marine or bovine, and why we went with the cow

Marine collagen tends to get positioned as the upgrade. Sleeker packaging, higher price, a general air of being the sophisticated choice. I assumed for a while that it was simply better and that bovine was the budget option.

Having read into it properly, that is not the shape of the difference.

where each one comes from

Marine collagen comes from fish, usually skin and scales. Bovine collagen comes from cattle hide. Both are hydrolysed into peptides in the same way, and both are predominantly type I, the type that makes up most of your skin.

Bovine also brings meaningful type III, which sits alongside type I in skin and blood vessels. Marine is more heavily type I on its own.

the absorption argument, examined

The standard case for marine is that its peptides are smaller and therefore better absorbed. There is something real underneath that. Marine peptides do tend to have a lower average molecular weight, and Subhan and colleagues' review notes the point.

What is less often said is that hydrolysed bovine peptides are also absorbed, and this has been measured directly. The 2005 Iwai work found collagen peptides circulating in human blood after ingestion. Absorption is not the dividing line people present it as. Both get in.

More to the point, the great majority of the clinical trials that produced the results everyone quotes, the skin trials, the nail trial, the bone trial, the joint work, used bovine or porcine peptides. The evidence base sits mostly on the bovine side.

real reasons to pick marine

If you do not eat beef, marine is the obvious answer, and it is a genuinely good ingredient. Some people also prefer it on sustainability grounds, since it uses fish processing byproducts that would otherwise be waste.

The catch is that marine collagen is a fish allergen, which rules it out for a meaningful number of people, and it carries a flavour that is harder to hide in a light, clean drink.

why we chose bovine

Three reasons, in order of weight.

The research. If I am going to put 20 grams in a can and point at trials, I want to be pointing at trials that used the same kind of material.

Type I and type III together, which is the combination your skin is actually built from.

And taste. Bovine peptides are close to neutral, which is what let us build a white peach drink with one gram of sugar in it and no wall of flavouring to cover something up.

Ours is grass fed bovine hide collagen. Marine is not a worse ingredient. It is a different one, with a smaller pile of human trials behind it and an allergen attached, and for a drink meant to be finished daily, bovine was the better fit.

the research i leaned on

• Subhan F, Ikram M, Shehzad A, Ghafoor A. Marine collagen: an emerging player in biomedical applications. Journal of Food Science and Technology. 2015;52(8):4703-4707.
• Iwai K, Hasegawa T, Taguchi Y, et al. Identification of food-derived collagen peptides in human blood after oral ingestion of gelatin hydrolysates. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. 2005;53(16):6531-6536.
• 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.

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