Does collagen increase muscle?

Name the control: why a trial proves only that its treatment beat its comparator, and what the collagen-plus-training trials proved against silica

Does collagen increase muscle is a question that gets a yes from one set of trials and a no from another, and the honest page gives the one rule that reconciles them rather than picking a side, because the rule is the thing a reader can take to every supplement trial they ever meet: name the control. A randomised controlled trial does not prove that a treatment works; it proves that the treatment beat whatever it was compared against, and the comparator decides what was proved. A drug that beats placebo has been shown to do more than nothing; a drug that beats the existing treatment has been shown to do more than something; and a supplement trial can be designed to produce either result from the same product by choosing the comparator, which is why the honest reading of any trial starts with the question of what the other group was given. The trials quoted for yes are three, and they are real. Fifteen grams a day of specific collagen peptides, bovine-derived, were added to twelve weeks of supervised resistance training, three sessions a week, and compared with the same training plus placebo: in around fifty older men with sarcopenia, the collagen group gained more fat-free mass and more strength and lost more fat mass than the placebo group; in young men, the collagen group gained more fat-free mass and strength; in premenopausal women, the pattern repeated. All three were funded by the manufacturer of the peptides, which is disclosed and is a reason for care, and all three are on the collagen and building muscle page. Now name the control. The placebo in every one of the three was silica, silicon dioxide, an inert powder with the same look and weight as the collagen and no protein in it at all, so that the comparison in each trial was training plus 15g of protein a day against training plus nothing, and the finding, read against its control, is that adding 15g of protein a day to a resistance training programme produces more fat-free mass and strength than adding nothing. That is a finding about protein, and it is expected: the protein and training literature has shown for years that adding protein to a programme increases lean mass gains, especially in people whose habitual intake is modest, as older men's often is and as young men's and women's sometimes are, and 15g of whey, egg, soy or an extra chicken breast would be predicted to do the same. Nothing in the design could attribute the result to collagen in particular rather than to protein in general, because the one comparison that would have, collagen against another protein, was not made. The outcome compounds the point: fat-free mass measured by DXA is everything that is not fat, which is water, bone and connective tissue as well as muscle, and a protein supplement that increased body water or connective tissue would raise it without a fibre growing, with what was measured taken apart on the collagen and muscle mass page; none of the three trials measured muscle protein synthesis, muscle fibre size or muscle cross-section by MRI, which are the measurements that mean muscle.

The trials that used whey as the control and what they proved, the trial nobody has run, the answer assembled from the controls that exist, and the worked example

The trials quoted for no used a different control, and naming it changes what they proved just as much. The tracer studies compared collagen peptides with whey protein, a complete protein that is the standard against which muscle-building proteins are judged, and measured muscle protein synthesis directly by following labelled amino acids into muscle protein in biopsies. In young resistance-trained men at rest and after a bout of exercise, whey raised myofibrillar protein synthesis and collagen peptides did not differ from placebo; in older women during energy restriction and reduced steps, whey supported muscle protein synthesis through the restriction and an equal dose of collagen did not; and in the connective tissue fraction inside muscle, where collagen's amino acids might have been expected to matter, collagen peptide ingestion did not increase synthesis after exercise either. Name the control and these are findings about collagen rather than about protein: the comparator was a protein, the dose was matched, and collagen lost to it, which means that whatever the silica trials showed about adding protein, the protein that was added would have done at least as well and by the tracer evidence considerably better had it been whey, which is the hide and the steak on the bovine collagen and muscle page read as trial design. The trial that would answer the question as asked has not been run, and the honest page says so plainly: collagen peptides against an equal dose of another protein, whey or a plant blend, over twelve weeks of resistance training, with muscle measured by MRI cross-section or fibre size rather than DXA fat-free mass, in a population not short of protein to begin with, would settle whether collagen increases muscle, and in a field where a positive result for collagen would sell a great deal of powder the absence of that trial after years of the silica trials is itself informative, since the parties with the resources to run it have the tracer studies to tell them how it would come out. So the honest answer is assembled from the controls that exist. Against nothing, collagen wins, by the margin that 15g of protein a day wins over no protein when added to training in people whose intake had room. Against whey, collagen loses, on the measurement that means muscle. The increase in muscle a lifter wants therefore comes from the protein collagen was compared against: complete protein at around 1.6 to 2 grams per kilogram across the day, in servings of 25 to 40g that each clear the leucine threshold, beside the training that drives the growth, with collagen beside it as filler toward the day's grams if the lifter takes it for other reasons and never as the serving that does the building. The tissues collagen's trials do address are the tendon, through the pre-loading protocol, the skin, the joints and the bone, each at powder doses and each a different roster from muscle's. The worked example is the protein that beats nothing and loses to whey, sold for other tissues and 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, carrying vitamin C's collagen formation sentence for cartilage and bones and no muscle claim, since the register's muscle sentences belong to complete protein and the controls say collagen is not one. Does collagen increase muscle: name the control, and the answer is that it beats a powder of nothing and loses to a protein, and the muscle comes from the protein.

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