Expert Perspectives on Peptide Use

I'm WendyZuckman, and this is Science Perses. The show that pits facts against internet phenomena Today on the show Dides Th are the top five pepttides I'd recommend to glow up before summer and flex on your ex, respectfully. Well, then you know that peepides are everywhere right now. Pepides. You want to know more about peepides? Look at my stash. I'm really into peepides. Pepides are huge right now No matter what you're struggling with, an injury that won't heal, belly fat that's pissing you off, low energy, gut issues, there is a peepide for you People are buying this stuff off the internet, injecting themselves with it, and saying that it's life changing I have never been this confident, felt this good, looked this good. You wantna be on these For the uninitiated, there are many different peptides out there that people are injecting But one of the biggest and most popular is called BPC one fifty seven It's a fan favorite of Joe Rogan's. Andrew Hubberan has injected it into his back. People often take it alongside another peptide in what's known as the Wolvverine stack Not so much because it makes you hairy. I wish but because it's supposed to help heal injuries. There's one peptide that seems to be good for everything, and that's BPC one fifty seven. BPC one hundred and fifty seven is primarily known for healing, but has a massive ability to heal your guts as well. It's so effective. I mean, I can't even begin to tell you Another popular peepide out there is called Motse Folks on it are saying they're losing weight, getting energy, and they reckon it's even going to make them live longer There is a peptide that works like a workout you never actually did, and it's called M see. You are leaner, you are more vascular and your muscle definition is better. My eyes are like open, wide. My raerrain is fiery I am so clear Guys, it's like you have unlimited energy But not everyone is so excited about peepides. There are the peepide heretics out there that say You are injecting what now This is a bad and potentially dangerous idea could apparently even increase your risk of cancer Pat pies are gonna to kill you That to go to k. Yeah What are you even doing? and where did this come from? And who told you this was a good idea? Every time I log in, there's another influencer in my feed raving about some compound they probably heard about on a podcast three weeks ago. A podcast S me Today on the show, Cad peeptides heal you? Will they really put a peepide in your step And the truth is that away from the internet hype, there is actually a potential revolution happening in medicine around peptides So today on the show, we are going find out what scientists are excited about here. We're gonna look deeply at the science behind these two massive peptides, BPC one hundred fifty seven and Mot C. And I know there are a bunch of other peptides out there. so if you want to know the science on those, just let us know in the comments And finally We're going to look at what are the risks here Are those peptides gonna kill you? When it comes to peeptides, there's a lot of it's so effective thenen This science Science fasces peepptides is coming up Just after the break Adobe Firefly is the all in one creative studio with AI powered image and video editing for today's creative process. buuilt for creators of every kind Firefly helps you generate, edit, and experiment fast Because the asks aren't getting smaller budgets aren't getting bigger, and the timelines, oh yeah, still tight With all the best creative AI models in one place, Firefly brings your ideas to life. Unlock a better way to make with Adobe Firefly. This episode is brought to you by Quaker Oats. The pace of the morning, the rhythm of the commute, the energy for whatever the day throws your way However your day unfolds, it all starts in the morning. So start with Quaker oats, one hundred percent whole grain oats with a good source of fiber to support digestive health and energy to keep you going. Stay in sync throughout the day Quaker, the official sponsor of the FIFA World Cup twenty six, brringing you fuel to start whatever's next. Visit Quakeroats dot com slash FIFA to learn more. Welcome back today on the show, Science versus Peptides And the first thing you have to know is what on earth peptides are So peptides are short chains of amino acids strung together. And you can think of them as small proteins. In fact, some scientists even call them micro proteins. Thousands of peptides swimming in your body, and some do very important things like insulin is a peptide Another pip tied ect GOP wants They blockbuster weight loss drugs, they mimic an important peptide in our bodies that regulates blood sugar and helps make us feel full. So peptides are real things in science But to know more about the current hype and what scientists are pumped about here We need to meet this guy. Hey there. Hi. My name is Hasssie Cohen Hassie Cohen