What happens if I take collagen for a year?

The money and the trials' calendar across the twelve months

What happens if I take collagen for a year is a question best answered as a ledger, twelve months down one side and what the year bought down the other, because a year is long enough for every collagen trial's reading point to have passed and long enough for a reader to have spent real money, and the honest page totals both. The money first, since it is the one line certain to appear. Two capsules a day at 28p is £8.50 a month and around £102 a year, six tubs of 120, a sum most readers carry without noticing for a modest dose taken for the vitamin C line and the habit. Ten grams of powder a day, the joint trial dose, is roughly a pound a day at typical shelf prices, £300 to £400 a year depending on the brand and the animal, a sum that is a decision, and at fifteen grams for a tendon protocol most days of the week, more again. Every year of collagen has that line, and the rest of the ledger decides whether it was a purchase or a habit. The trials' calendar second, laid across the twelve months. By month three, the skin trials had taken their readings: at 2.5 to 10 grams a day, elasticity by cutometer and hydration by corneometer up a few percent against placebo, dermal density by ultrasound in some, and eye wrinkle depth by profilometry in one eight-week trial, all in small and mostly industry-funded trials, so a reader on trial doses who measured by instrument had their skin answer by the end of the first quarter and a reader on capsules had no skin trial to have an answer from. By month six, the joint trials had taken their second and clearer reading: at around ten grams a day, activity-related pain modestly down on questionnaire scales at twelve and twenty-four weeks, with no change in cartilage on any imaging, so a reader who scored one provoking movement weekly had their joint answer at the half-year, in either direction. By month twelve, one trial had measured something no shorter trial could: five grams a day of a specific collagen peptide for twelve months in postmenopausal women with reduced bone density reported small increases in bone mineral density at the spine and hip against placebo, a single manufacturer-linked trial of one peptide in one population with no claim behind it, and the only collagen result that needed a full year to appear. No collagen trial ran longer than twelve months with any outcome, so the second year is off the evidence map entirely, and a reader who continues into it is continuing a habit, which is a fine thing to do knowingly and a poor thing to mistake for a trial.

The safety line, the habit line, and the year without a sheet

The safety line across the year is short because there is little to write. Collagen is a food protein with no upper level set by any authority, no accumulation in the body, since it is digested and used or burned like any protein, no tolerance that builds and no dependence, and the trials that ran twelve months at up to fifteen grams a day recorded nothing above placebo in their adverse event tables beyond the fullness and mild bloating of scoop doses in the early weeks, which the gut adapts to. The two standing footnotes hold across the year as across the day: hydroxyproline is metabolised partly to oxalate, a note for calcium oxalate stone formers who keep collagen modest and ask, and marine collagen is fish protein, an allergy question answered on day one and not one that develops with time. A year of collagen, then, is a year of a small protein serving, and the liver and kidney read it as such. The habit line is the one a year buys that a month cannot. Every collagen trial controlled one variable above all, consistency, dosing every day and measuring at the end, and the habit literature is plain that a daily dose anchored to a fixed point survives while a dose floating on memory lapses by week three, so a reader who reaches month twelve has done the one thing the trials required and most readers do not, and whatever else the year did, it built a habit that holds, which is worth something in itself and is the honest reason many readers continue past the evidence. The last line is the one the ledger exists for: what is a year without a measurement? It is a habit and a cost, and it is not a result, in either direction. A reader who took collagen for a year and feels their skin is better has a feeling, which lighting, season, sleep and a year of ageing all move more than a few percent on a cutometer; a reader who took it for a year and feels nothing has a feeling too, and may have had the trials' few percent without a mirror able to see it. Neither can honestly say collagen did or did not work, because neither measured, and the fix is retrospective only in the sense that the next year can start with a sheet: one skin photograph in fixed light or one joint movement scored out of ten, before the first dose, and read at the trials' reading points. The worked example is the £102 year 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, six tubs a year, lab tested and UK made, below the trial doses, taken daily at an anchor for vitamin C's collagen formation sentence, a habit that holds and a cost a reader knows. What happens if I take collagen for a year: £102 or £400 leaves, the trials' readings pass at three, six and twelve months for the reader who took their doses and kept a sheet, nothing accumulates, a habit forms, and a reader without a sheet ends the year exactly as informed as they began it.

What to check on the label