Collagen 101 for Healthcare Pros

Things to know about collagen and your healthcare practice. 

Like many healthcare practices, you may have begun selling collagen. But why?

To meet a growing market demand? To get better clinical outcomes for patients with pain?
There seems to be so much confusion around collagen; what types should it contain and how many grams should be consumed?

To get started, here's our quick Collagen 101:
Collagen is a protein that's in all of your connective tissues such as hair, skin, nails, joints, tendons, ligaments, and bones.

Starting around age 25, our natural production of collagen starts to decline. This happens for many reasons, like dehydration or having less building blocks due to oxidation stress.

Patients may start to see more wrinkles, feel more stiff, or get injured more often. While healthy collagen looks like a chain link fence with proper spacing and alignment of fibers, broken down collagen looks like a ball of spaghetti.

The chain link fence (proper spacing and alignment) allows tissues to stretch and strain yet bounce back, just like a brand new rubber band!

90% of the collagen in your body is made up of Type 1 and Type 2 collagen. Yet, so many products on the market promote having Type 3, on down the line in their formulas. We feel like this is just sales hype to impress buyers that more must be better.

Did you know that the only human clinical studies on collagen are focused on Type 1 and 2?

So, why would you healthcare practice offer patients a product that focuses on these extraneous types of collagen, whose main function is to hold the liver to the abdominal wall? So many collagens are just at the protein level and require more effort from the body to convert them down to peptides. This is why you will begin to feel the difference with a higher quality collagen that’s delivered in peptides verses collagen at the protein level.

Currently collagen is trending in popularity, whether patients are buying collagen directly from your practice or on their own. Many products on the market promote using collagen to get more protein in your diet.

However, collagen naturally lacks the essential amino acid L-tryptophan and contains only low levels of the primary muscle building amino acids. Your patients could get better muscle building protein just from eating tofu! It simply doesn’t make sense to sell collagen as a protein replacement.

What should you look for in the collagen you recommend to patients?

Look for low molecular weight particles, ideally at the peptide level. Make sure it delivers specifically Type 1 and Type 2 collagen which is found in 90% of the body. It should contain hyaluronic acid to allow for proper spacing and alignment of those Type 1 and Type 2 collagens. Alignment, spacing, and hydration are the keys to patients noticing a major difference in stiffness, recovery, and repair. Also look for trademarked raw materials that have numerous proven human clinical trials.

You can find the ‘collagen hydrolysate’ form of collagen on any shelf at Walmart or Costco. This doesn’t give you any information as to the quality of the raw material. If it was a trademarked and studied ingredient, they would show you the science that proves decreased pain, increase range of motion, faster healing times, healthier cells, and the hydration of skin and connective tissues.

We hope this Collagen 101 guide was helpful. If you're thinking about introducing a new collagen product to patients, we want to know which ones you're using - and why! Let us know in the comments below.