is a professor of Gerntology at the University of Southern California. And he thinks we are at the cusp of a revolution when it comes to peptides. And to understand why, we need to go back To a time when perhaps you felt like you were personally victimized by Regina George Lose my breath. My Destiny's child is playing on your Myyspace page Marine five isn't quite so we irritating And the human genome has just been decoded That's right It's two thousand four An international team of researchers announces that after thirteen years They found all the genes hidden in our DNA And if you need some biology one hundred one, genes are instructions that tell your body to make proteins proteins like hemoglobin or collagen And Husy remembers finding out just how many genes there are in the human body People said, there are twenty thousand genes That's it And they do everything I always found to be a little bit Mysterious. I didn't really think this could be true Has he figured that Humans are so complicated twenty thousand genes to make everything in your muscles, phones, brain, eyeballs, sphincters Even at the time, one headline said this was unexpectedly low And back then, there were clues that There's more to us than that So when you look at our entire DNA, you roll it out like toilet paper Those twenty thousand jeans Tiny fraction of the rw They're three percent of the DNA ninety seven percent of the DNA until twenty years ago, used to referred to as junk DNA. A, That's where these peptides are coming from, the so called junk DNA. Many of them That's so cool because someome of the famous peeptides that people know about are thking insulin, DLP one. They're not coming from junk DNA. Right. But where we're discovering these sort of cool new peepides. some of those are from jung DNA. Yes Yeah. For years, that so called junk DNA, and more generally the parts of our DNA that didn't code for proteins It was like a cipher that many scientists, including Hassy, were trying to decode. And over the years, they worked out that these mysterious chunks of DNA do loads of important stuff Including, get this coding for not e complicated proteins littleittle baby proteins. Nobody expected A small protein to come out of that fast forward to today And Hassy's team has found a bunch of peptides hanging out in weird parts of our DNA His lab likes to give them Yiddish names. Please tell me there's one called Kutzpah. We don't have Kutzfa yet, but we haveench. We have m Mench ap chamoos go muzzle, like muzzles off hs. We're just having fun Cassie's lab has found these peptides in what's called our mitochondrial DNA Mitochondria are known as the powerhouses of our cells. They kind of look like Beetle lavae But what they do is pump out fuel for our body to use for energy And in humans, Different versions of Hassy's mitochondrial peptides have been linked to lowering our risk of various diseases Alzheimer's, Parkinson's Diabetes, obesity, cancer In lab and animal studies, these peptides can affect muscle growth, metabolism, oxidative stress, insulin sensitivity, and cognition And we just keep finding more peptides A study published in May this year found more than three thousand peptides hiding in the mysterious chunks of our DNA And we're not sure what many of them even do. Cussy is excited that there is this whole world of tiny proteins, actors in the human body that we didn't even know existed And he reckons it could change the way that we understand some diseases Possibly opening the door to different kinds of medicine And what does micropotein revolution really embodies is the fact that instead of twenty thousand js We probably have a million jeds. Wow Expanding the human genome by two orders of magnitude, that is the revolution. That is the transformative change Another researcher told me that maybe we're not going to find that many peptides, he thought 's M more like twenty thousand, maybe thirty thousand. but still, that's a lot of pepttides And one of the peptides that Hassy's team has discovered completely bolted into internet fame. Sade That's right The peptide from the start of the show that people are going bananas for, saying that it's helping them lose weight and get energy. It is one of the top five peptides that you should try to glow up for summer and flex on your eggs respectfully It's Hassie's baby Mati is having a moment. Matsi is having a big moment. Over the last few months, I realized this is not just kind of a curiosity. Tens of thousands of people are taking Mati. Now if you are racking your yiddish, try to work out this one, it actually comes from a Hebrew prayer you say Hmotsi leem minred. Get it, Motsi Let's get into the science and find out if maybe you should start taking it So when Hasssy's team first discovered this little peepide just sixain amino acids all strung together We had no idea what it did. fun the post dooc who was working on it started putting it on things and injecting it into mice and, you