There’s a trick the collagen industry loves. Put “marine + bovine” on the front of a packet, list a load of different collagen “types”, give it an enormous milligram number and suddenly it looks incredibly sophisticated. If it came from a fish and a cow, and contains Types I, II and III, surely it must be better?
It sounds impressive. It sounds scientific. But a lot of it is marketing dressed up as biology.
Because when I look at a collagen supplement, I’m far less interested in what animal it originally came from and much more interested in what form that collagen is in by the time I swallow it.
Let me explain.
You’ll constantly see Type I, Type II and Type III written on collagen products as though we’re all supposed to know what that means. Very simply, Type I is the most abundant collagen in your body and is found in your skin, bones, tendons and other connective tissues. Type II is mainly found in cartilage, while Type III is usually found alongside Type I, including in skin, muscles and blood vessels.
Different animal sources naturally contain different proportions. Marine collagen is predominantly Type I. Bovine and porcine collagen typically provide Types I and III, while Type II is generally associated with cartilage sources, commonly chicken.
So when a packet screams “FIVE TYPES OF COLLAGEN!”, I completely understand why a customer thinks: Well, five must be better than one.
But that’s where we need to look a little deeper.
The thing I really want you to understand is molecular weight. I know that sounds horribly scientific, but stick with me because it’s actually quite simple.
Collagen starts life as an enormous protein molecule. Your body doesn’t simply swallow that molecule and send it off to your face. It has to be broken down during digestion into much smaller pieces — peptides and amino acids — that can then be absorbed and used by the body.
That’s why collagen supplements are generally hydrolysed: essentially, somebody has already started chopping that enormous protein into smaller pieces.
Those pieces can vary enormously in size, and we measure that size in Daltons. You don’t need to remember anything more complicated than this: bigger Dalton number, bigger peptide; smaller Dalton number, smaller peptide.
Many standard hydrolysed collagen ingredients have average molecular weights measured in the thousands of Daltons. Tripeptides are much smaller. Our Liposomal Tripeptide Collagen contains tripeptides with a molecular weight of under 500 Daltons.
And that interests me far more than whether there’s a picture of a cow or a fish on the packet.
Bovine collagen doesn’t know where your knees are. This is probably my favourite bit of collagen marketing because, once you really think about it, it becomes slightly ridiculous.
You’ll see bovine or cartilage-derived collagen marketed “for joints”, while marine collagen is marketed “for skin”, almost as though collagen has some sort of biological Sat Nav.
A peptide that originally came from a cow doesn’t enter your stomach and think, “Right lads, knees first.”Equally, a marine collagen peptide doesn’t know it needs to make a beeline for your crow’s feet.
Once collagen is consumed, it is digested into amino acids and peptides. Some collagen-derived peptides can enter the bloodstream and may act as both building blocks and biological signals. There are absolutely different collagen ingredients that have been specifically studied for different outcomes, and that distinction matters — but that comes down to the specific ingredient, its composition, processing and the evidence behind it, rather than an animal magically giving its collagen a delivery address.And this is why I’m equally cautious when I see MARINE + BOVINE + 10,000MG plastered across a product.
Imagine a collagen containing 2,500mg of a more expensive marine ingredient alongside 7,500mg of lower-cost bovine collagen. You can still write 10,000MG COLLAGEN across the front, you can still shout about it being marine and bovine, and commercially you may have achieved that impressive headline number at a considerably lower raw-material cost.
Bigger number. Lower ingredient cost. Better margin.
But - and this is important , I am not saying bovine collagen is bad.
Quite the opposite.
You could take bovine collagen and process it into extremely small, high-quality peptides. You could equally take marine collagen, do very little with it, put it in a beautiful tub and write PREMIUM MARINE COLLAGEN across the front.
That is literally the point.
Source doesn’t make a collagen premium. What you do with it does.
Which brings me to our collagen…
Our Liposomal Tripeptide Collagen is marine. But if I’ve just spent half an article telling you that marine doesn’t automatically mean better, why did we choose it?
Because I care about the specific raw material and its specification, not simply the animal it came from.
Our collagen tripeptides are derived from fish and manufactured in Japan. It’s a premium ingredient that costs us significantly more than using a generic collagen powder, but again, the interesting bit isn’t simply that it came from a fish. It’s what has been done to it.
Our collagen has been broken down into tripeptides. “Tripeptide” sounds incredibly clever until you realise that tri simply means three: a tripeptide is a tiny chain of three amino acids.
Our ingredient contains specific collagen tripeptides including Gly-Pro-Hyp — glycine, proline and hydroxyproline — and has a molecular weight below 500 Daltons. Research has shown that collagen-derived peptides, including hydroxyproline-containing peptides, can appear in the bloodstream following collagen consumption.
This is also why I don’t lose any sleep when somebody tells me another product contains 10,000mg while ours contains 2,600mg of collagen tripeptides.
Ten grams of one collagen ingredient and 2.6 grams of another aren't necessarily comparable purely on weight. It would be like comparing two cars based solely on how heavy they are. A caravan weighs considerably more than an F1 car; that doesn't make it the more sophisticated piece of engineering.
So I want to know: What am I actually getting for those grams?
What’s the molecular weight? What’s the peptide profile? How has it been processed? What evidence sits behind that particular ingredient?
When we formulated LTC, we didn’t start with “what's the biggest number we can legally put on the front?” We started with “what form of collagen do we actually want to put into someone’s body?” Then we went another step and made it liposomal.
Again, that sounds far more complicated than it needs to. A liposome is essentially a microscopic bubble made from phospholipids — the same type of fatty material found in cell membranes. I call it a little fat jacket. Our collagen ingredient sits within this phospholipid delivery system, designed to help protect and deliver it through the digestive environment.
So when I compare our collagen, this is what I’m looking at: the premium Japanese collagen tripeptides, the under-500-Dalton molecular weight, the specific peptide sequences and the liposomal delivery.
Not: “Well, theirs has a cow AND a fish.”
We also formulated LTC with lycopene, vitamin C, vitamin E, biotin and zinc. And here we can move away from marketing entirely because some of these nutrients have very clear authorised functions: vitamin C contributes to normal collagen formation for the normal function of skin; zinc contributes to the maintenance of normal skin, hair and nails; and biotin contributes to the maintenance of normal skin and hair.
So if you take one thing away from this slightly nerdy collagen lesson, please make it this:
The next time somebody tells you their collagen is better because it contains marine AND bovine, or Types I, II and III, or because the number on the packet is enormous, don't be bamboozled by the shopping list.
Look beyond it.
Ask what form of collagen you're actually getting. Ask about the molecular weight and peptide profile. Ask how it's been processed and delivered. And, perhaps most importantly, ask what evidence sits behind that specific ingredient.
Because whether your collagen started life in a fish, cow, pig or chicken isn't the quality badge some marketing would have you believe it is.
The animal is simply the starting material.
What matters is what they've done to it by the time it reaches you.
And that's the bit I'd like to see written in massive letters on the front of the packet.
