Drinking collagen to Fight Wrinkles?

Most likely many of you have seen ads or spoken to women who are drinking or selling beverages laced with collagen. The sales pitch for these drinks is that drinking collagen will rebuild and enhance the collagen in your skin and that Japanese women have been doing it for years (so of course it must be valid, right? And of course women who don’t drink collagen must look wrinkled?). I can see why this would be easy to accept. For more than two decades women have believed that collagen added to skin-care products will add to the collagen in your skin, so why wouldn’t the same be true from the inside out? After all, if you drink dairy products rich in calcium you do get better bone growth. If you drink colas and other soda drinks you lose calcium and have an increased risk of osteoporosis (Source: Osteoporosis International, December 2005, pages 1803-1808).

Does drinking collagen offer similar possibilities for skin? Most of this attention is a result of a collagen drink called Toki. It is marketed in a pyramid-style business plan so your neighbor or co-worker may be the one tempting you with frivolous, scientific-sounding claims to get you to purchase the drink or the company’s associated supplements (there is always something else you need), or try to get you to sell the stuff yourself.

Aside from claims that are too good to be true, Toki asserts that they have impressive, independent studies demonstrating the success of their drink. At best, their research is du­bious. Despite the company’s contention about having unbiased research, it isn’t the truth. The studies they have were paid for by the company distributing their products, namely Lane Labs, based in Allendale, New Jersey. If you end up believing even a portion of their misleading sales pitch you will find yourself out $175 for a 30-day supply. Surely that kind of expenditure requires more than the claims Toki has cooked up.

It is also questionable whether or not Toki actually contains collagen at all. The ingredients on the label are rice germ extract, soybean extract, hijiki seaweed extract, lemon juice, citric acid, artificial lemon flavoring, magnesium stearate, silica, and soybeans. None of those sub­stances have anything to do with collagen. Plant-based sources of collagen are questionable at best, as humans and animals are the only known source of ingestible collagen.

Are Toki or other collagen drinks any better than collagen supplements (which also hap­pen to cost a lot less) at providing potential benefit? You’ll be happy to know spending more money will not enhance the outcome. Either way, you won’t see your wrinkles diminish or disappear with Toki, so keeping the $175 monthly cost (that’s $2,100 a year!) in your pocket may be far more helpful to you in the long run.

In this case, getting past the hype and marketing shenanigans takes information, because anything involving the human body is complicated. Just in case you don’t want to make your way through this section, the short answer is, Don’t waste your money. Collagen drinks are not miracles for your skin. The distance between the hype and the truth is just too big for any budget to handle.

The same complexity holds true for collagen as a beauty supplement, too, because there is some research showing the intake of collagen can have benefit for skin and bones. But there is no science showing it gets rid of wrinkles, at least not unbiased research.

What is collagen? Collagen is made of protein and functions primarily as a support structure in the body, comprising 30% of its mass. There are many forms of collagen in the human body but only four types account for over 90% of the total. They are: Collagen I, found in skin, tendons, capillaries and veins, bone, and organs. Collagen II is the primary component of cartilage, while Collagen III is the main component of reticular fibers, and Collagen IV is the mainstay of the cell membrane.

When collagen is broken down it can produce gelatin, which can be used in foods (think Jell-O), or in cosmetics (think products that claim to get rid of wrinkles or in nail-care products claiming to grow nails). Pure collagen can be used in skin-care products as a way to keep skin hydrated. But eating Jell-O no more adds collagen to your skin than applying gelatin ever helped anyone grow a nano-inch of nail length. And no one has ever shed a wrinkle from putting collagen on their skin.

So does ingesting pure collagen translate to creating building blocks, the way eating calcium works on the body, or is it more akin to believing that if you feed a cow chocolate it will produce chocolate milk? The answer is that consuming collagen may have a good effect, as eating calcium-rich foods or supplements will, but NOT in terms of helping wrinkles. Thinking otherwise would be like assuming a broken leg will be repaired by eat­ing calcium.

When you eat or drink collagen (from meat or in supplements) it is digested and broken down into the individual amino acids it is made up of, just as it would be with any animal protein you eat. But regardless of the source the collagen would not be distributed directly to the collagen in your skin. It’s just not possible, any more than the chocolate in the cow analogy. Still, eating foods containing collagen does seem to be able to help the entire body’s formation of collagen, and that’s good news (Sources: Archives of Dermatological Research, Oc­tober 2008, pages 479-483; Knee Surgery, Sports Traumatology, and Arthroscopy, August 2006, pages 750-755; Journal of Nutritional Science, March 2006, pages 211-215; and American Journal of Physiology Endocrinology and Metabolism, June 2005, pages 864-869).

One other point that makes matters even more complicated: Some of these collagen drinks say they contain a form of or are able to stimulate the body’s production of collagen peptide (a fragment of collagen broken down by enzymes). Collagen peptides have been shown to improve general bone density, have anti-arthritic properties, and even anti-bone – tumor properties (Sources: Clinical Immunology, January 2007, pages 75-84; Matrix Biology, November 2006, pages S69-S70; and Journal of Bone and Mineral Metabolism, November 2004, 547-553). But this is a complex topic and there is no direct research indicating dosage, or information comparing modalities. There is also research showing that some forms of collagen can stimulate arthritis and that only specific forms can offer help (Source: Molecular Immunology, November, www. pubmed. gov). Medicating in this arena needs to be done with your physician’s advice.

Despite the confusion and the complex manner in which various forms of collagen work in the body (for better and, in some cases, for worse), what you need to know is that drinking collagen is not going to alter your wrinkles, firm your skin, or delay a trip to the cosmetic surgeon for any of the numerous corrective procedures that really do make an anti-wrinkle difference. I’ll drink to that!

Updated: September 11, 2015 — 1:29 am