Collagen and Vitamin C

For your next trivia night, the first nutrition study was done by James Lind on sailors in the British Royal Navy suffering from scurvy in the year 1747. He found that oranges and lemons cured scurvy. Now he was onto something even back then and it is shocking that it has taken us all the way to the present day to realize it. 

Scurvy is a disease of vitamin C deficiency. The signs of scurvy are hair changes and falling out, poor wound healing, brittle fingernails, teeth falling out and many others. There is one thing all of these tissues have in common, collagen. Collagen is a protein compound that makes up most of our tissues. Collagen has made waves in recent years as different health supplement companies have started selling different forms all promising different things and benefits from it. 

First things first, collagen must be taken with vitamin C. Vitamin C plays an important role in the formation and use of collagen. Most current literature uses about 15 grams of collagen with 200 mg of vitamin C. Then we come to the question of which collagen, many companies tote that their product has this special thing and is far superior. To date, type of collagen doesn’t matter and you can even use cooking gelatin and achieve the same effect. The only thing to be cautious of is the source of your collagen. We often advise against bone sources. This is because most mammals store their heavy metals in their bones. In an effort to avoid consuming extra heavy metals, we recommend using collagen from other sources. 

Now we need to talk about the concept of nutrient timing. If you are taking collagen (with vitamin C) and are trying to get it to help heal a specific tissue, maybe a patellar tendon issue, you need to consume it about 30-60 minutes before you do a loading session for that tissue. This loading can be done twice per day, but allow about 8 hours in between sessions. This nutrient timing allows the collagen and vitamin C to be absorbed into the body and be present near the targeted tissue when you go to load it and when it subsequently goes through the healing process. When you load a tendon, you squeeze fluid out of it, and during recovery and healing, that fluid gets pulled back into the tissue. By having those healing nutrients already present when it starts the recovery process, we see an increase in absorption of those nutrients into the target tissue. 

So what does all this mean? If you are already taking a collagen supplement, put vitamin C with it. If you have a soft tissue injury that you are trying to heal, consider adding a collagen and vitamin C supplement with it about a half hour before loading the tissue.