What Collagen Supplements Can Really Do for Your Skin and Joints

Whether you’re interested in improving the tone and texture of your skin or warding off some of the effects of aging, you’ve probably heard the buzz about collagen supplements. But you may be wondering if these supplements are worth the hype. The answer, experts say, depends on the health issue.

In a meta-analysis published in a 2026 issue of Aesthetic Surgery Journal, researchers evaluated 113 randomized controlled trials, involving nearly 8,000 participants and collagen use for a wide array of conditions. They found that collagen supplementation had benefits for skin elasticity and hydration, musculoskeletal health, and osteoarthritis, while the findings were less convincing for oral health and cardiometabolic factors such as blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels.

Here’s what to know about collagen and for which health concerns it might be most helpful.

 What is collagen?

 Collagen is the most abundant protein in the human body, and it provides structure, strength, and integrity to your skin, bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments. Cells called fibroblasts produce collagen, but this productivity declines as you age—on the order of about 1% to 1.5% per year—which is one reason why wrinkles and facial lines become more apparent as people get older.

 

Other factors that can contribute to collagen degradation include sun damage, smoking, and alcohol consumption, says Dr. Melissa Mauskar, an associate professor of dermatology at the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Menopause and autoimmune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus can also accelerate collagen loss, according to the Arthritis Foundation.

 

You can get collagen from foods such as chicken, turkey, beef, pork, seafood, gelatin, and bone broth. But “most people don’t get enough collagen in their diets in the modern age,” says Dr. Doris Day, a clinical professor of dermatology at NYU and co-author of Rebooting the Biome: How Properly Caring For Your Skin Biome Can Do More For Your Health and Beauty Than Any Skincare Ingredient on the Market.

Can taking collagen supplements help your health?

 It isn’t clear whether consuming collagen supplements actually increases collagen levels in your body. But it could even help indirectly. “Intact collagen does not survive digestion, but collagen peptides do, so by taking collagen you are providing your body [with] construction material to make new collagen,” explains Dr. David L. Katz, a preventive medicine specialist and past president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. How well your body is able to do that, he adds, depends on your overall health.    

 “There’s no panacea,” Day says. “You need to combine collagen supplements with a healthy lifestyle.”

 While research on the benefits of taking collagen supplements has yielded mixed results, there is some promising evidence for the supplements’ utility for age-related skin changes and some orthopedic conditions. A 2023 review of the medical literature found that taking hydrolyzed collagen supplements promotes decreased wrinkle formation, increased skin elasticity and hydration, and increased collagen content and density in the skin. (Hydrolyzed collagen supplements, which often come in powder form, are easier for the body to absorb and use.)

If you want to try taking collagen supplements for the benefit of your skin, types I and III are best, according to Katz, who recommends going with 2.5 to 10 g per day. “Stay hydrated, because it’s a big protein,” says Day.

 When it comes to joint benefits, such as reducing joint pain, 40 mg per day of undenatured type II collagen may be better, says Dr. Amy West, a specialist in sports medicine and physical medicine and rehabilitation at Northwell Orthopedics in New York. (Undenatured collagen is usually derived from chicken breastbone cartilage, and it retains its triple helix structure because it hasn’t been broken down or exposed to heat, acids, or enzymes.)

 “Arthritis pain is partly due to wearing down of cartilage or degradation in the quality of cartilage,” explains West. 

The idea that taking collagen supplements can stimulate collagen production in the body, as well as repair mechanisms for cartilage, hasn’t been proven, she emphasizes. Nevertheless, it could help with joint pain. A study in a 2023 issue of the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition found that active adults who took a daily dose of 10 to 20 g of collagen peptide supplements experienced improvements in their joint pain and functionality, along with their mood, after six to nine months. (The manufacturer of the supplements funded the study.)

“Collagen is not a cure by any means,” says Katz. “But it can help slow progression of osteoarthritis and help preserve good joint function over time.”

 

Another company-funded study found that taking 5 g per day of collagen supplements can improve bone mineral density in postmenopausal women. The meta-analysis in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal also found that collagen supplementation improved muscle architecture and led to a modest gain in muscle strength. “Collagen is not a strength-building compound per se,” says Katz. “Rather, collagen can help improve the integrity of cartilage, tendons, and ligaments, so in combination with conditioning exercise, this can improve strength and performance.” 

