We Call Bull on Marine Collagen (And Cheap Bovine Collagen, For That Matter)

Is the romance of the sea really comparable to the grass of the Swiss Alps?

No, we’re not asking where your favourite holiday destination is, but we are asking where your collagen peptide supplements really come from and asking can you be sure they are delivering clean and efficient collagen supplementation for Types I and III collagen?

If you WillPowder regularly, you’ll already know that we chose to supply bovine collagen peptides, not marin collagen peptides. One reason for this was because bovine collagen peptides could potentially support Types I and III collagen. In your body, these two collagen types are typically co-located.   It’s time to look at the finely detailed provenance of your collagen peptide choices and the potential effects those choices have on you.  Yup, join us for the WillPowder’s face off between the sources and qualities of bovine and marine collagen peptides and, spoiler alert, it’s #bovineforthewin for us at WillPowders.

Let’s start with a School of Fish wade through recent history.  Some of us will be old enough to remember when our favourite department store suddenly started hosting tropical fish in enchantingly lit aquariums on the beauty concessions floor.  What a crowd puller these were!  We were so mesmerised with the novelty (those clever marketing people, hey?) of an aquarium plonked in the middle of the unguents that of course we needed to know why on earth there was a fish tank interrupting our seamless stroll from eye creams to eau de toilette.   

No longer was it a miserable June in Melbourne or a questionable July in Queenstown as we were transported by those little fishes exploring their tank to a six foot square slice of bottomless boat ride reminiscent of warm holidays and relaxing times taking in a coral reef or two.  And now it seemed the sea had something else to offer - marine extracts for our skin - how gorgeous!  Suddenly, our skin care routines made us believe we were Disney’s Ariel herself.  Sea algae, anyone?  We started with being happy to have the natural bounty of sea plants in our face creams and from there it was only a short marketing scramble over the rockpools into slapping on the exotic novelty of marine collagen extracts.   All this, even though we were hazy as to what marine collagen actually was, where it came from and how it was sourced, it sounded important and the fish were pretty and that was enough.  

Those tropical tanks with their verdant hues and flashes of golden fins were a million miles away from the wet fish docks that we had seen and smelt during our childhood trips to the coast.  A gnarled fisherman in his chest waders and eyebrows up to his receding hairline and a few stray scales of snapper stuck to his face just didn’t compare with the romance of cheery fish in warm turquoise tanks.  And so, the allure of the marine extracts market was born, those captive fishies having worked their slippery magic on our psyche, just as they were intended to do.  And so, we were (fish) hooked!  

Having been convinced to slather marine plant extracts on our faces, followed by marine fish extracts, when oral marine collagen supplements arrived, it appeared just about everyone was happy to swallow what seemed in our minds to be taking the waters in a shot full of tropical oceans.   To the sea! was the toast and it was ‘Bottoms up!’ from there. 

Unfortunately, our oceans are becoming increasingly unromantic with oil slicks, but even they don’t account for the amount of oil that has spilled into our oceans from the runoff from roads, rivers and drainpipes.  In fact, there’s twice as much oil from these sources in our oceans than those oil slicks we see on the news.  Nice!  That’s right, used engine oil and last week’s chip fat can make its way into the sea. 

We would have had to have lived on Mars for the last ten years to have avoided the messages on the increase of plastics in our oceans.  But, if we are comfortably imagining that those plastics are big things that we can’t imagine fish gobbling down like plastic drinks bottles, how aware are we that those same plastics begin to break up into smaller pieces with the actions of the waves and UV light?  Nemo can avoid the discarded half litre plastic bottle of water that is floating across the ocean, but he is going to struggle when those same plastic particles are only microns thick.   And the other kicker is that this process releases harmful chemicals into the sea.  We already know that microplastics have entered the food chains in the oceans. It makes the saying, we are what we eat, quite chilling.  

