What does taking too much collagen cause?

The four causal tests, and the two alleged effects that pass them

What does taking too much collagen cause is a question whose verb is doing more work than the shelf notices, because cause is a causal word and epidemiology has spent a century working out how to tell an effect that is caused from one that merely happened nearby, so the honest page borrows its tests, a light version of the Bradford Hill considerations, and runs each alleged effect of too much collagen through them: does the effect rise with the dose, does it follow the exposure in time, is there a plausible mechanism, and is it specific to the collagen rather than to whatever else the reader did or ate that week. Two alleged effects pass all four. Fullness and bloating first: they rise with the dose, faint at a dessertspoon of ten grams and marked at a scoop of twenty, absent at a capsule; they follow the dose in time, arriving within the hour and passing within a few; they have a mechanism, twenty grams of any protein in a glass of water distending a stomach that was not expecting a meal, more so fasted or late; and they are specific to the drink, since a reader who drops the scoop loses the symptom and a reader who swaps to whey keeps it. Fullness and bloating are caused by too much collagen, fading over a fortnight as the gut adapts, the supplement tolerance literature's mild end. Raised urinary oxalate second: it rises with the load, the gelatin feeding studies showing urinary oxalate climbing after large gelatin doses; it follows the dose in time, over the hours and day after; it has a mechanism, hydroxyproline, a tenth of collagen and found almost nowhere else, being metabolised in the liver through glyoxylate to oxalate; and it is specific to collagen and gelatin, since no other common protein carries the hydroxyproline. Raised urinary oxalate is caused by too much collagen, and it is a footnote rather than a harm for every reader except one group, calcium oxalate kidney stone formers, for whom urinary oxalate is a variable already being watched and a daily twenty grams of collagen pushes it the wrong way, so that reader keeps collagen and gelatin modest and asks whoever manages the stones. Two effects caused, one a discomfort and one a footnote, and the rest of the list fails.

The alleged effects that fail the tests, the toxicity question, and the worked example

Weight gain fails on specificity. It has a mechanism, but the mechanism is calories, four a gram like any protein, thirty-six in a dessertspoon and seventy-two in a scoop, and calories from collagen cause weight gain exactly as calories from anything else do, only when they sit on top of maintenance intake over weeks, so the cause is the surplus and not the collagen, which fails the test of being specific to the exposure; the water weight lifters report in the first fortnight of a new stack is creatine's, and a reader who wants to know which stops one and not the other. Headaches and rashes fail on temporality and specificity together: both appear in the placebo arms of the collagen trials as often as in the collagen arms over twelve weeks, the signature of a symptom people have anyway and attribute to whatever they started, so neither follows the collagen in any way a placebo does not, and the one real rash on this page is an allergy rather than an excess, hives after starting a marine collagen being fish allergy, which is caused by any dose and not by too much, and is a reason to stop and choose bovine. Kidney and liver damage fail every test: there is no mechanism, since the liver handles collagen's nitrogen through the urea cycle as it handles any protein's and the kidney excretes urea and oxalate as it always has, the trials at up to fifteen grams a day for a year show no kidney or liver marker moving above placebo, and collagen appears in none of the supplement-associated liver injury case series, which name botanical extracts and excess vitamin A instead, so a reader worried that too much collagen damages the kidneys or liver is worried about an effect with no cause behind it, the one honest kidney note being the oxalate footnote above for stone formers and the one honest exception being a reader with existing kidney disease, whose protein intake is set clinically and who asks the team before any protein supplement. Toxicity fails by absence: no authority has set an upper level for collagen or gelatin because no toxic dose has been found, so too much collagen does not cause poisoning at any intake a person could swallow, and above fifteen grams the honest word is unstudied rather than unsafe. The tests totalled: too much collagen causes fullness and bloating, which pass on every count, and a rise in urinary oxalate, which passes and matters to stone formers, and it does not cause weight gain, headaches, rashes, kidney damage, liver damage or toxicity, each of which fails at least one test and most of which fail all four, with weight gain caused by the calories, the rash by fish allergy and the rest by nothing. The worked example causes nothing on this page: 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, just over a gram of protein with no scoop to distend anything and around 120mg of hydroxyproline, below the research band, taken for vitamin C's collagen formation sentence, marine, so the fish-allergic reader chooses bovine. What does taking too much collagen cause: fullness, and in stone formers an oxalate load, and nothing else that survives being asked how it knows.

What to check on the label