 If you’re interested in taking collagen supplements for the benefit of your skin, joints, bones, or muscles, experts recommend talking to your doctor. Often, there’s little harm in trying them for a few months to see if they help, Day says. But be patient, because changes won’t occur overnight. “Consistency is key,” Day adds. “It can take months to see the effects.” 

 

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for food, medicines, exercises and so on.   

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When You Get a Stitch in Your Side, What’s Really Going On?

Before the mile run each year in middle school, on the dreaded walk down from the classroom to the course, my classmates would argue over the best way to prevent a side stitch. More so than turning an ankle or coming in last, that repetitive stabbing pain is what the majority of us dreaded most. Our cures ranged across the map from taught techniques, like breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth and not eating for three hours prior, to my favorite: Punching yourself in the stomach at the slightest hint of pain (don't try it, it doesn't work).

There’s a medical term for that stabbing side cramp: exercise-related transient abdominal pain, or ETAP. And it's far from rare. Around two-thirds of runners experience them every year. But unfortunately for middle schoolers, elite athletes, and weekend joggers everywhere, this medical term does not come with a medical solution. There’s no standard advice for how to prevent a side stitch, says sports chiropractor Brad Muir, because we don’t know the mechanism that produces the pain in the first place. “It’s still up in the air.”

That’s partly because, even though side stitches are common, researchers haven't really studied them. In 2015, a article article noted that after a few studies in the 1940s and 50s, there was a nearly 50 year gap in research on side stitches. Despite that, there are some basic things that we do know about ETAP: It’s more common in younger people; the number of reported cases tends to drop off as people get older. The pain is more common in activities where the upper body twists, like swimming, running, and horseback riding. Athletes of all levels get side stitches—elite athletes get them less often, but their stitches are no less painful than the ones in amateur exercisers.

About half of athletes said that they thought their stitches were triggered by eating or drinking, and some studies back this observation up. In the lab, drinking liquids with high concentrations of sugar were more likely to trigger a painful cramp than beverages with little or no sugar. Things like body mass index, body type, and gender haven't been connected to the frequency or severity of ETAP.

What we do know about side stitches, the symptoms and risk factors, don’t provide much information about the underlying cause of the pain. One common theory posits that, during exercise, not enough blood (and therefore oxygen) gets to the diaphragm and causes the pain—but side stitches still occur in activities like horseback riding, which don’t tax the respiratory system. “The explanation of it being just the diaphragm never really held up to more scrutiny,” Muir says.

Another explanation is that jolting movements during exercise put stress on the ligaments in the abdomen that hold the organs in place. That explanation accounts for the role of food and drink in ETAP—putting something in the stomach would make it heavier, forcing those ligaments to work even harder. But it doesn’t account for the high rate in an activity like swimming, where muscle movements are smooth.

Bad posture or problems with a runner's gait could also be a factor in ETAP, Muir says. There’s some evidence that playing around with certain vertebrae in the spine could reproduce the particular pain from a side stitch, indicating that biomechanical fixes could help with the problem. Friction and irritation in the tissue of the  is yet another explanation.

One of the reasons it’s difficult to pin down an explanation for ETAP, Muir says, is that there are so many different components of the problem, and not all of them apply to each case. Four people might come in with their pain on the right side, for example, and then the next three all have the problem on the left. Muir says that it’s rare to have no clear explanation for an abdominal pain. “It seems to be in a class almost of its own.”

Because we don’t know exactly what causes a side stitch, Muir says there’s no standard advice for how to prevent it. The best thing to start with, he says, is a quick rundown of your history: Did you drink a lot of water before that run where you had a particularly bad cramp? Is there something you usually eat on days you’ve had an issue? If you play a sport, he says, the next step might be to have someone check out your form, and make any biomechanical adjustments.

Typically, ETAP will stop when you stop the activity. If it doesn’t, or the pain gets worse, Muir says it’s best to check in with a doctor to rule out any other gastrointestinal or abdominal problems unrelated to exercise.

But usually, side stitches, while incredibly annoying, are innocuous. And there’s no gold standard to make them go away, Muir says. “It’s all sort of trial and error.”

 

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.   

https://gscrochetdesigns.blogspot.com. one can see my crochet creations  
https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com. feel free to view for easy, simple and healthy recipes    
https://kneereplacement-stickclub.blogspot.com. for info on knee replacement