Aside from no one bothering to spend money to figure it out, some of that is probably because it’s also legitimately hard to say, unless it’s stuff you’re buying.
Like, there’s a gazillion ways to make bone broth with a lot of different kinds of bones, so how and what are going to affect the collagen content a lot, presumably.
Got a link to a recipe?
I don’t care what people say, aspic is the proper form of salad. Aspic reached it’s zenith in the 50’s and 60’s but somehow the knowledge of this artform was lost. It’s a national tragedy. I would never have skipped the salad course as a kid if it had looked like this:
Rotfl!
Sorry. You know my diet. Salt, water, meat and fat (although I’m still trying to ditch that last cup of coffee. At least it is finally creamless.). I did initially look up bunches of recipes to get the main idea, however. Basically I take the pork trotters, hocks, and usually some additional source of meat, and I boil it to form a rich stock. Then I shred the meat, skin, etc and let it gel in the broth. It doesn’t have to just be pork, you can add chicken bones, chicken meat, beef, sliced eggs and even some carrot if you like. Adding the sliced eggs and carrots makes it a little bit more visually appealing, but it’s delicious either way.
To some extent that’s true, however it’s not particularly hard to say a “10g chicken foot has 6g of available collagen”. Likewise, it shouldn’t be hard to say “chuck roast is 7% collagen by weight”.
There are hundreds of people on this forum who eat a lot of collagen rich cuts of meat like chuck roast, pulled pork, brisket, etc because they’re the cheapest cuts in the grocery store. They’re cheap because they are so full of collagen they’re barely edible without a half-day cook time and they’re positively loaded with fat. These same people (like me!) are paying $30/month for a 1lb of collagen powder. It kind of makes sense to know whether that’s just throwing money in the garbage. If 15g of collagen a day is optimal, and we’re already getting 25g through diet, spending $1 a day to increase collagen to 35g/day doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense.
I mean, I think either of those is going to be a guestimate at best, since it’s just going to vary. Maybe a lot. Which, to be fair, is just generally true of meat for any macro or nutrient purposes.
Still, I don’t disagree with the rest, but the way I look at it with this stuff is that the powdered version allows me to test stuff out with more precision than I would get otherwise, and it allows me reasonably guarantee I am getting whatever minimum I set.
These don’t even rise to the level of guesstimates, they’re just totally made up numbers. I can’t find solid, validated numbers on the collagen content of food for the life of me.
This is a really good point. I hadn’t really thought of the testing aspect.
I actually started experimenting last night with collagen and achilles tendon massage/stretching. It made a significant difference overnight. My soreness dropped significantly, and my pain free range of motion expanded dramatically after waking this morning (when it’s stiffest/sorest).
To illustrate how poor of a scientist I am, I changed 2 variables at the same time by adding in the collagen and the massage. Now I’m stuck with both for the foreseeable future. You won’t catch me complaining though, I’m just glad something worked so I can get back in the gym!
@Ilana_Rose @Don_Q Thanks for the suggestion about aspic! I wanted something a little different for my mid-day meal, so I made an ‘aspic Vienna Sausage’ bowl. Doesn’t look like much. But that’s my protein (25.4 grams total of which 11.6 is collagen from the gelatin). I added 70 grams of my own spicy mayo for the fat (65.8 grams total of which 47.6 is from the mayo, the rest from the sausage). Here’s the aspic prior to drowning it in mayo:
If you aren’t sure the amount of collagen you are getting from food is enough and are suffering symptoms, try supplementing for a month or two and see if it helps. If it does, you must have needed it. If it doesn’t, don’t continue.
Well, having done a bit of research, the whole collagen supplementation thing looks increasing questionable. It makes a lot of sense if you’re a low protein vegan, but for the average ketonian eating 1g/kg of protein per day, collagen supplementation is a dubious proposition at best.
As I understand it, regardless of how we consume protein, we break it down into it’s constituent amino acids. From there, we build our own proteins. Whether you’re eating steak or jello, it all goes into the same pool of available amino acids.
Here is the amino acid profile for $0.50 worth of hamburger and $1 worth of gelatin (primary difference between gelatin and collagen isolate is the hydroxyproline content, otherwise they’re almost identical). Spot much of difference? Not really. The chart on the left is more complete. The chart on the right has more glycine and proline.
Fortunately, the hamburger amino acid profile on the left is for 100g and I eat 550g of hamburger a day. So basically, multiply everything in the left hand chart by 5 mentally and compare that to the chart on the right. The chart for gelatin on the right starts to look like a rounding error. Another nice bonus with the hamburger is that they throw in 70% of my daily calories for free in the form of yummy fat along with a few dozen vitamins and minerals. Maybe the carnivores are onto something, but don’t tell them I said so… 
https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/beef-products/6211/2
https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/sweets/5480/2
There are still some possible ways that collagen supplementation could make sense:
The first 3 don’t apply to me, but it’s conceivable that the fourth ones does. If there is indeed a window of time where amino acid availability is critical for the synthesis of tendon tissue, and it’s not possible to eat a normal meal during this window of time, water soluble collagen isolates are pretty convenient way to top off the ol’ amino tank. It doesn’t taste too bad, and hot water is easier to find than a microwave sometimes.
Other than that, it’s hard to fathom a use case for collagen supplementation based on the minimal amount that I know. Is anybody aware of information that contradicts any of the points above?