The irony is that one marine collagen company within our world relies on their customers collecting the empty plastic ‘shot’ packets from their measures of marine collagen everyday, storing them up and requesting an envelope from the company that they can use to stuff as many of the plastic wraps into as possible and post them back to the company, with a sweetener that you don’t have to pay for your own postage.  Why, thanks!  Correct us if we are wrong, but, all the evidence points to the fact that, given our busy lives, humans usually find the quickest way from A to B, even with the best will in the world.  It is a vain hope to imagine that everyone is diligently collecting those full plastic jackets and dutifully posting them back.  It seems shortsighted that, if you are sourcing a product that has an investment in marine life, that you are risking adding to the problem by asking that customers put in an extra shift recycling beyond the familiar curbside or supermarket recycling.  There is a huge risk that those little sachets will be sashaying towards the ocean in this convoluted process.  

Man made fibres slough off in tiny particles when we wash our clothes and these end up in waterways and then can end up in the ocean.  In fact, according to statistics from the European Parliament, half a million tonnes of the microplastics in our oceans come from the laundering of synthetic fibres every year.  Whereas cotton or wool would break down because they are natural fibres, synthetics won’t do this.  These microfibres have been found woven into the digestive tracts of fish.  These microfibres also clog up the gills of fish and disrupt reproduction.  While there is nothing to suggest that these fibres are in marine collagen, there is a question to ask about how the industry is bringing knowledge of the peril sea creatures are in and raising awareness amongst customers - asking them to consider buying natural fibres when possible or to wash clothes far less - so as to give back to the source that their product comes from. 

In the same way that we would be askance being asked to eat something that had been feasting on the questionable bounties of the local tip, we need to consider the fact that there are five main areas of ocean that have become rubbish tips, one of which is nearly six times the size of France. If we thought that the natural salination of the oceans was enough to keep them clean, then we Little Mermaid’s need to wake up.

There is no chance that our bovine beauties have anything in their diets other than grass.  Side note: while this article compares the provenance of marine collagen to our Swiss Grass Fed Bovine Collagen Peptides, it is worth noting that even bovine collagen is not all equal. Some cattle are fed vegetable or fish oils. Fish oils in silage?  What?  When did you last see Daisy casting out on her fishing boat ready to catch fish to eat?  She’s strictly vegan, for a start!  We seem to live in a mixed up world in which some parts of the food industry are happy to feed foods derived from one species to another when, in nature, never the twain would meet.   

There are some stories about the virtues of marine collagen that warm the very cockles (who doesn’t love a pun?) of your heart when it comes to wound healing.  For example, collagen from the jellyfish, Rhopilema esculentum, might be beneficial for general use in wound clinics in the future [*].  In a world where scientists believe we all emerged from that dot of infinite mass in which every particle was touching the rest before they all burst out in the Big Bang, it stands to reason that the answers to everything could already be waiting to be combined in what exists in the universe right now and, accordingly, a particular genus of jellyfish appears to have the perfect combination of collagen to heal human injuries such as burns or wounds that might otherwise require extensive skin grafts.  Fantastic! 

However, it is a billion to one shot (and the rest) that the oral marine collagen peptides you might choose to ingest have come from that one genus of jellyfish.  This is not how marine collagen supplements come to pass.   When the manufacturers of marine collagen list FISH and SHELLFISH as allergens in marine collagen, we start to understand how generic the production of marine collagen might be. 

Table showing Where the industry sources marine collagen as a whole

2. Objections to the MSC issuing certifications can be found here Claire Christian, David Ainley, Megan Bailey, Paul Dayton, John Hocevar, Michael LeVine, Jordan Nikoloyuk, Claire Nouvian, Enriqueta Velarde, Rodolfo Werner, Jennifer Jacquet, A review of formal objections to Marine Stewardship Council fisheries certifications, Biological Conservation, Volume 161, 2013, Pages 10-17, ISSN 0006-3207, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2013.01.002. 

To read more about issues of our modern oceans click here

For further reading on the impact of synthetic fibres in our oceans try The impact of textile production and waste on the environment from the European Parliament

For another perspective on clothing microfibres and marine life try The Guardian Article How Your Clothes Are Poisoning Our Oceans and Food Supply

Let the Swiss Farmers tell you why their products fall under some of the most stringent rules in the world on animal welfare Swiss Farmers for You

The potential risks and the current unknowns on BMAA in aquatic ecosystems is studied in this article Presence of the Neurotoxin BMAA in Aquatic Ecosystems: What Do We Really Know? Elisabeth J. Faassen