I want to talk a little bit more about protein supplements okay um we've talked extensively about the milk protein isolates wey and casian um I get I get asked questions all the time about this and unlike you I don't know the ansers so I'm kind of like you know my answer is I don't think that matters but for example my wife's friends always ask me about collagen hey should I be consuming this collagen or that collagen or this collagen and I and my response is I don't think that matters I frankly think you're just better

off consuming a high quality protein that has a balance of all of the amino acids but uh tell folks first of all what collagen is um and then maybe answer my question about whether or not there's a unique benefit to consuming collagen um as a supplement I'm was thinking like I should do less research so I I don't get all these questions so collagen is a protein uh that is very I mean it's pretty prevalent in your body because it's the it's the main protein that is uh used for uh structural uh protein it's a

structural protein so collagen is in your cartilage your bone your tendons your ligaments um and all of that and it's also in muscle very small amount relatively in order to and it's important to transfer the force of your connect of your muscle towards your tendons so even in the muscle all of your contracto proteins need to be uh linked to collagen in order or connective tissue proteins in order to transfer the force now um a lot of people or in the market you see now ingest collagen supplements because it helps you with uh strength Force

skin bone ligaments and stuff like that so we're interested in because um it's a very nice source of glycine and Proline about 50% of your collagen is glycine and Proline so it's a poor protein from a total perspective it's not as balanced as as an animal derived uh meat protein or milk protein so but it contains a lot of glycine and Proline so what you could say is that hey your ligaments your cartilage your bone also contains a lot of glycine and Proline and so it's a good source of these two amino acids um makes

perfect sense so the story is uh makes sense but it's a little bit like um yeah if you eat something that you need it's going to be better for you but the question is do we already get enough Glycine and proline in our diet and is additional uh via collagen of additional value now that is something that we don't know and we've been starting to look at this and so we've been ingesting collagen and whey protein after exercise and then we look at myop protein synthesis but also muscle connect protein synthesis and I hope that

doesn't go too fast exercise stimulates both myi as well as connect muscle connective protein synthesis so the Adaptive response in muscle is both connective proteins as well as my f proteins now if you ingest protein it further increases the response to exercise and you see greater myop fi protein synthesis however the ingestion on of dairy protein or protein does not seem to increase muscle connective protein synthesis rates so so far at least for up to six hours after exercise your contractile muscle responds to protein in addition to exercise but your muscle connective does not now

we've tried that also with collagen and we do not see a greater increase in connective tissue protein synthesis rates in muscle so either it is not happening in the first five hours and the exercise is already a stimulus enough and the response is later on or there's enough Glycine and proline in Dairy protein how much are you seeing in the muscle connective tissue response to Dairy I I was under the impression based on what you said that it was virtually none is it some but just pales in comparison to the exercise it pales to in

in comparison to the exercise exactly okay no significant increase in muscle connective protein synthesis uh in addition to the exercise effect have you done this activity or this experiment without exercise so you can because obviously exercise is such a potent stimulus that as you said it might be dwarfing what we see and and what is that have you done that experiment let me look what uh so you're saying without exercise yes we also done it without exercise and it does not seem to be responsive to nutrition but I have to uh make an exception in

that study by urine that huge amount of protein that 100 grams we suddenly see it interesting so in that study where you gave the massive dose of protein and those were not exercising patients over a longer period of time yeah but that was exercise as well I see but that oh that was exercise okay and that but that was also yeah okay so it seems that based on those data there is no benefit in both myofibril fibular or muscle connective tissue protein synthesis using collagen versus using whey or casian so if a person is taking

a collagen protein because they believe that it will disproportionately help them increase the strength of their connective tissue the data would say that that is not correct at least in the presence of an exercising individual yes over over five hours I guess to be fully complete okay and I how and so what I hold so from a practice translation um I still hold an option open for ligaments tendons bone cartilage because when I look at muscle connective protein the fraction that we actually take out of the muscle contains only a few percent of collagen so

the muscle doesn't contain a lot of collagen so the question is is it not more important for tendons ligaments bone and cartilage I wouldn't say say that it's not working there so again we are also athletes we're also patients and also scientist so as as a scientist I haven't seen evidence that it actually leads to Greater connective tissue protein synthesis rates but if I would actually break my hip or I would actually have a major issue with my knee and I'm recovering and rehabilitating I think I would take uh both a protein supplement that also

has a little bit of collagen in order to be sure that I get enough Glycine and protein yeah but that's meid but but I would say that the the the you know the other point to consider is if there are people listening to this who are just using collagen as their supplemental protein Source they're undoubtedly compromising myofibrillar muscle protein synthesis because as you said they're basically just getting a lot of Proline and Glycine and they're probably really missing out on Lucine lysine methionine and the other amino acids that are far more it's a very low

quality protein from the perspective amino acid balance yes yeah but it's a nice source of glycine and Proline but if you take enough protein probably the Glycine and Proline is already sufficiently available in your diet however if you have major issues with ligaments tendons or other almost purely collagen based structures it might be a benefit I'm not throwing that away that is something that we still want to look at for the next few years but the jury is still out on that [Music]