How Vital Proteins Collagen Became Part of One Active Adult's Day

The first thing I do most mornings is stand at the top of the stairs and take inventory. Fourteen steps down to the kitchen, and some mornings my knees have an opinion about every one of them. I am 58, retired from the front office of a high school in Asheville, and I have no intention of giving up my Saturday hikes or my twice-weekly pickleball games with Bev.

Which is why I have spent the last few years reading a lot of supplement labels and rolling my eyes at a lot of supplement marketing. I am not a doctor, a nurse, a dietitian or a trainer, so I will not pretend to tell you what will work for your body. What I can tell you is what my own routine looks like, what the label says, and what I noticed. Nothing more than that. My husband Dale takes none of this. Neither does Bev. This is just my kitchen counter we are talking about.

Twenty months ago I added Vital Proteins Collagen Peptides Powder to my morning cup. I asked my family doctor, Dr. Lowe, before I started. The canister I buy is unflavored, 9.33 ounces, and the label lists 13 servings per container. It says hydrolyzed collagen peptides, gluten free, kosher certified, 0 grams of sugar per serving, and that it dissolves in hot or cold drinks. The listing talks about hair, skin, nails, joints and bones. I am not going to repeat that as a promise to you. I will tell you what happened in my own body and let you decide what to do with it.

I tried it in plain water exactly once. There is a faint taste, not offensive, just present, and I did not want to start my morning arguing with a glass of water. In coffee I cannot taste it at all. It stirs in and disappears, no grit left at the bottom of the mug. That is the whole reason it stuck: it did not ask me to change anything. Same cup, same chair, one extra step with a spoon.

Ten weeks in is when I could point to something. My knees felt a little less stiff the day after a Saturday hike, the long downhill stretch back to the car especially. And my nails, which had split and peeled for years, got stronger. That is the honest version. There was no morning when I sprang out of bed. I did not suddenly take up running. The stairs still have fourteen steps. They just felt less like a chore on the way down.

Ten weeks in, my knees felt a little less stiff the day after a Saturday hike, and my nails stopped splitting. That is the whole of what I noticed.

Twenty Months In, Including the Part I Do Not Love

Here is the part I do not love. Thirteen servings in a canister. I use one serving a day, the serving on the label, so a canister lasts me just under two weeks. I have reordered more times than I can count, and I have learned to keep an unopened one in the pantry so I am not standing in the kitchen on a Sunday with an empty canister and a full mug.

People ask whether the powder replaced the tablet I take with breakfast. It did not. They are different things on different shelves, and the Vital Proteins canister is the only one of them that goes into a drink. Nothing about my routine is complicated. Coffee first, then breakfast, then whatever the day asks for.

Per serving it lands in the same neighborhood as the other things on my counter, which is to say it is a real line item and not a rounding error. I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I decided was that the thing I noticed at ten weeks was worth keeping, and I have kept it for 20 months. If I had noticed nothing, I would have finished the canister and moved on, the way I have with plenty of other things.

The label on the Vital Proteins canister is short and boring in the way I like. What it is not: a pain reliever, a substitute for the strength work Dr. Lowe suggested, or something to start without a conversation with your doctor or pharmacist. That goes double if you take a blood thinner or any other medication, or if you are pregnant or nursing. It costs nothing to ask, and I asked.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to write down how you feel before you start. Not a score out of ten, just a sentence in the back of a notebook. Which stairs, which trail, which morning. Then leave it alone for two months. The reason I can say anything useful about my own experience is that I have the sentence I wrote in March sitting next to the one I wrote in June, and I can see the difference for myself.

And I would tell you not to hand it a job it cannot do. My walking, my twice-weekly pickleball, the stretching Bev nags me about, the strength work Dr. Lowe suggested, all of that comes first. A powder in your coffee is a small thing that sits on top of a routine. If the routine is not there yet, the powder will not build one for you. If your knees have not been looked at, go get them looked at. This is not a substitute for that, and I would not want anyone reading this to think it is.