know, let's see what happens kind of thing. And one of the things that they did is put some mice on a high fat diet, which would usually make them put on weight Then they injected some mot se into them L behold They did not gain any weight Instead of gaining weight like they should on hypha diet, they didn't get any weight And Mati completely prevented one hundred percent accumulation of fat in the liver of those mice. Wa. That was a big deal Stking in the liver can be dangerous. It can muck up the liver itself, but it can also lead to things like stroke So the idea that this peptide could prevent that from happening, even when the mice were eating all these calories. potentially big The team kept testing it They gave oldlder mice Moty and they live longer than mice on a placebo. You give my Sot C putut them on a treadmill that can run a lot longer Husssey's team worked out that MOTy might protect muscle by blocking the activity of a molecule that can break down muscle. One study found that in men having a mutated form of MOy increased their risk of type two diabetes and having more visceral fat Another study found that type two diabetics with low MOT C, had a higher risk of having a life threatening cardiac event Aasss he thought This might say There really could be something here. So he started a company with a friend and they raised eighty million dollars and ran a small clinical trial of Moseill peopleeople with a high BMI and quite a bit of fat around their liver, have them come to a lab Four weeks, twenty people, you get injected typically in your tummy subcutaneously for thirty days Theople were injected with either Matzi or a placebo And Hussy basically wanted to know, would those getting Mot se lose more weight Would they lose some of the fat around their liver And he's what happened. When it came to weight loss and fat around the liver The Matzi group did Maybe a little better But it wasn't statistically significant. They did see some more exciting stuff though There are these liver enzymes that tend to go up in people with fatty liver. Those went down. Blood sugar went down, which is great And it was pretty safe. The biggest issue is that some people had a bit of skin irritation around the site of injection which is not a complete deal breaker But it was a little bit annoying for the people who used it So things were going okay, and Hassi thought that maybe this really would be a drug. In fact, he was starting to dream of larger trials with more people But soon A rival peepide entered the field O Zempic became It' the most successful drug in history It was a weekly drug And our version of Matsia at the time was a daily injection Investors told Hasi. This is not going to make money And ultimately, the company fold in But since then, Mi has taken on a life of its own. You can buy it online, supposedly just for research purposes. and inject yourself with it. People are going bunkers Just off the back of a bunch of mouse studies, one small clinical trial and a whole lot of hype That created this crazy black market views of Mi. and I've spoken to some people who swear that they see their athletic performance improve on not see. Is that surreal for you? Is it so strange that it is surreal, It is surreal. And like I mentioned, now people are saying that they're losing fat and building muscle and amping up their energy on Mat see. he says, you know, if you look at his mouse studies maybe you could make a case for some of these claims. I mean, after all, the Mice did run longer on a treadmill it up against the hive The research cupboard is pretty bare After the break, we go further down the peeptide rabbit hole as we dive into the science on BPC one fifty seven Plus Could peptides really give you cancer T me up. 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It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollars sponsored job credit at indeed dot com slash podcast That's indndeed d. com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apppply. Ne a hiring hero? This is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. Welcome back. Now let's get into one of the most popular peep tides on the market, the PC one hundred fifty seven This is the so called Wolvverine pepttide people say it can help you recover from injuries Fast So where does it come from And should you try it BBC one hundred fifty seven stands for body Protective compompound one fifty seven. You know immediately that it was not discovered by Hassie's team It was isolated from gastric juice in the early nineteen nineties by a Croatian lab. And what's curious is that Humans don't actually make BPC one hundred fifty seven. You can't find it in our DNA. So the going theory is that maybe a guuffbg makes it We don't know Big question is Can it heal you? For this, I called up Keith Barr, a professor of moolecular exxercise Physiology at University of California Davis And he told me that recently So I started getting a