It’s sold as a white powder to add to lattes and smoothies, and is touted as a remedy for joint pain and loose skin.
Or, as an ingredient in face masks and moisturizers, where it claims to give you a youthful glow.
It’s marine collagen, a buzzword in the beauty and supplement industry that’s often extracted from fish skin, scales and bones, or other animals like sponges and sea cucumbers, depending on the product.
The global market for marine collagen is already $1 billion It continues to grow, driven by the demand to look and feel younger.
Advertised Alternatively Some people avoid the traditional sources of collagen supplements, which come from land animals such as cows and pigs, for religious or other reasons.
Many marine collagen products feature imagery of waves and fish or references to “cold, clean” ocean water and are marketed as natural or environmentally friendly.
But with overfishing and climate change already threatening marine life around the world, is this a sustainable place to find anti-ageing hope?
That depends on who’s watching this New conservation issuesWhen you pick up a product, you might not know where the collagen comes from.
“With these marine collagen products, shoppers are buying a black box of marine ingredients,” Kelly Rohrbach, sustainable seafood campaigner at Canadian marine conservation group Living Oceans Society, said in an email to CBC News.
Origin of collagen
Our bodies naturally produce collagen, which gives elasticity and strength to skin, tendons, bones and other tissues. As we age, our bodies produce less collagen.
However, it is found widely throughout the animal kingdom and has been found in dinosaur bones dating back 68 million years. T. rex This has led people to turn to collagen supplements derived from other organisms.
Health Canada has approved over 2,000 natural health products that contain hydrolyzed collagen as a drug ingredient and over 1,000 natural health products that contain marine-derived collagen.
Cow-derived collagen has been leading the industry. However, last year, Investigative Journalism Bureau, Parents Other studies have linked collagen, leather and beef farms to the decline of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.
The investigation traced collagen’s supply chain back to major companies, including Vital Proteins, a Nestle-owned brand promoted by Jennifer Aniston (Nestle says it takes steps to ensure its products are safe). Zero deforestation by 2025.
Marine collagen, which researchers have already been paying attention to, Rich and Sustainableand Low risk of disease transmission It is chemically different from mammalian collagen, Easily absorbed.
“It’s exploding,” said Azizur Rahman, director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Climate Change Research. Published a scientific review He is researching the effects of marine collagen on skin aging and is leading a spin-off company conducting research and development of marine collagen products.
“Over the past decade or so, market demand has increased significantly, especially for marine-derived cosmetic products, due to growing consumer interest in natural and sustainable ingredients.”
Another Demand for Fish
However, when it comes to new demands on marine life, sustainability is not guaranteed.
is more than One third of the world’s fish stocks are overfished Many fish around the world are being caught at biologically unsustainable levels, and the numbers are rising, according to the United Nations Food and Aquaculture Agency’s latest world report.
Most of the remainder are also at limit and are classified as having been fished to their maximum biologically sustainable limits.
“If you look at global seafood production from the oceans, and particularly from capture fisheries, it peaked in the 1990s,” said William Cheung, director of the Institute of Marine and Fisheries Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
“This means that we know the demand for seafood is increasing, but we can’t produce more fish.”
Chang says he is not aware of any studies being done specifically on the effects of marine collagen, but that any new introductions into the ocean should be considered in the context of climate change further threatening marine life and the growing global population that relies on seafood, particularly in developing and low-income countries.
Canadian scientists have also raised concerns about demand for other dietary supplements derived from fish. Shark Liver Oil and Omega-3 fatty acids.
a Natural Ecology and Evolution A paper published in 2022 identified marine collagen as an emerging problem in marine biodiversity, pointing out that it could pose a threat to species such as sharks and sponges.
But the paper points out that it could also be an opportunity for sustainable resource use if it is derived from skins, bones and off-cuts that might otherwise be discarded from the fish processing industry.
Where does marine collagen come from?
The tricky thing is that marine collagen products don’t always say what they’re made from.
Some companies tout their ingredients. For example, Nova Scotia-based Landish claims its marine collagen is made from wild cod, haddock and pollock caught in the North Atlantic for fish fillets. The company says it uses “only by-products,” or Skin and scales.
Toronto company Genuine Health says its marine collagen is “upcycled” from the same species caught in the “deep, cold waters of the North Atlantic.” (Neither company responded to CBC News’ requests for more details.)
Nippi Collagen, a Burnaby, British Columbia-based industry leader, said in a statement to CBC News that the company uses skins and scales that are by-products of the seafood industry, and that the source varies by grade: lower grades come from farmed fish sourced around the world, including Thailand and Indonesia, while premium grades come from wild fish scales. (It did not respond to further questions about the fish species.)
However, many products don’t provide information about what animals were used, whether they were wild or farmed, or where in the world they were raised.
“As with any fishery or aquaculture product, there can be sustainable and unsustainable sources,” Living Oceans’ Roebuck said.
“It is impossible for consumers to know what species are being exploited and whether this is contributing to overfishing, ocean degradation or even illegal activity.”
Consumers can rely on ecolabels to avoid that risk.
For example, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) blue ecolabel certifies that wild fish and seafood have been independently assessed and A set of sustainability requirements(The MSC’s standards have been criticized by environmental groups for not being strict enough, and are currently being revised.)
Curtis Hayne, MSC program director for Canada, said products bearing the label are also audited for traceability, something that is often a challenge in global fisheries.
“So when you see something with the blue MSC ecolabel it’s a way of saying it’s come from a sustainable fishery, and there’s assurance, strong assurance that it’s come from a certified fishery and hasn’t been mixed along the way.”
While there were no marine collagen products bearing the MSC ecolabel in 2020, as of last year there were 37 types worldwide, mainly sourced from MSC-certified Atlantic cod, and they are “growing rapidly”, Mr Hayne said.
By-product issues
Using by-products in the production of marine collagen is likely to have less of an impact, but may still have an impact.
for example, Critics argue They say beef by-products, bovine collagen and leather, actually contribute to the revenues of cattle production, which is linked to deforestation, and thus encourage deforestation.
On the other hand, if money is invested in making fisheries more sustainable, profiting from the by-products will encourage further improvements, Hayne said.
“From our perspective, this not only reduces waste but also enables fisheries to extract more value from this precious wild resource,” Hayne said.
Chan calls the industrial process of discarding so much fish “very wasteful,” and points out that many cultures around the world rely on eating whole fish.
“I’m from Hong Kong and I grew up in Chinese culture, so we eat almost every part of the fish,” he said.
“We use the whole fish to make soup because we think that if you have the fish bones, the fish soup will be really rich and tasty and you’ll get a lot of nutrients out of it.”
He hopes that growing demand for marine resources like collagen will tie into larger discussions about trade-offs, equity, and food security.
“We need to use the resources available wisely and manage them wisely.”
