Halal Nutrition Researcher Exposes the Labelling Loophole That Lets Collagen Brands Sell Muslim Women Pork

I am about to annoy a lot of people I have worked alongside for fourteen years.

My name is Sumayyah Karim. I am an Accredited Practising Dietitian in Melbourne, and almost every client I have seen in those fourteen years has been a Muslim woman — students, new mothers, grandmothers, women fasting through Ramadan while holding down a job and three children.

In that time I have sat across from women dealing with every version of the same conversation:

You name it. I have seen it.

And for most of those fourteen years I gave the same advice everyone else gives. Eat more protein. Check your iron. Sleep. Be patient.

Then my own sister rang me.

The phone call I could not answer

Hafsa is my older sister. She is forty-one, she has three children, and she is the most unbothered person I know. She does not ring me about her health.

She rang me about her health.

She had been finding hair in the shower drain for months. Then on the pillow. Then, the part that actually got to her, in a dense mat on the inside of her underscarf every time she took it off.

She did the right thing. She went to her GP, who did the right thing and sent her for bloods. Iron. Ferritin. B12. Vitamin D. Thyroid. Full blood count.

Every result came back inside the reference range.

"Everything's normal," she was told. "It's probably just age."

She was forty-one.

What a normal panel does not measure

A blood panel is a list. It measures what is on the list.

And there is no routine test on it for collagen — the structural protein that makes up the bulk of the dry weight of your skin, forms the sheath that anchors every single hair follicle, and builds the bed your nails grow out of.

That is not a flaw in the test. Collagen is not floating in your blood waiting to be counted. It is built into tissue. Which means a woman can have a completely clean panel and still be losing structural protein faster than her body is replacing it, for years, with nobody measuring it and nobody mentioning it.

From the mid-twenties, production begins to slow. The figure most commonly quoted is a fall of roughly one per cent a year. Slow enough that nothing seems to happen for a decade — and then, somewhere in the thirties or forties, several things appear to happen at once.

Skin that takes a beat longer to settle. Nails that split across rather than break off. A ponytail that has quietly halved.

These read as unrelated complaints. Structurally, they are one.

So I told Hafsa what the research says, which is that for skin and nails specifically there is a real body of randomised, placebo-controlled evidence behind collagen peptides. Not marketing. Published trials with control groups.

And she asked me the simplest question in the world.

I told her I would send her a couple of options that afternoon.

It took me eleven weeks.

So I emailed 23 collagen companies

I assumed this would be straightforward. I am a dietitian. I read labels for a living. I have manufacturer contacts.

I wrote to twenty-three brands sold into Australia, the UK, Singapore and Malaysia. I asked each of them two questions, in plain language, in one short email:

1. What animal is your collagen derived from?
2. Who certified the slaughter as halal, and can I see the certificate?

Here is what came back.

Three out of twenty-three.

And the four that admitted porcine were, in their way, the honest ones. They answered.

The loophole nobody is required to close

Here is the part I did not know, and I have worked in this field for fourteen years.

The overwhelming majority of collagen produced worldwide is derived from pig hide. It is abundant, it is cheap, and it processes beautifully. It is also, for a Muslim buyer, simply not an option — and there is no rule anywhere that requires it to be named on the front of the pack.

The next tier is bovine collagen, which is permissible in principle. In principle is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence. It is permissible only if the animal was slaughtered according to Islamic requirements, and almost nothing on the shelf carries anything that says it was.

Meanwhile the front of the pack says grass-fed. Pasture-raised. Clean sourced. Halal friendly.

And it repeats in the format. A capsule shell is usually gelatine. Gelatine is the same question about the same animal, one layer out. A gummy needs a gelling agent, and that agent is usually gelatine too — most often porcine, because it sets better and costs less.

So the position most Muslim women have been left in is this: aware of the evidence, and unable to act on it without taking a stranger's word for something they had no way to check.

What the trials actually show

I want to be careful here, because this is the point where articles like this one usually stop being honest.

Collagen does not regrow hair that is gone. It is not a treatment for any medical condition. And if you are shedding heavily you should still have your iron and your thyroid checked — I will say that twice before this article ends.

What the evidence supports is narrower and, for a woman in her thirties or forties, more useful:

Two things are worth noticing about those trials.

The doses were between 2.5g and 5g a day. And they ran for eight to twenty-four weeks.

Which tells you exactly why so many women conclude collagen does not work. They took a gummy containing one gram, for three weeks, and felt nothing. They never took a research dose of it for a research length of time.

The three that could answer

Which brings me back to the three brands out of twenty-three that could name a certifier.

Two of them certify the finished powder. That sounds fine until you understand what it means: the powder is tested and approved at the end of the line, after it has been produced, without anyone verifying how the animal it came from was slaughtered. It is a certificate about a product, not about a process.

One certified the entire chain. Farm, abattoir, processing, packing. Every step, documented, by a named body.

That was Barakah Co. — a small operation I had never heard of, which turned out to be exactly why they had taken the slow route. They built the supply chain for Muslim buyers from the start rather than adapting one afterwards.

Ten grams of Type I and III bovine peptides per serve, which is above the dose used in every trial cited above. Unflavoured. One ingredient on the back. Dissolves clear, which sounds like a small thing until you are drinking it every morning for three months.

I sent it to Hafsa in March, on two conditions: that she gave it ninety days before deciding anything, and that she took the photograph.

I have since recommended it to more clients than I can reasonably count, which is the only reason this article exists — enough of them asked me to write it down that writing it down became easier than repeating it.