lot of emails from people asking me, so you know, I inject BPC one hundred fifty seven into my tendons and they're feeling better as you know, this is a magical thing. And like, oh well, that's really cool. So let's go test it. He wanted to see if BPC one hundred and fifty seven can really heal tendons and ligaments which can be very difficult injuries to treat. So it would be great if all you needed was one cheeky injection and off you go And he is tested out His first step is basically building a little tendon in a dish. We take cells from people who basically rupture their Achilles. They come to our medical center to get their Achilles tendon repplaired. And what we do is we take the little broken piece Keith's team takes the roughed up cells of the human tendon embeds them in a gel, puts it all on a tiny bone like scaffolding. and then Yada yada yada The cells will start to replicate They make more cells. And so from that one ACL, that one ruptured ACL, I can make about a thousand little engineered human ligaments. Wow. That's so cool The model will grow to about the size of a toothpick And then he's ready to test it The team exposes the tendon to say different peptides and basically sees what happens And he told me that often it's pretty obvious if it's doing something If you wiggle it, normally, you'll see it move a little bit. If it's stronger, it'll stay nice and stiff If it's really weak, it'll flop around. So you can see that these these drugs or these treatments are really either having an effect on the tissue or they're not. And they've seen this with another peptide called insulin L Growth factactor one Some people, in particular, bodybuilders use IGF one to get stronger, and in high doses, it's not safe It can increase your risk of heart disease and cancer But it's been studied for a long time and it can help you build a bit of muscle and make you bigger Just you. So IGF one, that's the difference between say, a Great Dan and a Chihuahua Wait so if you gave it a Chihuahua insulin growth factor one at a critical point in development. When it's very, very young and developing still, it will get bigger And it will become a big Chihuahua. Yeah away from the Ta What happened when Keith put these peptides on his lab grown tendons. And so When we treat with IGF one they gets stronger But when we did the exact same thing with BPC one hundred fifty seven It had absolutely no effect. No effect It wasn't better, but it wasn't worse Keith's team tested BPC one hundred and fifty seven a different way, bathing some human cells in it to see if they replicate it faster. And again I didn't really do anything Now this doesn't totally put the kiibos on BPC one hundred fifty seven. Keith has just started studying this. He hasn't even published the data yet, He wants to keep running tests And he says that Just because BPC one hundred fifty seven might not do anything to his tendon in a dish. doesn't mean that it doesn't do something when you put it into a body So for example, other researchers have found evidence in rats and basically petri dish studies The BPC one hundred fifty seven might promote something called angiogenesis or the production or the making of new blood vessels, supposed to increase the ability to get blood flow to whatever tissue that you're trying to regenerate. And Keith says you wouldn't see new blood vessels popping up on what's basically a disembodied tendon in a dish So to find out if this peptide really does increase angiogenesis and more broadly helps you heal from injuries We really need to test it in a human body, right? Not just human flesh So what studies do we have here Let me tell you So in twenty fifteen, a placebo controlled safety trial for BPC one hundred and fifty seven was registered on the US government's website for clinical trials The results were never published. Another study from twenty years ago of forty six people with ulceratative colitis either got a BPC one hundred fif seven enema or a placebo each day for two weeks And it looked like BC one hundred fifty seven Group did better overall But the thing is most of the findings weren't significant. And then there's a doctor who, by the way, wrote a book called The Fountain of Youth withith Pepides And he has a clinic in Florida where he injects people with peptides. And he gathered up twelve of his patients who he'd injected with BPC one hundred fifty seven because they had knee pain and ask them basically, do you remember how bad your pain was Better now Nine out of the twelve, so seventy five percent, said that three months to a year later Pain was better Now we have no idea if the peptide was the thing that improved their knees or the passing of time you know, is supposed to heal all wounds O perhaps it was placelbo effect I talked about this with Dr. Drv Cooler a physician and health policy researcher at Wild Cornell Medicine in New York And he told me that the placebo effect can be huge partarticularly when