Finally, I have a good reason to be annoyed by people who talk about needing to improve the beauty of their skin by consuming collagen-containing products:

“Consumers are not scientific,” Professor Fusako Baba said. “Women especially are motivated to be beautiful and thus tend to believe in health-related products.”

According to scientists, it is misleading to say ingesting collagen, which can also be found in gelatin, shark fins and the skin of chicken and fish, will result in smoother skin.

That’s because collagen is digested into amino acids just like other proteins, and thus eating meat and other protein-rich foods has the same effect, they say.

“Good protein contains sufficient amounts of all kinds of essential amino acids, and most animal protein falls into this category. Collagen is no better than average as a protein,” Kuniko Takahashi, a nutrition scientist at Gunma University, writes in her book “Tabemono Joho Uso Honto” (”Truth and Falsehood of Food Information.”)

She also says applying collagen cream to skin will not make it any smoother, because collagen is produced inside the body and not absorbed through skin.

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