And I'm being facetious, of course. I think there are risks to all of those, but it is the appropriate opening joke, frankly, because if you're expecting cypionate HGH-type results from peptides, you ain't going to get them. At least not with respect to like anabolic growth, feelings of well-being. Peptides are short chains of amino acids. Insulin's a peptide, etc. I cannot take credit for what I'm about to say next, but it's a very, very important principle. I think this is kind of the theme today, I suppose. Abu Bakri, who's an MD, came on the podcast, talked about peptides, and he said, look, for many, many hundreds if not thousands of years, but certainly hundreds of years in the context of pharma, people have been searching for medicines in plants, isolating medicines from plants. Pharma companies still do this. Now people are starting to look for medicines within the body, and peptides are a great example of that. GLP, for instance, the drugs that increase GLP do so to thousandfold levels over the levels of circulating GLP that you would have, and they result in, as we all know, robust weight loss. So that's one category. I think we need to think about categories of peptides, but understand that peptides are all over. They're made in your brain and body. Some of them may have benefits when made synthetically and delivered at very, very high doses, such as with these GLP agonists, Ozempic, Mounjaro. Retatrutide is one that we should talk about, made by Lilly. It's coming out soon.
Yeah, a lot of people are finding that microdoses can have similar effects, and that's an important kind of cost-risk analysis. Okay, so stepping back, peptides are made in your body. They, at high concentrations made synthetically, they may provide benefits that make them medicines. So we can think of the weight loss peptides, the GLPs being the most prominent example. The GLP drugs that increased levels of GLP 100-fold were used to treat diabetes for a while, still are, but they didn't induce much weight loss. The ones that raise GLP levels thousandfold or more, those lead to robust weight loss, including muscle loss. And so that's part of the controversy. Also, there's discussion about maybe increasing some apathy. They reduce craving for alcohol and perhaps cravings more generally at the recommended dosages. In some people, they can create nausea, which is why some people are taking less of them and still getting the weight loss benefits, but less nausea. There's a lot of stuff going on there. To stay on the GLPs and weight loss peptides specifically, Lilly developed retatrutide, which hits the GLP, GIP, and glucagon system, leads to the most robust weight loss. Seems to spare some muscle. Perhaps people should always resistance train anyway to offset that. But it's the most effective of those weight loss, let's just call it GLPs, even though it hits these other systems. The gray market is the quote-unquote for research purposes only stuff that you can buy online. It's perfectly legal to sell for research purposes only, not for animal or human use. And I joked on X a while ago like, 'Wow, all these home labs, everyone's buying this. Of course, people are injecting them.' The concern is about contamination with things like lipopolysaccharide, or you're not getting what you think you're getting. So many people are already taking retatrutide even though it hasn't been formally released because it's pretty easy to synthesize. And so it's being sold on the gray market, people are taking it. There's a second category, and then I'll return to the kind of gray market issue. The second category would be things to increase growth hormone, so-called growth hormone secretagogues, things like sermorelin, ipamorelin, tesamorelin. These are all variants on the theme of get the brain neurons that project down to the pituitary to stimulate release of growth hormone at night. Typically, you don't eat a couple hours before sleep is the idea. Probably good for sleep anyway. It is good for sleep anyway. Then you inject this stuff. Typically, it leads to maybe a three- to eight-fold increase in growth hormone, IGF-1. Some stimulate appetite quite a bit, like MK-677. Some don't. I've tried sermorelin very briefly. Dramatically increased my slow-wave deep sleep. Nuked my REM sleep. This is a common theme. Spiked my prostate-specific antigen. I've never had any problems with PSA. I came off it. PSA went back to normal. No one's been able to give me a mechanistic explanation for that. I'm not about to run the experiment again. I didn't find that I got much fat loss from it, but I didn't use it very long. I didn't find I got stronger, you know, just didn't seem worth it to me given the PSA thing. A lot of people take these things and they're going to get these really dramatic increases in growth hormone. They sound dramatic, three- to eight-fold, but whether or not they're meaningful in terms of fat loss, it doesn't really seem they're that robust, especially given that you have all the GLPs now. So the growth hormone secretagogues also include things like CJC, and there are some variants on these which can lead to some insulin resistance but maybe spikes GH a bit more. I don't know. None of those to me really seem worth it personally, just given the effects aren't that great. You know, if someone can afford it and they can get a script for it, probably better to just take pharmaceutical somatropin or Omnitrope growth hormone. And you know, the bodybuilders would take like eight IUs a day or something crazy like that. But in the trials that have been done with metformin and GH, typically it's people are taking one to two IUs five nights per week. That will dramatically increase deep sleep and probably sleep overall, and the effects on fat loss and just tissue repair, healing, and feelings of well-being and just cognitive function. Anecdotally, people and subjectively people say like, 'Wow, I just feel so great.' This is the getting up in the morning and be like, 'Wow, my joints feel good,' and just being ready to like go, go, go. It's not anabolic as much as something like testosterone, etc. But I'm not telling people to run out and do GH. But if you could get a good script, a script for real GH and take a low dose versus taking a bunch of like unknown secret peptides, that seems like an obvious one for me. Then there's a category of things like BPC-157, body protection compound 157, which is an amino acid chain that is in gastric juice, but it's this isolated amino acid chain that seems to be the one that's most popular. And at the same time, it's the one for which most people probably are taking it for all the wrong reasons. I've tried it. I definitely feel like after a pain or strain, the recovery is faster. But I can't do the control experiment because it goes systemic. So it's not like you could, let's say you hurt both biceps. You could, you can't inject into one bicep and not the other and assume that it's just acting locally. It's going to go systemically. There are capsule forms of BPC that people claim are just as good. I don't know. Do you have to inject locally close to the injury? It seems that might be helpful. The animal data on BPC are really impressive. Cartilage regrowth, fibroblast migration, angiogenesis, nerve regrowth. It's a literature I've spent a lot of time with. There's not a single published human trial. Where I think the most interesting use of it perhaps is, I know someone recently, she wrote to me and she said that her dog had a spinal injury and she said, 'Does BPC work in animals?' I go, 'Actually, pretty much all the data are in animals.' So if my dog, god forbid, had an injury, I'd be willing to give him or her BPC. You have to work out the appropriate dosage.
