Why is collagen so well known outside of the fitness world let's discuss protein collagen?
What it is what effects it has on your body and if it's actually good for anything if you've ever had a little wonder around a supplement shop, if you've ever read the ingredients list of a protein bar or if you've ever read through an article talking about anti-aging or skin health it's quite likely that you've seen the word collagen but what is it and does it deserve all the attention that it gets firstly, what is collagen? Collagen is the most common protein in the human body because it's a major structural protein that helps form the structure of pretty much everything your skin, nails, connective tissue, and bones.
Collagen plays a big part in keeping them and you all together and that brings me to a really important point about collagen, it only comes from animal sources you see collagen is produced by animals and often extracted from their bones and connective tissue so there is no at least widely available vegan collage, which is strange because i've actually seen quite a lot of products marketed as vegan collagens which are actually a combination of amino acids and other nutrients thought to be necessary for the production of collagen in the body the thing remember though is that these supplements won't have the same effect as taking collagen itself now that said there are apparently some new vegan collagen products that are coming on the market and are made using bioengineered bacteria and yeast but they aren't common yet so most of the vegan collagens available in the stores aren't the real deal another thing worth nothing about collagen is that despite coming from animals it's not a complete protein. So an incomplete protein is lacking or low in one or more amino acids needed for the human body specifically collagen completely lacks the amino acid tryptophan on top of that collagen is not very good at stimulating muscle protein synthesis or MPS and this is the process our body uses for growth and repair of muscles.
what is collagen actually used for so let's talk about collagen as a useful supplement for building muscle and the answer is "NO", As I mentioned earlier collagen is an incomplete protein and it's not good at stimulating MPS muscle protein synthesis that is one of the most important factors when considering a protein to use when building muscle there are far better proteins available that are great at stimulating MPS and promoting muscle growth like Whey casein egg white powder and even Soy protein these are often better and cheaper than collagen.
So if building muscle is your goal those are the better options. I genuinely don't know how big a butt it is there seem to be a couple of benefits to using collagen that science can't fully quite explain, just yet you see collagen supplements aimed at joint care and the skeptic in me wants to call you to see when you eat a protein, any protein it all gets broken down into amino acids which get absorbed and are then used by your body for whatever it needs like repairing joints by that logic taking a really high-quality protein like whey protein should be all you need and in fact, should be better than collagen but there are several studies that show collagen may be useful for reducing joint pain if you suffer from joint pain, in fact, meta-analyses or combinations of the results of several studies found just that a reduction in perceived pain. When taking collagen supplements the thing is scientifically we can't explain why that would be the case, if it were due to the amino acids any good quality protein should help the other difficult-to-explain benefit of collagen is skin health specifically We have another meta-analysis of collagen studies showing that they help to reduce skin wrinkles improve skin hydration and restore skin elasticity.
Scientists say that collagen supplementation shouldn't work like this but we have the results that say it does from a scientific perspective it has many people scratching their heads, in reality, scientists need research to confirm the effects and to help us explain how they might be happening so should you use collagen well, if your goal is muscle growth then absolutely not there are far better proteins available If you have some joint pain and nothing else has worked for you or if you want to reduce those fine lines and wrinkles you could at least try it out for a few months to see if it helps if it does fantastic if it doesn't at least you can say you tried.
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