Peptides: The Science, Uses & Safety | Dr. Abud Bakri

People are now stacking their GLP-1 as their insulin sensitivity tool, their growth hormone or their GHRH, and their androgen modulation therapies as this trinity stack, trinity stuff, to get very fit, very healthy quickly. So a lot of these transformations you see in CEOs and celebrities and stuff is using a combination of those three things. You know, your TRT plus peptide or retatride, whatever it may be, and then using a growth hormone modulation, whether if you can afford growth hormone or testosterone. And you're seeing people lose a lot of fat, gain a lot of muscle in short amounts of time. Is that healthy? We'll find out. But that is like the celebrity protocol.

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Abu Bakri, an internal medicine physician who is also extremely knowledgeable on the science and use of peptides. When I say peptides, I mean both FDA-approved peptides such as the GLP agonists. You probably know these as things like Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Retatrutide, as well as peptides such as Body Protection Compound 157, or BPC-157, which, as you'll learn today, has a very long history of being used in humans for gut health and tissue repair, and many interesting studies in animals supporting its potential use in humans, but a minimum of formal studies in humans, meaning one. We discuss BPC-157, what it does and how, as well as things like growth hormone secretagogues like tesamorelin, MK-677, and others. And we talk about things like GHK copper, which nowadays many people are using to promote collagen synthesis and repair for aesthetic reasons like improving skin, hair, and so on. We also talk about peptides that have been studied for the purpose of DNA repair and longevity like epitalon and pinealon, which also have been touted to improve REM sleep and for improving cognitive function. You'll also learn what is known and what is not known about these peptides, both in terms of function and safety.

During today's episode, you will come to appreciate that Dr. Bachri has truly encyclopedic knowledge about these peptides. He is also formerly trained as a physician and, as a consequence, you will learn how to think about peptides based on whether or not they have known receptors or not. That turns out to be very important, and what their real safety profiles are, as well as what particular concerns you ought to have if you are considering using peptides of any kind. As a formerly trained, board-certified physician, he comes at this topic through the lens of a physician, but also somebody who is very interested in the current status and future of peptide medicine. Today's discussion, thanks to Dr. Bachri, is a true masterclass on peptides. By the end of today's discussion, I promise you, again, thanks to him, that you will be among the most informed, doctor or otherwise, about peptides from the GLPs to BPC-57 and all the others that I mentioned, including some that I didn't mention here in the introduction. So, it is a real gift and honor to have this knowledge presented to all of us. So, buckle up. You're about to learn a lot about peptides.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Abu Bakri. Dr. Abu Bakri, welcome. Good to be here.

Peptides, huge topic and huge category of biology and medicine. So, we should start off by breaking this into categories so that people can wrap their minds around it because that word peptides has come to mean stuff people buy and take and maybe should or shouldn't buy and take. But there's a lot of important and quite simple biology to understand before anyone should even be thinking about any of that. So if I just push the word peptides towards you, how do you carve that up in terms of thinking about it as an MD, as a clinician, and maybe also put yourself into the mind of an interested, let's call it a peptide-curious person out there?

Scientifically, I would say it's one of the languages of the human body, right? So the body likes these different languages to communicate between cells, going from DNA to RNA to proteins, which are can be broken down as polypeptides and peptides. And peptides are one of these languages. Steroid hormones are another language. And then peptides can be broken down further into subcategories, whether or not they have receptors or they have no receptor, and that kind of changes the clinical effects we'll see, like the GLP-1s, which have a very strong clinical effect compared to these obscure peptides like BPC-57, TB-500, TB-4, that don't have a clear target. They have receptors, but they just have many of them, or they don't even have receptors. We don't have a receptor identified for BPC-57 or TB-4.

Just stopping you right there. There's a very interesting distinction. I don't think anyone else has described peptides this way. Let's take BPC-57 for the moment. We're going to talk a lot about it today. If it doesn't have a receptor, what are some ways that it could impact cells and organs and so forth? Or is it that there are receptors, we just don't know what they are?

It could be that the latter, that maybe the receptor is still elusive, or it could be that it's modifying certain proteins that already exist or linking different peptide proteins together in a more favorable fashion for gene transcription. The Russian peptides are all epigenetic modifiers that they bind to the groove of the DNA in certain spots that either open up or close the chromatin to certain areas of genetic expression. And they've modeled this out like a steroid hormone. So steroid hormones bind like they bind to a like the androgen receptor binds DHT or testosterone goes into the nucleus, turns on all the androgenic genes.

