Collagen and Vitamin C: Do You Need to Take Them Together?
Many collagen powders now come with vitamin C added, and many people searching for a collagen product ask whether they need vitamin C alongside it. The short answer is that vitamin C is essential for making collagen, but it does not need to be in the same scoop. Where it comes from matters far less than whether you get enough of it.
What vitamin C actually does for collagen
Your body does not absorb collagen and put it straight back into skin, tendons, or joints. Collagen peptides are digested into amino acids and small peptides, and the body builds its own collagen from them.
That building process needs vitamin C. It is a required cofactor for the enzymes that stabilize the collagen structure. Without enough vitamin C, the body cannot form collagen properly. Scurvy, the classic vitamin C deficiency disease, is in large part a failure of collagen formation.
So the link between the two is real. The question is only whether it needs to come in the same product.
The study most often quoted
The study behind most "take collagen with vitamin C" advice was published in 2017 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Eight healthy young men drank either a placebo or a vitamin C enriched gelatin drink, with 5 g or 15 g of gelatin and 48 mg of vitamin C, one hour before six minutes of rope skipping. With 15 g of gelatin, a blood marker of collagen production roughly doubled.
Two details are easy to miss. The trial had eight participants. And it compared gelatin plus vitamin C against a placebo. It never compared gelatin with vitamin C against gelatin without it, so it cannot show how much of the effect, if any, came from the vitamin C. The researchers did not measure vitamin C levels in the blood.
What that means in practice
The 48 mg of vitamin C in that study is a small amount, well under the adult recommended daily amount of 75 mg for women and 90 mg for men. Most people who eat fruit and vegetables regularly reach that from food.
So for most people, the collagen and the vitamin C do not need to share a scoop. If your diet already includes regular fruit and vegetables, a collagen product without added vitamin C is not missing anything. If your diet is low in fresh produce, it is worth fixing that, or adding a vitamin C source separately, regardless of whether you take collagen.
One more point worth knowing. Collagen is not a complete protein. It contains no tryptophan, so it cannot replace a complete protein source such as whey or egg white. It does a different job.
Two products that passed the CuratedFit Standard
Ancient + Brave True Collagen is a single-ingredient powder: bovine hydrolyzed collagen peptides, Type I, from grass-fed EU herds, at about 4.5 g of protein per 5 g serving. Nothing else is added, including vitamin C. The manufacturer recommends getting vitamin C from the diet instead. Its batch testing is manufacturer-stated, and CuratedFit has not seen the certificates.
Sevenhills Organic Camu Camu Fruit Powder is one whole-food way to cover vitamin C separately. It is a single-ingredient fruit powder providing about 259 mg of vitamin C per teaspoon, calculated from the manufacturer's stated per 100 g figure.
The takeaway
Vitamin C is necessary for collagen. It is not necessary in your collagen. Make sure your overall intake is adequate, then choose a collagen product on what is in it, not on whether vitamin C was added to the label.
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