Crushed Tonic’s collagen comes from a blend of sustainably harvested non-gmo tilapia and pangasi raised in fresh water fish farms in Europe, with final processing in a Kosher certified facility in France.

After a lot of research and discussing with our manufacturers, we went with our specific tilapia collagen brand for many reasons:

• Always marine, never bovine— bovine collagen is collagen sourced from boiled cow hides that traveled a long way from their butchers. We can get behind eating fish skin powder; cow skin, however, is a totally different story (and one that surprisingly, MANY consumers are not aware of).
• Our collagen is hydrolyzed (hydrolysis is just a fancy word to describe the process of breaking something down with water).
• Hydrolyzed collagen (also known as collagen peptides-- we will use these terms interchangeably throughout) boasts of more than a 90% absorption rate, 3 times higher than when source from food.
• Why is hydrolysis important? Due to its size, our body cannot utilize collagen in its native state (skin, bones or connective tissue of animals). Hence, collagen compounds must go through this intense hydrolysis process (where these large food forms of collagen are cooked, boiled and then broken down with water and enzymes into small and short chains of amino acids so that our body can actually absorb. 

• It tastes better— some of the other fish brands had a stronger, gamier taste, while tilapia collagen is essentially flavorless. This was the most important reason for me to go with my collagen; collagen is something that needs to be drank daily for at least 4 weeks for full effects, yet when I started drinking it, we all hated the taste of it so much! 
• It is the most effective— not only is it the highest in bioavailability compared to the other sources of marine collagen, tilapia skin is the best in promoting wound healing and skin regeneration (ingestion of tilapia collagen encourages the growth of fibroblasts & increases the expression of genes involved in wound healing). Tilapia also has the highest concentrations of protein in their scales.
• It is sustainably sourced—because tilapia is so abundantly farmed (and the skin is so often discarded), sourcing collagen from aquacultured tilapia is the most environmentally friendly.
• It is purest of its kind — many breeds of wild fish now contain high levels of mercury and other toxic metals (which Vital Proteins was recently spotlighted for), while our collagen was tested to be less than 0.01 PPM. And all of our tilapia collagen goes through a validated and safe process (sterilization and pasteurization, filtration, UF, and demineralization), something that many collagen companies cannot stand behind. Our collagen is also irradiated and is contaminants free, carbohydrate free, cholesterol free, and preservative free.
• It is the most clinically proven—there were ample amounts of clinical studies done on this specific brand already, that we didn’t have to question the efficacy of the collagen.