Yeah, like puberty is a good example of that.

Yes. Exactly. Exactly. So like pinealon, that we've talked about, shuttles heat shock proteins with androgen receptors.

Got it. So if I just pause us for a second, we should think about this word peptides in two major categories, at least.

One is has known receptors, plural, like the GLPs.

The other category would be does not have known receptors, might have receptors, but can definitely impact biology in interesting ways, or so say the animal data.

A lot of animal data.

All right. I know a lot of people are interested in GLPs, and I want to go there. But because I know most people are probably listening to this foremost because they want to hear about the other stuff, let's start with BPC-57. What is it? What do we know about it? We'll explore safety and what is your stance on it from the perspective of a consumer and a clinician. So first of all, what is BPC-57?

The best way to look at it is, you know, as humans, we've been looking for medicines in plants for thousands of years. And in the last, let's say, 150 years, we've been looking for medicines in cells. So animal-derived versus plant-derived medicines is the way to think about it. You think about aspirin, you think about metformin, the statins, those were all discovered in, you know, plant tissues. Um, stats more so fungi, but you get the point. Now we've been looking into animal tissues to find cures, medicines, treatments. So a group in Croatia in the '90s looks out for this peptide called BPC that they, they eventually named BPC. It's a 40,000 Dalton giant peptide called BPC. BPC-57 is 15 amino acids from that giant peptide. We don't naturally make BPC-157. That's what you'll commonly hear online. We make BPC, the big protein.

Did this group go looking for body protection compound? For those that aren't familiar, in the laboratory, you can take a tissue, grind it up. You can do what's called fractionation. You can start separating basically cells and tissues and liquids according to the size of different proteins. Like different filters will let just like certain filters will let sand through or pebbles through or boulders through. That's kind of what you do. And then you figure out what the sequences are, and then you throw them on cells or put them into animals and you try and figure out what they do. Why were they motivated to look for what eventually became BPC?

Pavlov, the famous scientist that would do the dog, the experiments on the dogs with the bell and making the dogs salivate. The other work he did was on gastric juices of dogs. What he'd do is he'd put a hole in the dogs' stomachs. He would um feed them food and then get the gastric juices and sell that as a medicine.

That's how he made his money.

Yeah, that was part of his business.

So he got a Nobel Prize. He was also kind of like, what did he have like a, um, a call code? It was like, like Enter Pavlov for for discount at checkout. Amazing.

So this is BPC before BPC-57 exists. There's probably other peptides and compounds in there, but they, they found that gastric juices had positive effects on healing on people that had, you know, GERD and these kind of things.

Wait, so people were taking BPC in the time of Pavlov?

They didn't know what BPC was. They were taking gastric juices from dogs.

For what?

GI distress, GI discomfort. Uh, some people were trying for wound healing. There was a big push in this era for like finding animal tissues and putting them into humans. That science fizzled out. At the same time, there's a scientist Hans Selye that's coming up with the stress adaptation theory, and he notices that animals are stressed out. Three things happen to them: their adrenals get really big, so they make more cortisol; their gastric lining gets destroyed; and then their thymus gland and their lymphatics shrink down. And he, he has this published paper where you have clear adrenal from a stressed animal versus a non-stressed animal, a thymus from an animal that's stressed versus not. So this group is looking and thinking, hey, Pavlov had this gastric juice. Hansely said that there was damage when during stress, there must be some kind of cytoprotective or organoprotective compound in the gut. The stomach is a very rich endocrine tissue. It makes ghrelin, all these other hormones. So they're like, there must be something else in the gut juice that protects the gut lining from further damage.

Were people drinking the gastric juices of dogs? Were they injecting them?

Drinking was mostly what they did. And it was supposed to be a medical elixir, presumably. It had many, many things in it, many peptides. Not...

This dyspepsia and like upset stomach and this kind of stuff is what people were thinking.

Do the reports point to the fact that it might have worked independent of what was sold on, uh, Dr. Pavlov's non-existent website?

This was in like the early 1900s. And then, uh, Selye was what, 1930s?

I think so. Yeah, 100 years ago.

Someone will correct us if we're wrong. And this other group in Croatia was '91.

'91. Okay.

