Dr. Luc (Luke) van Loon

I mean, it's the same as, oh, you can take creatine and you get stronger legs and you have a higher workload.

But then if you're a high jumper and you gain 1.2 kilos, simply also by most of it actually water retention, it's not going to improve your high jumping.

So it's more than only muscle, of course.

That's a lot of questions.

So collagen nowadays is much seen as a potential supplement to support muscle conditioning.

And of course, we were interested from that perspective.

We often look at myofibular protein, which is the contractile proteins in the muscle, of course, because that's what generates the force.

But you have to understand that the force that is generated by the contractile proteins has to be transferred towards your tendon and your bone in order to make movement possible.

And so the muscle has a whole intricate network of connective proteins that allow the contractile apparatus to be transferred throughout the whole muscle in both longitudinal as well as transversal way towards the tendon and the bone.

And there's now suggestions that strength is very much dependent on the quality of that connective protein network.

And in muscle, that is, a lot of it is collagen.

But if we get a fraction of the muscle is the connective proteins, and of those connective proteins, about 5% is collagen.

And so we were interested to see whether collagen ingestion will actually stimulate that specific fraction in muscle.

Now, so far, studies have not shown increase in muscle protein synthesis when you ingest collagen.

Now, why could that be the case?

Because it responds to high quality protein, but not to collagen.

Collagen is from amino acid composition, not a very high quality protein because almost 50% is composed of proline and glycine.

And so it has a lot less essential amino acids.

And so if you give collagen protein, you generally don't see increase in mixed muscle proteins.

We've done a study to see whether it increases connective protein in muscle.