it comes to knee pain We know placebo effects are very powerful. People who have a fake knee surgery, they have better outcomes There are literally studies where doctors give someone an anesthetic Slice them open. Basically, Stare at the ceiling for a bit and then sew them back up And those patients felt better. to the same degree as if they'd gotten real surgery There are studies that suggest that the more expensive you think a drug is, even if it's a placebo, the more effective it seems to be for you. And that's true for things like Parkinson's, which you wouldn't expect In this case, you're going through the trouble of ordering something online. There's a bunch of syringes. It's kind of scary. You inject yourself. It's expensive, it's painful. You really want this to work So if all we've got are some uninspiring studies in people Why are folks online going through all this trouble for BPC one hundred fifty seven Where are all these exciting claims coming from that it'll heal your tendons and ligaments that you'll become Wolverine Well BBC one hundred fifty seven has been used by folks in certain online spaces for a while now So there is A lot of lived experience or anecdote, whatever you want to call it But if you're looking for science for all those claims about BPC one hundred fifty seven What we have are studies in rats And the vast majority of those studies actually come from one particular lab. It's the lab that first discovered the peptide in Croatia It's the same lab that's linked to that study in people, the clinical trial from twenty fifteen that never published those results. But for three decades, what this lab has published are scores of studies where they'll get a rat It's quadricep or ligament, slice its cornea, damage its nerve. You get the picture And then they give one group of rats a placebo while the other gets BPC one, fifty seven over and over and over again The team finds that the rats injected with BPC one hundred fifty seven do better It calleds up the professor that heads up that lab But he wouldn't go on the record to talk And once I started asking, why didn't he publish that clinical trial from twenty fifteen? He ghosted me completely. Cpive M more Puson of Naznia So that's APC one fif seven And like I mentioned, there are other peptides out there that are supposed to help you hulk up and recover faster a review paper looking into some of the most popular ones basically concluded prettyretty much no evidence in humans for this I spoke to one of the authors of that paper, Dr. Coreory Mayfield, a resident at Kechchool of Medicine, USC was more shocking on that front than learned how little research there had actually been. Going in, what did you think you were going to find? We had thought there would probably be more At least evidence supporting the use of these. I don't think there's really any therapy that we see that has less evidence that's more used So here's where we're at Online, you are gonna read and see these amazing stories of people juicing up with peptides and feeling so great and healing so quickly and popping with muscles. But if you are looking for scientific evidence that peptides are doing that magic and not placelbo or something else You are going to be bitterly disappointed cause I kind of was But this takes us to the last question of the episode. What are the risks? If you've got a knee injury that just won't heal or you want to build extra muscle fast And you want to give this stuff a go Are there any downsides Well, if you try this You will be injecting yourself. so you need to be careful because you could get a nasty infection And there is the odd case report of bodybuilders using unclean needles to inject steroids and then getting infected with hepatitis C or HIV And on Reddit, you will see people injecting themselves with peptides and then some body parts swelling up like mad and needing antibiotics Also, if you're giving yourself repeated injections, you need to worry about lipohypertrophy, which is a buildup of fatty rubbery lumps under the skin Away from the needles, another issue is How do you know what's in the vial? Right now in the US, you can't buy a lot of these peptides at a pharmacy. You get them online, right to drive cooler The physician at Wild Cornell Medicine in New York recently bought some peptides to find out exactly what was in them. It was for an article that he wrote for the New Yorker. Oddly Just as it aside, on one of the websites They gave him a little bonus. And when I was checking out, they just added thirty capsules of this synthetic hormone called deemoxytocin for no reason, which you doctors usually use for inducing labor or treating postpartum bleeding.s just like hair. are some other drugs you might like, I guess No matter, within a week, the peptides started arriving What did it look like when it arrived? Oh, it was just it's usually just a white powder, you know, It looks maybe like some flour or coce You know