There are 70% to 80% of human skin is composed of collagen. If calculated according to the average weight of an adult female of 53 kg, the collagen in the body is roughly 3 kg, which is equivalent to the weight of 6 bottles of beverages. In addition, collagen is also the structural cornerstone of human body parts such as hair, nails, teeth and blood vessels, and it firmly binds the connective tissues of various parts of the body.

However, the collagen content of human reaches its peak at the age of 20, and then it begins to decline. The daily collagen loss rate of the human body is 4 times the rate of synthesis. And according to the calculation, the human body losses approximately 1kg collagen every ten years. When the reproduction rate of collagen slow down, and the skin, eyes, teeth, nails and other organs cannot obtain enough energy, signs of damage and aging will appear.

The traditional view is that when collagen powder takes orally, the collagen molecule will break down into amino acids after entering into the body, so it judges that the method of supplementing collagen with food is invalid. In fact, after decomposition, specific amino acids are used to synthesize new collagen through DNA translation and RNA transcription under the action of VC.

In the field of scientific research, a consensus has been reached whether food supplement can promote the activity of collagen. However, researchers have two points about how peptides are taken in the body. On one hand, they think that those amino acids will induce body to break down collagen so as to stimulate the production of new collagen. On the other hand, they think those amino acids will circulate in the body to produce new collagen.

Eve Kalinik, the American nutrition therapist once suggested that the method to add collagen in the human body is to try every available form of biological intake, such as drinking more bone broth, and all foods rich in vitamin C will promote our body to produce collagen.

In 2000, the European Commission of Science confirmed that the safety of oral collagen, and recommended women take 6 to 10 grams of high quality collagen. If converted according to food intake, it is equivalent to the skin content of 5 fishes.

What’s more, considering water pollution, antibiotic and hormone, the safety of animal tissues are dangerous. Therefore, provide collagen to the human body is become a daily maintenance choice.

How to choose useful and healthy collagen products?

We can pick up useful and healthy collagen from collagen type, molecular size and technical process.

Type I collagen is mainly distributed in skin, tendon and other tissues, and it is also the protein with the highest content of aquatic product processing waste (skin, bone and scale), and is the most widely used in medicine (marine collagen).

Type Ⅱ collagen is often found in joints and cartilage, usually extracted from chicken cartilage.

Type Ⅲ collagen is produced by chondrocytes, which can help support the structure of bones and cardiovascular tissues. It is usually extracted from bovine and pigs.

 According to the United States National Library of Medicine pointed out that marine collagen is better than terrestrial animal collagen, for it has small molecular weight and has no heavy mental, free toxic and no biological pollution. What’s more, marine collagen has more type Ⅰcollagen than terrestrial animal collagen.

Except for types, different molecular size has different absorption for human body. Scientific research shows that collagen molecule with a size of 2000 to 4000 Dal can be most effectively absorbed by human body. 

At last, scientific process is very important to collagen. In the field of collagen, the best way to break down protein is enzymatic hydrolysis, which hydrolyze collagen into small molecular collagen peptide that are most suitable for human body to absorb.