Is collagen beneficial for older men?

The one trial in older men, read as a men's trial

Is collagen beneficial for older men is a question that the collagen literature has addressed exactly once, and the honest page begins by reading that one trial as what it is, a trial in older men, rather than as the general endorsement the shelf makes of it, because its design says precisely what it can and cannot tell a man in his sixties or seventies. The trial recruited around fifty men over sixty-five with sarcopenia, the age-related loss of muscle mass and strength that is the main physical threat of the decade, and randomised them to 15g a day of collagen peptides or to a placebo of silica, with both groups following the same supervised resistance training programme three times a week for twelve weeks. At the end the collagen group had gained more fat-free mass and more strength and had lost more fat than the placebo group, and the result has been quoted on collagen tubs aimed at older men ever since. Read as a men's trial, it shows two things clearly and a third not at all. The first is that resistance training works in older men with sarcopenia, since both groups gained muscle and strength over twelve weeks, which is the most important finding in the trial for any older man and the one the tub leaves out. The second is that fifteen extra grams of protein a day beside the training helped men whose baseline protein intake was below the research targets for older adults: the placebo was silica, which supplies no protein, so the comparison was extra protein against none in men who were, like most older men, eating less protein than their muscle needs, and extra protein of any kind helps an under-fed trainee, with the fat-free mass measurement, by absorptiometry, including water and connective tissue as well as muscle. The third thing, the one the tub implies, the trial cannot show: that collagen did anything a better protein would not have done, because no arm received whey, a mixed protein or simply more food, and the direct comparisons that do exist found whey switching muscle protein synthesis on and collagen failing to, which fits collagen's three percent leucine against a threshold that rises to three or four grams per meal in older muscle. So the one trial in older men says that older men should train and eat more protein, and says nothing about collagen being the protein to eat; a man who read it and bought whey would have read it correctly.

What is unstudied in older men, what the decade actually needs, and the honest rider

What is unstudied in older men is most of the rest of the collagen literature, and the honest page says so because the shelf's benefits for men are mostly borrowed from trials in women. The skin elasticity trials, the best-replicated collagen finding, recruited women almost exclusively, and men's skin differs in ways that matter: it is thicker by around a fifth to a quarter, with more collagen to begin with, it declines gradually without the menopause cliff, and it gets more sun with less sunscreen, so that what an older man reads as low collagen is mostly photoageing and the trials' few percent on a cutometer were measured in a different dermis. The bone density trial, 5g a day for twelve months with a small gain at the spine and hip, was in postmenopausal women, whose bone loss has a different driver, and no collagen bone trial exists in men, whose osteoporosis is under-recognised and whose levers are the same as women's, load, vitamin D, calcium and protein. The joint trials are mixed in sex and modest in result, questionnaire gains at around 10g over twelve to twenty-four weeks with no cartilage change, and apply to an older man's knee as to anyone's. What an older man's decade actually needs has stronger evidence than any of this and costs less. Protein at 1.2 to 1.6g per kilogram of body weight a day, higher than the general adult recommendation because older muscle is anabolically resistant and responds less to a given dose, spread across three or four meals each carrying around three grams of leucine from complete sources, whey, dairy, eggs, meat, fish or soya, since the leucine threshold rises with age and a low-protein breakfast is the commonest gap. Resistance training two or three times a week, progressive, through the main movement patterns, which both arms of the one trial proved works and which also builds the bone and protects the joints. Vitamin D at ten micrograms a day through a UK winter, the one supplement with a guidance dose for the age, for the muscle and the bone. And the medicine list checked before any supplement, since older men are more often on anticoagulants, statins and blood pressure medicines, and a pharmacist's two minutes is cheaper than a surprise. Collagen rides beside that as what it is: a claim-free top-up whose grams are not counted towards the protein target because of its leucine and tryptophan, whose one men-specific trial showed protein helping rather than collagen, and whose honest tub prints vitamin C's and zinc's sentences and no muscle, bone or skin claim. The worked example is that rider, stated on its true terms: two capsules, 1200mg hydrolysed type 1 marine collagen with 12mg vitamin C at 15% of its reference value plus zinc, 120 for £16.99 at 28p a day, lab tested and UK made, the zinc contributing to normal protein synthesis, the collagen below the 2.5 to 15g research band and counting for nothing towards protein. Is collagen beneficial for older men: the one trial says train and eat more protein, the rest was studied in women, and the capsule is a rider on a decade whose real needs are the plate, the barbell and the winter vitamin D.

What to check on the label