'91. Okay. Their first paper talks about this like, hey, there must be some kind of compound. They, they identified the big 40 Dalton protein BPC. And then they, they were like, what's what's causing the actual biological effects? They identified BPC-57, the 15 amino acid peptide that's causing all these effects. There's actually more peptides in gastric juices that some other scientists may or may not have already identified. This field of peptides is going to be very interesting because almost every organ has a signature of peptides. Like if you think back, Dr. Vladimir Vulfovich in the 1850s, 1880s, finds carnosine and carnitine in muscle of cattle. So you can think that the first peptides that are found are carnosine, and then carnitine is the amino acid that's that have positive effects on strength training and performance and different effects there. But that was the whole idea is like, hey, there's muscle peptides that may have muscle effects, right? Gut peptides might have gut effects.

So this Croatian group, um, isolates this 15 amino acid kind of mini segment, yep, of BPC. They and others start injecting into mice, inducing injuries to nerve, to tendon. Maybe describe a few of those effects. I'm familiar with that literature, but I can tell that you are far more familiar with it. So, what are some of the impressive effects that they observed that led to where we are today?

So, they did all kinds of horrible things to these mice. They would, you know, sever tendons and then give them BPC through oral or injectable intraperitoneal administrations, and they'd have faster healing times. They would sever the ACL of the mice. They would, uh, do burn wounds. So when a patient has a burn wound in like the ICU, they end up having crazy gastric ulcers, but if they were able to put BPC topically for the mouse, they would have no gastric ulcers. They name it as this anti-stress compound is how they, they look at it. Now, when they do that Achilles paper on the mice, that's what explodes the bodybuilder interest and leads us to today where we are like, oh, MSK injuries must be BPC, tendons and and and and muscle injuries. But the original idea of BPC was to use it as a gastric treatment, not to use it as a musculoskeletal.

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Let me pause you here. People are probably saying, should I take it or should I? Just hang in there, folks, because this is really, really important. What is so striking to me about BPC, and by the way, that's not an endorsement for BPC. Just what's so striking to me because my lab worked for a long time on optic nerve repair and neural regeneration. Nerves don't like to regenerate in the central nervous system. Peripheral nervous system, they do it, they do it slowly, but they do it.

Yep.

Not in the central nervous system. Ask anyone who's had a stroke or an optic nerve injury. It's a tough road at best. There are data that I've seen with my own eyes that show that, you know, you can accelerate healing of tendon, of ligament, of nerve pathways.

In animals. Yes.

In animals. Yes. Thank you. And that it just generally promotes quote unquote repair.

Yep.

That's kind of weird.

It is weird.

Right? Because I could spend the next 10 hours or more telling you about all the ways that people have tried to get nerves to regenerate and couldn't. And as you point out, this thing doesn't really have one specific, at least known receptor.

So the data on the gut make a lot of sense. This is, after all, a gut peptide. It makes sense that that gut peptide could get lots of places in the body, right?

But what is it doing mechanistically if we know to support regeneration or replenishment of all these different tissue types? Because a neuron is a very different cell type than, you know, a fibroblast or one of the bits of collagen that make up different connective tissues.

It's modulating a lot of these growth and healing pathways, like in the models of damaging the endothelial layer or the epithelial layer of different tissues. You'll get more VEGF signaling. So that's the vascular endothelial growth factor. So get more blood vessels and angiogenesis being formed, which creates a lot of the controversy around BPC safety. You'll get cell migration, especially when coupled with TB-500 and TB-4. You'll get, you know, more access of the healing factors to the area through androgenic pathways. On top of that, you'll get an anti-stress effect. So the other big thing that they did was they'd give corticosteroids with BPC-57 to these mice. And usually when you have a wound and you give corticosteroids, the corticosteroids will slow or even stop the wound healing from happening. When BPC was administered, the healing was either the same or even better.

Is BPC considered anti-inflammatory? Because based on what you just said, it almost seems like it helps maintain some of the pro-inflammatory response. Some people might be thinking, why would you want inflammation? What Dr. Bachri just said is if you block inflammation with corticosteroids, you aren't going to call in the signals to repair tissues. So lowering inflammation is a dicey thing that maybe we set aside for later in the conversation if we have time. But is it thought that BPC is lowering inflammation, or is it just somehow hitting the gas pedal on all these regenerative, restorative biological processes?

