type i, type ii, type iii, and why anyone cares

For about a year I bought collagen products with roman numerals on the front and nodded at them like I understood. Type I and III. Type II. It looked technical, so I assumed it was meaningful, and I did not want to be the person who asked.

It is meaningful. It is also much simpler than the packaging makes it look.

there are 28, you need three

Your body makes at least 28 distinct types of collagen, catalogued in Ricard-Blum's review of the collagen family. Most of them exist in small amounts doing specialised structural jobs you will never think about.

Three of them account for the vast majority of the collagen you are made of, and those three are the ones that end up on labels.

type i is the workhorse

Type I is roughly 90 percent of the collagen in your body. Skin, bone, tendon, ligament. When people talk about skin thickness, elasticity, and the firmness that changes through your thirties and forties, they are talking about type I.

It is also the type that shows up in almost every skin trial worth reading, including the 19 randomised controlled trials pooled in the 2021 meta analysis in the International Journal of Dermatology.

type iii travels with it

Type III sits alongside type I in skin and in the walls of blood vessels and organs. Younger skin holds a higher ratio of type III, and that ratio shifts with age. In practice you do not buy them separately, because they occur together in the same source material.

This is why so many labels say type I and III. It is not two ingredients. It is one ingredient described accurately.

type ii is the cartilage one

Type II is the main collagen in cartilage, so it comes up in the joint conversation. It usually comes from chicken sternum rather than hide, and it shows up in two very different forms.

Hydrolysed type II is dosed in grams, the same way type I is. Undenatured type II, often labelled UC-II, is dosed in milligrams, around 40 mg, because it is thought to work through a different route involving the immune system rather than by supplying raw material. Lugo and colleagues ran a randomised trial on that 40 mg dose in 2016.

Both are legitimate. They are just not comparable by weight, which is a genuinely confusing thing about the category.

what is in our can

Bovine hide peptides, which are type I and III. That is the pairing behind the skin research, the nail research, and the bone research, and it is the pairing your skin is actually built from.

Twenty grams of collagen protein per can, from 22 grams of peptides. If you want type II specifically for cartilage, that is a different product and I would rather say so than blur it.

The roman numerals are not marketing. They are just a description of which part of you the protein came from, and therefore which part of you it is best suited to rebuild.

the research i leaned on

• Ricard-Blum S. The collagen family. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology. 2011;3(1):a004978.
• de Miranda RB, Weimer P, Rossi RC. Effects of hydrolyzed collagen supplementation on skin aging: a systematic review and meta-analysis. International Journal of Dermatology. 2021;60(12):1449-1461.
• Lugo JP, Saiyed ZM, Lane NE. Efficacy and tolerability of an undenatured type II collagen supplement in modulating knee osteoarthritis symptoms. Nutrition Journal. 2016;15:14.

LÉS is a beverage, not medicine, and nothing here is medical advice.