Collagen is the most abundant protein in the body and a major structural component of skin. Production declines with age, which is the reasoning behind collagen supplementation.
What hydrolysed means. Collagen in its native form is a large protein and would be broken down in digestion regardless. Hydrolysis breaks it into shorter peptide chains before you take it, which is intended to improve absorption.
Hydrolysis is not all-or-nothing. It produces peptide chains across a range of sizes, and the average is expressed in daltons, a unit of molecular mass.
Native collagen runs to around 300,000 daltons. Ordinary hydrolysed collagen typically sits between 3,000 and 5,000. Innour state theirs at 2,000, which places it at the lower end of the hydrolysed range.
The argument for lower weight is that smaller peptides cross the intestinal wall more readily, so more of what you take reaches circulation as peptides rather than being broken down entirely into individual amino acids.
There is reasonable support for that. Specific short peptides, particularly prolyl-hydroxyproline and hydroxyprolyl-glycine, have been detected in blood after ingestion of hydrolysed collagen. These are the fragments proposed to act as signals to fibroblasts rather than simply as protein, and they are the more interesting part of the mechanism.
Two things worth understanding. Molecular weight is an average across a distribution rather than a single value, so two products quoting the same number can differ in what they actually contain. And most brands do not publish a figure at all, which makes "low molecular weight" as a standalone phrase close to meaningless. Quoting one is a point in Innour's favour regardless of the number.
Why marine. Marine collagen is predominantly type I, the type most abundant in skin, and its peptides are smaller than bovine collagen's. Both are cited as reasons for better bioavailability.
On the mechanism, honestly. Ingested collagen is digested into peptides and amino acids like any other protein. It does not travel intact to your skin and become collagen there. The proposed mechanism is that certain collagen-derived peptides survive digestion in small quantities and may act as signals to fibroblasts, alongside supplying amino acids as raw material.
Research on ingested collagen and skin has produced some encouraging results, though studies vary considerably in quality and many are industry-funded. It is a more plausible field than it was a decade ago and less settled than the marketing suggests.