It's more putting the gas pedal on these processes to bring in the immune system, the healing factors. For example, in one tendon model, they noticed that it increased the amount of growth hormone receptors on the tendon. So theoretically, this would allow more growth hormone to dock in and cause the outgrowth of the tendon and the regrowth of it. So there's that theory there. Downstream, it'll modulate nitric oxide synthesis. So that's a big thing when it comes to wound healing because you need to dilate the blood vessels, you need to call in different cells. So it's really changing the way cells behave at that level, but that's only for like the tendon side of it. They also did weird things on the neurological side, like they would make these mice drunk, okay? And they would then give them BPC and they'd get less drunk and when they go through mazes.

Oh boy. We did not just recommend you take BPC with alcohol. I want to be very clear. Um, but people are going to, you know, do their own interpretation. So, I'm being semi-facetious, but very interesting.

And then also, they would give them, get the mice drunk and then have them withdraw from alcohol. And like withdrawal is deadly. If we have a patient in the hospital that withdraws, they could die during that withdrawal if they're not given benzodiazepines. They got BPC and they didn't have the withdrawal symptoms. I'm like, what's going on here? This is a very interesting compound. I think it gets all the hype for the MSK stuff, but I think the neurological, neuropsychiatric, let's say, and then gastric effects are way more interesting when it comes to that because it's modulating the gut-brain axis in an interesting way. We'll have people come to us and they're like, "My Adderall is not working since I've been taking oral BPC." Are they happy with that effect?

No, they're not happy. They're very mad because like it seems like it's blunting their Adderall.

So it's doing something from dopaminergic signaling, both on both sides, both withdrawal when it comes to like the GABAergic side, but also the peak of signaling. So if you like peruse Reddit, which you should never do, um, you'll find all these anhedonia discussions about BPC, people feel like depressed and low energy.

Incredible. Seems to be in terms of effects in animals and anecdotal reports in humans, because I think both your and my excitement about this might be occupying a substantial amount of the force field here. Let's do something that normally I would do in a few minutes. I'm going to ask you some very direct questions about this, and you and I, don't hold you responsible as being like BPC, you know, spokesperson, but here you are. That's Pavlov's job. And he's dead. Are there any known adverse events from people taking BPC, known and documented? Okay, adverse events where it's unrelated to, uh, contamination or something of that sort?

In the literature, when it comes to, um, the animal data, they've injected animals with, you know, a thousand times the dose of BPC with no real adverse effects. So there's, we don't even know the LD50 of BPC, which makes it hard for it to become an FDA-approved.

Maybe define LD50.

LD50 is the dose at which 50% of the animals would die if it was administered to them. So we don't even know what that is. And that's actually an important number, as barbaric as it sounds, to determine for any drug. What's the LD50 for caffeine? What's the LD50 for aspirin? What's the L? This is every drug you take, folks, on or off the counter, you know, prescription or non-prescription, has gone through LD50 testing in animals.

To be a clinician to prescribe this, we need to know what that is, which which limits us. Now, there were two very small phase one and phase two trials on rectal BPC enemas, um, in the early 2000s from that same Croatian group. So that's the big concern of BPC. All the data comes from one group. So people can be skeptical. There's a couple of Chinese groups that have also replicated some of their work. But, uh, those groups wanted to try to treat ulcerative colitis. It's a very, you know, miserable condition where the immune system attacks the lining of the gut in multiple spots. Uh, and they use enemas of BPC up to like 80 milligrams, which is much more than than people would take.

Most people are injecting microgram. Yes. 100 or 200 micrograms per day or something. Maybe more, but you're talking about 80 milligrams.

Yeah, rectal enemas. They did a phase one and phase two trial.

They're doing this daily or they do it once?

They did it for a few weeks. Um, and then they re-measured. They had it was placebo-controlled. The data is not available. The abstracts are only available. So that's what also gives us some pause when we're going to, you know, push that forward, especially when the legal discussions are happening here in the next few months on BPC. The first, the phase one trial showed no adverse effects. They, and they didn't even have BPC in the systemic system too. That's that's a key point to know that orally administered or rectally administered BPC doesn't seem to go systemic.

Maybe define that a little bit more specifically.

If you take aspirin and then you measure blood aspirin levels, you'll notice the levels go up. When they measured BPC levels, BPC-157 levels in these individuals, they didn't find it in the blood. So, either it was broken down very quickly, or it stayed locally to the lining of the gastric tissues.

That raises a question for me. Let's say somebody doesn't quote unquote take any BPC-57 by enema or otherwise. If I were to just draw your blood right now, uh, there's BPC-57 in there, the bigger protein?

