That’s interesting—if it’s broken down not into single amino acids, but a mixture of single amino acids, dipeptides, and tripeptides, that still fits with how I understand the system to work; like we’re breaking it down into pieces, but not reliably into single units, sometimes two or three. And then collagen consists of distinctive tripeptide repeats, so the tripeptides you get from collagen are a distinct mixture rather than just random 3-mers, I didn’t think of that. That these tripeptides actually do something is surprising if true, but why not.
I guess what I was thinking was that when you eat collagen, it doesn’t become your collagen. Which seems to be true: your collagen is made at the ribosome from single amino acids, not assembled from the kind of dipeptides and tripeptides discussed in the paper. So it’s not like you get collagen by eating collagen, the way you get vitamin B12 by eating vitamin B12. But if there’s some totally separate biological effect… well, I can’t rule it out.
That’s interesting—if it’s broken down not into single amino acids, but a mixture of single amino acids, dipeptides, and tripeptides, that still fits with how I understand the system to work; like we’re breaking it down into pieces, but not reliably into single units, sometimes two or three. And then collagen consists of distinctive tripeptide repeats, so the tripeptides you get from collagen are a distinct mixture rather than just random 3-mers, I didn’t think of that. That these tripeptides actually do something is surprising if true, but why not.
I guess what I was thinking was that when you eat collagen, it doesn’t become your collagen. Which seems to be true: your collagen is made at the ribosome from single amino acids, not assembled from the kind of dipeptides and tripeptides discussed in the paper. So it’s not like you get collagen by eating collagen, the way you get vitamin B12 by eating vitamin B12. But if there’s some totally separate biological effect… well, I can’t rule it out.