Does bone broth help your gut health?

The amino acids in bone broth, such as glutamine, glycine and proline, can strengthen the gut barrier and reduce inflammation in the intestinal wall. This is shown in a 2025 review article from the Mayo Clinic. An important caveat: these are the effects of those individual substances on their own, not of bone broth as a product in controlled human studies.

Whether bone broth also concretely helps with inflammatory bowel diseases or functional diarrhoea has not yet been demonstrated in clinical trials. The same review mentions those applications as possibilities, but the authors themselves state that further research is needed. At this point, therefore, you cannot say that bone broth as a ready-made product has proven benefits for gut problems.

Regarding absorption: small collagen peptides, the kind found in bone broth, survive the gastrointestinal tract better than large collagen molecules and are absorbed into the bloodstream more efficiently. This has been demonstrated in rats, not in humans. It is an interesting indication that the substances in bone broth can do their work at all, but it does not automatically translate into a proven health benefit.

From a practical standpoint: eating bone broth as part of a varied diet is not harmful and does provide proteins, minerals and peptides. However, if you want to use it specifically for your gut health, there is no evidence that it does more as a product than the sum of the individual nutrients you can also obtain from other sources.