CanPrev

Educating customers, naturally

Dietary supplements often come with a side of hype, but Canadian natural health company CanPrev is all about the science—and believes its customers deserve to know it, too. The company publishes primers on its most popular products: hefty booklets, available online and in stores, telling you everything you ever wanted to know (and never thought to wonder) about a particular vitamin or supplement.

I had the pleasure of writing CanPrev’s deep-dive primer on collagen, one of this century’s most ballyhooed supplements. Does collagen actually deliver on its marketing’s lofty promise to restore youthful vibrancy to skin, joints, and bones? To answer this, I immersed myself in medical and biochemistry journals—exciting if foreign territory for this humanities grad—then turned my newfound knowledge into a chatty, entertaining (really!) 17,000-word explainer on what collagen is, what it does, and how it can help us. Thanks to the good folks at CanPrev, this project was a ton of fun: we even imagined the synthesis of collagen in our bodies as an IKEA instruction manual! For a taste, check out the PDF below; to read the entire primer, please visit collagen.ca.