What are the side effects of collagen type 1 and 3?

The numerals as a provenance stamp, and why they carry no side effect of their own

What are the side effects of collagen type 1 and 3 is a question that treats the type numbers as a safety category, as if type 1 and 3 collagen were a different substance with its own risks, and the honest page starts by reading the numerals for what they are, a stamp of where the collagen came from, because that reading answers the question and the other one cannot. Collagen comes in many types, defined by the sequence of their chains, and the three that matter on the shelf are distributed by tissue: type 1 forms the thick fibres of skin, tendon, ligament and bone, type 3 the finer fibres alongside it in skin, vessels and healing tissue, and type 2 the matrix of cartilage. A tub that says type 1 and 3 is telling the reader, whether it means to or not, that its collagen came from hide, because mammalian skin yields types 1 and 3 together, while fish skin and scales yield type 1 alone, which is why marine tubs say type 1, and chicken sternum cartilage yields type 2, which is why the undenatured type II product says so; type 1 and 3 is bovine, or occasionally porcine, and almost never anything else. Once the hide has been extracted to gelatin and hydrolysed by enzymes into peptides of a few hundred to a few thousand daltons, the type distinction largely dissolves: the body receives short fragments and free amino acids, glycine, proline, hydroxyproline, and not intact type 1 or type 3 fibres, and the small peptides that survive digestion, prolyl-hydroxyproline among them, are common to both types, so there is no mechanism by which a type 3 peptide could produce a side effect a type 1 peptide does not, and no trial has ever attributed an adverse effect to a collagen type. The numerals, then, carry no side effect of their own, and the honest question underneath the one asked is what are the side effects of bovine collagen, which has two lists, the animal's and the molecule's, and the page gives both.

Bovine's own list laid on collagen's general list, the one thing not on it, and the other provenance

Bovine's own list has three entries, and only one is a side effect in the medical sense. Alpha-gal syndrome is a delayed allergy to mammalian meat and to mammalian-derived gelatin and collagen, sensitised through the bite of certain ticks, rare in the UK and commoner in readers who have lived where the lone star tick is found, presenting hours after ingestion with hives, gut symptoms or anaphylaxis, so a reader with the diagnosis does not take a type 1 and 3 collagen and takes marine or none, the one allergy specific to this provenance. Faith and diet are exclusions rather than side effects: a type 1 and 3 collagen is excluded by vegans, by beef-avoiding diets, and by kosher and halal observance unless the tub carries a certification of source, slaughter and processing, with porcine excluded by those rules entirely, so the type 1 and 3 reader checks the source line and the mark. And the BSE question is a file rather than a side effect: bovine gelatin and collagen are sourced under the post-BSE controls, specified risk materials excluded, controlled herds and countries, processing assessed as reducing infectivity, and are regarded as safe food ingredients on that basis, so the reader reads the traceability line, country of origin and manufacturing standard, and passes on a tub that does not print one. Collagen's general list applies to type 1 and 3 as to any hydrolysate: fullness and mild bloating at scoop doses of twenty grams in the first fortnight, fading as the gut adapts and absent at a dessertspoon or a capsule; a taste in some powders taken in water; the hydroxyproline to oxalate footnote, urinary oxalate rising after large gelatin loads, a note for calcium oxalate stone formers and nothing for anyone else; the whey shake a bovine powder is usually stirred into and blamed for, the lactose bloating and the dairy acne story belonging to the whey; and nothing above placebo in the trial adverse event tables at up to fifteen grams a day for a year, no liver, kidney or skin event. The one thing not on the type 1 and 3 list is the thing most often put there by readers who have read a marine page: fish allergy, which belongs to type 1 marine collagen and is the mirror of alpha-gal, each provenance excluding the other's allergic reader. The worked example is the other provenance, type 1 marine, on its true terms: two capsules, 1200mg hydrolysed type 1 marine collagen with 12mg vitamin C plus zinc, 120 for £16.99 at 28p a day, lab tested and UK made, fish-derived, so the alternative for the alpha-gal and beef-excluding reader of this page and unsuitable for the fish-allergic one, below the research band and taken for vitamin C's collagen formation sentence, which no type holds. What are the side effects of collagen type 1 and 3: the side effects of bovine collagen, an allergy, two exclusions and a file, laid on the ordinary list of any hydrolysate, with the numerals themselves blameless.

What to check on the label