How to flush out excess collagen?

The exit routes and their timings: the body's own flush, which ran before the question was asked

How to flush out excess collagen is a question that assumes two things, that collagen taken as a supplement is stored somewhere in the body and that something drunk or done could move it out faster, and the honest page answers by listing the exit routes the body already uses for dietary collagen and the time each takes, because once the timings are on the table both assumptions dissolve and the shelf's flushes, water, lemon, fasting, a cleanse, are revealed as flushing a store that was never filled. The first exit is digestion, and it begins within minutes of swallowing. Hydrolysed collagen, already cut to short peptides at manufacture, meets the stomach's acid and pepsin and then the pancreatic and brush-border enzymes of the small intestine, and within an hour or two it has become what every protein becomes, free amino acids, glycine, proline, hydroxyproline, alanine and the rest, plus a small fraction of di- and tripeptides, prolyl-hydroxyproline and hydroxyprolyl-glycine among them, that resist the enzymes and are absorbed intact; nothing recognisable as collagen crosses the gut wall, so the first thing the question imagines, collagen circulating or lodging as collagen, never happens. The second exit is the amino acid pool. The absorbed amino acids join the body's circulating supply and are drawn on by whatever tissue is making protein at the time, muscle, skin, gut lining, enzymes, with no tag that says they came from collagen and no preference for being made back into it; whatever is not used is deaminated in the liver, the nitrogen stripped off and passed through the urea cycle, and the urea excreted by the kidneys in the urine, a process that rises and falls with protein intake as a normal adaptive response and that disposes of a day's surplus within about a day. The third exit is the peptides: the surviving di- and tripeptides peak in the blood around an hour after a dose, circulate for a few hours, and are broken down or excreted by evening, which is why the pre-loading protocol times its dose an hour before a session and why nothing carries over to the next day. The fourth exit is oxalate: collagen's hydroxyproline is partly metabolised in the liver to glyoxylate and then oxalate, which is excreted in the urine the same day, raising urinary oxalate measurably after large gelatin doses and returning to baseline once the dose stops, a point that matters to calcium oxalate stone formers and to nobody else. Put the four together and the body's own flush is complete by the following morning: a day's collagen has left as urea, as carbon dioxide from oxidised amino acids, as oxalate and as the amino acids built into whatever the body was building anyway, and the body on day three hundred of a daily habit holds exactly as much dietary collagen as it held on day one, which is none. There is nothing to flush, and a reader who wants the collagen they took to be gone has only to stop taking it, after which it is gone by tomorrow.

What clinicians mean by excess collagen, which is made and not eaten, and what the shelf's flushes actually do

What clinicians mean by excess collagen is a different thing from what the question means, and the honest page separates them because a reader who has read the phrase somewhere may be worried about the wrong one. Excess collagen in the medical sense is fibrosis: collagen deposited by the body's own fibroblasts in a tissue where it should not be, in quantities that stiffen and scar it, and it arises from a faulty signal rather than from a surplus of material. In the lungs, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and the fibrosis of some occupational exposures; in the liver, the fibrosis that follows years of inflammation from alcohol, fat or a virus; in the skin, keloid scars, in which the fibroblasts of a healing wound keep depositing collagen past the wound's edges under a genetic predisposition, and the hardened skin of scleroderma, in which an autoimmune process drives fibroblasts to deposit collagen in skin and organs; in the heart and kidneys, the fibrosis that follows long-standing high blood pressure or diabetes. In every case the collagen is made on site by cells receiving a wrong instruction, and the amount of collagen a person has eaten plays no part, since eaten collagen is amino acids by the time it reaches the blood and a fibroblast under a fibrotic signal builds from the same pool whether its owner eats gelatin or not; no case report, cohort or trial links dietary collagen to any fibrosis, and the one time collagen has been studied in a fibrotic disease, oral type I collagen was tested as a treatment for scleroderma on the principle of oral tolerance, not as a cause. Nothing drunk or done flushes fibrotic collagen either, since it is matrix laid down in a tissue and not a substance in circulation; its management is medical, with anti-fibrotic drugs for some lung disease, treatment of the underlying cause for the liver, silicone, steroid injection or surgery for keloids, and a rheumatologist for scleroderma. So a reader worried about collagen building up inside them from a supplement can stop worrying, since it cannot, and a reader with a thickening scar, stiffening skin or breathlessness has a doctor's question and not a flushing one. What the shelf's flushes actually do is worth a sentence each, because they are sold for this. Water does what water does, hydrates and supports the kidneys that were already excreting the urea and oxalate at their normal rate, and more of it does not speed the exit of amino acids that are already gone. Lemon, apple cider vinegar and the cleanse teas do nothing to protein metabolism and, in the case of laxative teas, move the bowel rather than any collagen. Fasting stops the next dose arriving, which is the only flush that exists, and a reader who simply stops taking collagen has fasted from it to exactly the same effect without fasting from anything else. The worked example is a dose the body flushes by tomorrow, 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, below the 2.5 to 15g research band, carrying vitamin C's collagen formation sentence and no claim for the collagen. How to flush out excess collagen: wait a day, because the body already has, and take the real excess collagen, which is fibrosis, to a doctor.

What to check on the label