Collagen is, by now, a pretty common supplement. There's been fairly divided opinions on whether it actually works though. The main argument against was that it didn't survive your gut, so was pointless as a supplement.

If we're honest, this was our opinion till a few years ago. Two things changed that. One was doing a lot more research. This podcast in particular stands out from memory. It's well worth a listen if you have any passing interest in joint and connective tissue health (don't rush all at once). The second was trying it out.

We started mixing collagen into our smoothies. One of the main drivers for building TOTEMIC was to try and make consistency easy. And this mix formed the basis of the TOTEMIC concept.  But that's an aside, the point is that we did some research then tried it, consistently, for at least couple of months. 

We liked it, it felt like it was definitely worth keeping in our mix. We'll make no claims and this isn't a claim about what it'll do for you, YMMV etc. but we decided it was low/no downside and good upside. So a win.

Now a meta study has just been published which came to a pretty similar conclusion. This means they studied other studies containing almost 8000 people. The headline findings pointed to improvements in skin elasticity, hydration and osteoarthritis-related joint pain It also found modest effects on muscle growth. (Collagen is protein so that may not be too surprising if you read the post we made previously on protein.)

Effects on oral health and cardiometabolic markers (cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar) were inconsistent or not significant. Though claims against those were news to us, so we're not marking that as a fail.

It's worth noting that though the confidence in the results are high, the confidence in the underlying studies is less strong. That's not resolved in the study but worth noting.

We made collagen the basis of our BOND block along with a couple of supporting actors to ensure we get the best performance from it. You might want to add it to your mix if you feel like you could benefit from the effects the study points to.

If you want a good overview of the study you can read one on Time here.

The full study is here.