With regards to strictly building muscle, should Creatine be counted towards meeting daily protein intake requirements? Or should it be taken in addition to the typical protein types that are normally counted?
Thank you!
I consider creatine, collagen, BCAAs, etc, as supplements, not food (which protein powder is,) so I kind of ignore them for macros.
Worst case scenario, I got a tiny bit of extra protein.
1 Like
You only take 5g of creatine per day, so it wouldn’t make much of a dent in meeting your daily protein requirements even if you counted it as such (which I wouldn’t recommend).
1 Like
Dang, my apologies to both you and antiquity. I inadvertently typed “Creatine” in my post, when what I meant to ask about was Collagen.
If you could provide your perspective on collagen instead, I would greatly appreciate it!
1 Like
To expand on this, any “specialized” form of a protein is to add or subtract to a certian goal, or deficit. Complete proteins let our body decide what to do. I don’t take fish oil when I eat salmon, for instance, because it’s redundant.
Collagen is great for joints, but it won’t be used to make your biceps more bisextular. Maybe someone who is preparing for a contest and trying to get to 3% bodyfat would approach this differently.
1 Like
I’m with @Brant_Drake.
I also don’t count anything that’s totally static. For instance, I take fish oil, and it is definitely a fat, but I’m not going to treat that as a caloric variable to lower in a diet, so I just don’t count it.
The purpose of measuring something is to give you the ability to adjust it. You’re going to adjust the collagen based on your joints (I assume, or some other variable) that’s different than how you’d adjust your dietary protein; I wouldn’t count them together.
A quick internet search said that Collagen contains amino acids equivalent to 12-18 grams of protein per 20 grams of collagen.
And it’s got all the essential amino acids, so it’s as effective as whey protein for building muscle.
But the average serving size for collagen supplements is one scoop that weighs about 11 grams. So maybe it’s worth 6-10 “grams” per serving. Depending on your daily protein goals, that may or may not be worth counting.
If you start using 4-5 scoops of collagen, for sure count it.
Also, the internet says that 5 grams of BCAAs are equivalent to 30 grams of protein.
I guess if I couldn’t do dairy products, a BCAA/Collagen shake would be useful.
What? Do BCAAs break physics?
But I guess if it’s on the internet it must be true.
30 grams of whey contains about 6 grams of BCAAs, so just kinda work that backwards.
1 Like
Thank you everyone for the help and information.
When I posted the question, I was revamping my protein shake mixture, as I had read in a T Nation article that collagen is a poor muscle builder. I was including the protein from the collagen (36g) in that shake “as protein” and wondered if I was short changing myself as far as daily muscle building protein requirements.
If the collagen truly doesn’t count, 36 grams is quite a bit of a deficit.
Considering all the replies, it seems that I should use the collagen purely from a joint/etc benefit and increase the better “muscle building” proteins.
Any further comments and recommendations are more than welcome.
Thanks again everyone!
Well, just a comment. If you look at the amino acid profile of collagen, you will find a completely different distribution, compared to whey. I will not go into further details, but for example, collagen is low in leucine - whey is not. As far as I have learned, leucine is the start signal to the muscle building machinery. This meaning, collagen will never and can not replace whey protein for muscle building purposes.
To add, collagen may be of different orgin/type. The most common type 1 originates from cowhide and such, which may be beneficial for skin and nails. It is the type 2 collagen from chicken, that give the most benefits for joints.
Furthermore, I’ve read somewhere that collagen may result in muscle gains, probably as a result of water binding properties. I don’t remember the specific details on this.
2 Likes