What happens if you take too much collagen every day?

The year's tally at thirty grams a day: what is swallowed, what it costs in calories, and what the body does

What happens if you take too much collagen every day is a question with a quantity and a duration hidden in it, and the honest page makes both explicit by running a year at a dose above every trial, thirty grams a day, roughly a scoop and a half of a typical powder and the kind of dose a reader reaches by following the shelf's more-is-better logic, because a tally over a year says more than any list of symptoms. Start with what is swallowed. Thirty grams a day for three hundred and sixty-five days is around eleven kilograms of hydrolysed collagen over the year, which sounds alarming and is not, because none of it stays: each day's thirty grams is digested in the stomach and small intestine to free amino acids and a few small peptides, absorbed, used by whatever tissue is building protein or oxidised for energy, and cleared from the blood by evening, so that on the last day of the year the body holds exactly as much dietary collagen as it did on the first, which is none. Collagen is a food protein with no toxicity threshold and no upper intake level, the randomised trials at 2.5 to 15g a day for up to a year report adverse events no different from placebo, and thirty grams is simply twice the highest trialled dose, a quantity nobody has studied and nothing in the biology suggests is harmful, since a large steak supplies more protein. What the body itself reports at thirty grams is the same-day set: fullness or bloating in the hour or two after a large scoop, since it is a big bolus of protein in a glass, a taste or aftertaste, especially from marine sources, and in some people looser stools, all arriving with the dose and leaving within hours, warning of nothing cumulative because nothing accumulates. Now the first real line of the tally, calories. Collagen is around four calories a gram, so thirty grams is around a hundred and twenty calories a day and forty-four thousand over the year, and forty-four thousand calories is the energy content of around five kilograms of body fat; a reader who adds thirty grams of collagen to an otherwise unchanged diet and does not log it has added the energy of five kilograms of fat over the year, which gains weight slowly only if intake was already at expenditure and does so as any unlogged food would, and which is the one way too much collagen measurably changes a body. The calories are also calories of incomplete protein: thirty grams a day appears as protein on the tub's panel and counts for nothing towards the 1.6 to 2.2g per kilogram of complete protein a muscle needs, since collagen carries roughly three percent leucine and no tryptophan, so a reader who counts them has written down thirty grams of protein and eaten none that holds muscle, and may have displaced the whey or the eggs that would have.

Glycine and oxalate, money, contaminants, and where the year's harm actually lives

The second line is glycine and its companion. Thirty grams of collagen supplies around ten grams of glycine a day, three times the dose the sleep trials used and beyond any dose trialled for anything, with no known harm at that level, glycine being an amino acid the body makes and uses in quantity, and a reader on an evening dose might notice better sleep, the one effect a large glycine dose has been shown to produce. Beside the glycine rides hydroxyproline, which the liver partly metabolises to oxalate, so that a thirty-gram daily dose raises urinary oxalate every day of the year, symptomlessly, which is irrelevant to most people and is exactly the thing a calcium oxalate kidney stone former should not run for a year without a doctor's knowledge, since a daily nudge towards stone formation across three hundred and sixty-five days is how a stone is built; this is the one line of the tally with a specific population it matters to. The third line is money. The trials used 2.5 to 15g a day and found 2.5g and 10g performing alike in skin, modest joint gains at 5 to 10g and the tendon protocol at 15g, so every gram above fifteen buys nothing any trial has found, and thirty grams a day costs, at typical powder prices, between four hundred and seven hundred pounds over the year above a 15g habit, money that would have bought a year of whey, a decade of winter vitamin D or a course of physiotherapy for the joint the collagen was meant for. The fourth line is contaminants. A trace of lead, cadmium, mercury or arsenic in a batch of collagen, especially a fish-derived one, is harmless in a dose and a different question across three hundred and sixty-five doses at double the usual quantity, since lead accumulates in bone and cadmium in the kidney over years; a product with a batch certificate of analysis has answered the line and one without has made the year a gamble repeated daily. Where the year's harm actually lives is therefore clear from the tally: not in the organs, which process and clear each day's dose as they would any protein and show nothing cumulative in a year of trials, but in the ledger, forty-four thousand unlogged calories, thirty grams a day of displaced complete protein, hundreds of pounds spent above the evidence, a daily oxalate load for the stone former, and a compounding contaminant risk if the tub was never tested. The honest dose is the one the goal's trials used, 2.5g and above for skin, 5 to 10g for joints, 15g with vitamin C before loading for the tendon protocol, or a habit dose stated as below the band, and too much every day is everything above that, harmless to the body and expensive to the year. The worked example tallies honestly: 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 for heavy metals and UK made, around 440g of collagen, 1,800 calories and a hundred pounds over a year, below the 2.5 to 15g research band and holding no claim for the collagen. What happens if you take too much collagen every day: the body digests it and forgets it each day, and the year remembers the calories, the pounds and the protein you did not eat instead.

What to check on the label