What not to eat when taking collagen?

Tracing each item to its origin: coffee and sugar

What not to eat when taking collagen is a question the shelf answers with a confident list, coffee, sugar, dairy, gluten, alcohol, processed food, and the honest page answers by tracing each item to where the instruction came from, because every item on the list has an origin, none of the origins is a human trial of collagen taken with food, and a reader who sees the origin stops obeying the instruction. Coffee is the most repeated item and has the most interesting origin. A laboratory study exposed cultured human skin fibroblasts, the cells that make dermal collagen, to caffeine in a dish, and found that at the concentrations used the cells made less collagen and less of the proteins that support it, a finding its authors reported as a possible mechanism for caffeine affecting skin and that has since been repeated across the internet as proof that coffee destroys collagen and that collagen should never be taken with it. Three things separate the dish from the instruction. The concentrations in the dish were applied directly to cells for a sustained period and bear no straightforward relation to what reaches the dermis after a cup of coffee, which is diluted through the whole body and cleared in hours. No human trial has shown that dietary caffeine lowers skin collagen, and the epidemiology of coffee and skin ageing is inconsistent, with some studies finding coffee drinkers have less photoageing. And no trial has shown caffeine blunting oral collagen: the collagen skin trials let participants dissolve their dose in any drink they chose, coffee included, and found their few percent on the instruments regardless, and a hydrolysed peptide is not destroyed by heat or by caffeine since it is already broken to fragments the stomach finishes digesting. Coffee is, in practice, one of the commonest ways people keep a daily collagen habit, and the origin of the warning against it is a dish. Sugar is the second item and its origin is real but misapplied. Glycation is the slow, non-enzymatic attachment of sugars to proteins, and over years it attaches to the long-lived collagen of skin and tendon, cross-linking the fibres abnormally, stiffening and yellowing them and making them harder for the body to remodel, a process accelerated in diabetes and by a diet consistently high in sugar; it is a genuine reason a sensible long-term diet matters for skin and connective tissue. It has nothing to do with the hour a collagen capsule is taken or whether a biscuit is eaten beside it, since glycation acts on the collagen a person already has over years and not on a dose of peptides in the stomach, so the instruction do not eat sugar when taking collagen has borrowed a true fact about decades and applied it to a mealtime.

Dairy, gluten, alcohol and the rest, why a protein digests beside anything, and the one true item turned the right way up

Dairy and gluten are the third and fourth items and trace to nothing at all: no mechanism by which casein, lactose or gluten would interfere with the digestion or absorption of a hydrolysed protein, no study of any kind, and an origin that appears to be the general tendency of wellness lists to include the two foods that other wellness lists exclude. A reader with a dairy or gluten intolerance avoids them for that reason and a reader without one has no collagen-related reason to. Alcohol is the fifth item and its origin is real and sideways: alcohol dehydrates the skin, degrades sleep, in which repair runs, slows wound and tissue healing when heavy and is a lever on skin ageing and on recovery, all of which are reasons to drink less and none of which is an interaction with a protein's digestion, since a glass of wine beside a collagen dose leaves the peptides exactly as digestible as before. Processed food, the sixth item, is a general dietary instruction with a collagen label stuck on it. The reason none of these items survives tracing is that hydrolysed collagen is a food protein, digested in the stomach and small intestine by acid and enzymes to amino acids and small peptides exactly as the protein in a meal is, and a protein digests beside any other food: the peptide absorption studies measured prolyl-hydroxyproline and its relatives in blood after ordinary feeding, the skin and joint trials gave collagen with or without food at any time of day in any drink, and no condition of eating was ever specified because none was ever needed. There is therefore nothing not to eat when taking collagen, and the honest page would stop there except that the list contains one true item, printed upside down. The shelf sometimes says not to take collagen with other protein, on the theory that the proteins compete for absorption, which is false, since the gut absorbs a mixed protein meal with ease; but the true version of that item is the reverse, that a reader should make sure to eat complete protein elsewhere in the day, eggs, dairy, meat, fish, soya or whey, so that collagen, which contains no tryptophan and roughly a third of whey's leucine, is never the day's main protein, because a diet in which collagen displaces complete protein under-feeds muscle and, in the extreme laboratory case, lowers brain tryptophan. The one thing to do with food when taking collagen is to eat the rest of it. The worked example is taken with any meal in any drink, 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, counting for nothing towards the complete protein eaten beside it and carrying vitamin C's collagen formation sentence. What not to eat when taking collagen: nothing, and the coffee the list warns against is where most people put it.

What to check on the label