depending on what you're most familiar with I didn't know you'd make that joke. I was ready to make it, but you got in there out in front of me. All right He took these peptides into a lab that tested what was inside And the results found that one of the vials had the right peptide at the right dose. Another vial contained endotoxins, which are bits of bacteria posossibly from contaminated water in the manufacturing process Another vial had less than half the advertised dose And I got one vial that had lead in it. I prefer my medications without lead in. Yes, lead. And then people would be injecting it into themselves. this is, of course, just Drub's experience. Maybe he got unlucky. We don't have studies analyzing what's contained in the peptides that people are buying online Researchers are on the case though But what we do have are studies on a similar illicit market Anabolic steroids One Australian study of more than a hundred samples found that twenty two percent, so one in five, were mislabeled and they could also be contaminated with heavy metals from lead to arsenic I asked Drav what the lab he tested his peptides at was saying Broadly, what did they tell you about how many of the peptide samples that they test have issues with them? They estimated somewhere between ten and twenty percent of the samples that they receive have significant issues, whether of dosing or purity When you're ordering these unapproved drugs online, You don't really know why you're getting.ust like a box of chocolate. Exactly, exactly Basically, in this unregulated market, these peptides are coming from factories where the quality control is not up to snuff This may change in the US soon. The FDA is meeting in July to talk about letting compounding US pharmacies make a handful of peptides, including MOTI and BPC one hundred fifty seven, and then sell them directly to the public Of course, that's not going make them effective just less likely to have lead in them But there is one more risk that we need to talk about, and that is around cancer Like I mentioned, some peptides are supposed to work by encouraging blood vessels to grow And this, in theory, could increase your risk of cancer because giving cancer cells a blood supply gives them the nutrients to survive and spread I talked about this with Dr. Cory Mayfield I know anyone who would have had a scan for some weird thing in their body. one of the tests for is that weird thing cancerous is are there blood vessels around it or not? Correct That's the main thing we look for is, you know, is it getting blood? Is it new blood? that's like is it pulling in its own blood supply And that's what we worry about We don't know for sure if this is a risk or even if someome of these peptides increase angiogenesis in the first place But the thing is that Th tides actually do what people are saying they can. If they are modulating your body in all of these different and exciting ways probably will have some side effects. Think about the peptides that we have good research on. So GLP ones, for example, they work really well But if you're losing a ton of weight you ain't to worry about muscle loss They can also cause nausea and diarrhea, and rarely gut paralysis IGF one, like I mentioned, can increase your risk of cancer and heart disease None of the doctors and researchers that you heard from in this episode, Drav, Corey, Keith and Hasssey inject themselves with peptides I talk to Hassi about why he's not injecting Mati And let me say that I am comoming of age, and I'm very worried about my muscle loss, my sarcopenia I'm worried about this. If Mutzy was approved, I would take it right now Will I ever take it? I don't know. At the moment I'm not taking it. Why not? Because I don't trust. I don't trust The stuff that people are taking out there I don't know where they're getting it, how it's mixed, how it's prepared. But you could you could actually you're one of the few people out there that could actually get MOi and know you're getting MOzi. But you still don't take it. It's. Why not? Because I'm an old fashioned traditional guy And you know, when you're raised with values as a physician scientist You know, all the supplement universe is something that you really disrespect And the majority of supplinance is a multib billion dollar business Almost all of them don't work And I've always said to myself, Why are people doing it? They don't know. There's no evidence. So I come from a place of a traditional old fashioned physician scientist who believes there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it And while I get the impulse to want to be your best self, and I know how frustrating it is when injuries take a long time to heal also think that potential peptide revolution happening in Scienceland That'd be super cool But at the same time injecting yourself with stuff that some influencer Or worse Podcaster is selling you online. As Hassie would say It's the wrong way to do it.