The third scenario above (moderate protein) is probably worth exploring, and the distinction between gelatin and protein isolate will doubtlessly be questioned. Here is the amino acid profile for $40/lb Bulletproof brand collagen powder. I don’t have much use for bulletproof products because I think they’re overpriced, but I don’t question their integrity or the quality of their products.
On the left is our $0.44 hamburger, on the right is $1.60 worth of bulletproof collagen powder.
https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/beef-products/6211/2
For folks that are on a low/moderate protein ketogenic diet, it’s conceivable that collagen supplementation could be useful. The reason for this is that the amino acids glycine and proline and hydroxyproline are quite important for growing things like skin. Here is a chart from wikipedia on the constituent amino acids for human skin tissue:
As you can see, glycine is the most important, proline is next, then comes alanine, and hydroxyproline bats 4th. You can see from the bulletproof chart that it beats hamburger in pretty much all these categories. Most notably, it has 5x more hydroxyproline than hamburger does. The question of course is how much of each of these do you actually need in a day? I still don’t have the answer to that, but I’m 99.999% confident that my 550g of hamburger blows any recommended daily allowance of every single amino acid completely out of the water.
That said, if you’re eeking out a 25g protein/day ketogenic diet for some reason, that may not be the case for you. In that case a scoop or two of collagen powder might make more sense.
I regret that I have but one like to give. That’s the funniest, coolest thing I’ve seen all day! 
I showed your vienna aspic picture to my kids (ages 5,7,9) and they thought it was awesome. I checked the fridge and cupboard and we’ve got both bone broth and jello in stock. The kids are begging me to make a weird aspic with them for lunch. Sounds like a perfect gateway aspic before we tread down the chicken foot road…
Happy to know my little aspic was possibly instrumental in a new family adventure! I will caution, though, neither unflavoured gelatin nor Vienna Sausage have much flavour. So I’d recommend flavoured gelatin to get the kids’ attention. Unless you have some really fine mayo with lots of flavour.
Let us know how it goes!
I am 61 and my skin had become paper thin and even light scratches broke the skin. I started adding a scoop of collagen to my morning coffee and it really helped my skin
I bought a tub of collagen and a frother for my 86-yo Dad to add to his coffee. He doesn’t eat enough protein and his skin is worse than mine so I hope it helps him also
Exactly. However, collagen synthesis requires much more glycine and of course tissues that are high in collagen are also high in glycine.
The more complete chart on the left looks better in terms of higher numbers but it involves an assumption that we want higher amounts of all those amino acids. Some evidence exists that calls that into question.
Again, this assumes that there is no “too much” of any of the amino acids.
I have heard Paul Saladino talking many times about the importance of not getting too much muscle meat because it leads to poor methionine to glycine ratios. Apparently you want plenty of glycine but not at the cost of getting too much methionine. There are associations between methionine levels in diet and arterial disfunction, excessive free radical generation, and oxidative damage to DNA. That’s just what I’m remembering of the top of my head.
Now, I don’t supplement. But I have a rule. If I eat a lunch or breakfast it isn’t muscle meat. Its either a bone broth filled with connective tissue, fat, and marrow (and, ok, a bit of meat for texture variation), or it’s liver, or, rarely, it’s seafood. Anything animal tissue that isn’t muscle.
Yes, amino acids must be ingested with certain balance between them, not simply the more the better. I first learned this many years ago re balancing grains and legumes to maximize amino acid utilization. After I get home from work I’ll try provide relevant info.
Interesting. I’ve heard a lot of folks here say that collagen supplementation has benefited skin/hair/nails, so there must be something to it.
It makes me wonder if there isn’t a single amino acid that is the limiting factor, and is less prevalent many cuts of meat, but is found in high levels in collagen. My primary suspect is hydroxyproline. If you look at the “recipe” for building skin from wikipedia, the ratio of glycine to hydroxyproline is about 4:1. That’s not a problem with hamburger because it’s made from the “throwaway” cuts that are too full of collagen and fat. More expensive cuts (ribeye, NY Strip,bacon etc) don’t appear to have hydroxyproline, or don’t have anywhere close to a 4:1 ratio. If one amino acid “ingredient” is missing because of the kinds of dietary meat consumed, skin (or whatever tissue) won’t be built, or the limiting ingredient will be prioritized for other areas (organ tissue). This can be true even for non-essential amino acids as our bodies ability to synthesize amino acids decreases as we age. That’s my half-baked theory of how collagen could make a noticeable difference on a moderate protein diet.
How many grams of protein per lb bodyweight do you eat in a typical day? Looking at my food log, I’m up around .6g/lb of bodyweight of protein. What cuts of meat make up the bulk of your calories?
This is a great point that I hadn’t considered. Interestingly, of the dozens of articles I’ve read on the benefits of collagen, none of them mentioned anything about the ratio of amino acids. It does make sense that the ratio is important, but it hadn’t occured to me that you’d want to minimize specific amono acids. I just assumed we’d break down unused aminos in the pool for energy.
Any good resources on ideal amino acid ratios you’d recommend (apart from Saladino who you’ve already mentioned)?
Unfortunately no. I hesitated to even write the above post because I’m drawing on something I’ve heard a couple of times but have never done a deep dive into.
I do remember, however, that one study found that you had to have a lot of methionine to get one of the negative effects. I think it was 5x normal intake. If you’re only eating a pound of red meat a day then I think you’re fine. I do wonder about long term effects in some multi pound a day of muscle meat carnivores though.