The bigger, the bigger BPC protein. I don't, you wouldn't find.

Is it circulating or is it contained or is it restricted to the gut?

We don't have that data.

Well, that's incredible, right? Because we're talking about these effects all over the body. We don't even know if it leaves the gut.

No, but in, well, the injectable is going to go systemic.

And most people are going to take, if they're decide to do this, they're going to take an oral or an injectable. They're either going to inject local to the injury if they can, or an intraperitoneal. They found fragments of the 15. Like there's there's a paper in 2024 that looked at this, and they could figure out if somebody had BPC administered for doping reasons because it's on the WADA list now. So they could figure out if someone had taken BPC.

Got it.

But there, we don't know like we don't, we need to know the dynamics. We don't know where it goes, how it goes.

And we don't know the results in terms of what those 80 milligram enemas of BPC did for the colitis.

In the phase one trial, it was just a safety, there was no adverse effects. In the phase two trial, it was very small, like 40 patients, there was at least a positive signal on on the ulcerative colitis. And this was done in the United States or this was in Croatia?

Okay, so to be quite direct, on the one hand, you have groups, um, who I think are mostly well-intentioned saying, hey, 80 milligrams of BPC by way of enema did not cause any adverse events, and that's the phase one that you described.

If we believe their data is right.

On the opposite side, many people, especially in the United States and, you know, in Northern Europe, where the regulations tend to be similar-ish, right, as compared to elsewhere in the world, would say, well, yeah, but that study was in Croatia. Now, I have many Croatian friends, that's not a knock on Croatia. Why would it be that the clinical trials in Croatia would hold less weight? This is, this is a dicey area, but I think it's important because you'll hear this, "Oh, those are Chinese peptides, those are Russian studies." Yeah. And, you know, I mean, to me, you know, the question is, was it good science? Was it done carefully? Would it pass muster for a phase one in the United States?

That's a good question. The groups seem to be very robust and they do really good randomized control, double-blind placebo-controlled trials. I think we're very, uh, United States-centric. We view ourselves as the premier science, and we are the premier science. So people kind of trust that more. And there may be, you know, perverse incentives when it comes to different government bodies and like, you know, Soviet era research that might be, you know, pro-fabrication when it comes to certain compounds that makes people hesitant because there's a lot of like these Soviet era compounds that are not peptides, or some of them are peptides, they're fantastic, they sound amazing, but when they get tested, maybe they're not as potent as the Soviet data would suggest.

I always thought that the Russian stuff was like the really potent stuff that they didn't want anyone else to know about. That kind of way goes the other way, right?

It could go both ways. I mean, but they were, they were more interested in performance. They wanted better astronauts, better Olympians, better soldiers. We care more about, you know, a profit drug model that gets people on a subscription for with the monthly drug, unfortunately.

Sometimes it heals people, but.

So nowadays, is BPC-57 legal in the United States? Like, if I wanted to go online and buy BPC-57, I can do it, right?

Legally for research purposes only.

I thought now under the new regulations, uh, recently passed, that you can get it from a compounding pharmacy or...

Technically not just yet.

Okay.

And it depends on medical boards to break it down. BPC-157 never got FDA approved, right? So it gets into these compounding pharmacy lists. There's a category 1, 2, and 3. Category 1 means the FDA thinks like, hey, this is not an approved drug, but we're okay with you compounding this and you're okay to push that forward. Category 2, it's like do not compound. In late 2024, BPC-57 and like 20 other peptides got moved to this category 2 list. Since about 2017 to 2024, people have been prescribing BPC and these alternative medicine anti-aging practices. It gets removed from that list. Of course, you know, compounding pharmacies re-label it as PDA, peptide arginate, but it's the same thing.

It's the same exact thing.

Yes. One of them will be an acetate, one of them will be an arginate, but the PDA is is BPC-57. Because there are many, many people selling compounded pentadecapeptide.

Pentadecapeptide. That's the arginate. Okay. I think the acetate one is the one that's on the category 2 list. Now, just in April of this year, it got removed from the category 2 list and it's not yet on the category 1 list, which would allow physicians to prescribe it through compounding pharmacies. Now, but they can prescribe the PDA version.

People are prescribing PDA. Yes.

Now, now state medical boards view that very differently. Like I got a letter from one of the licensed in many states, one of these states reached out to me. It's like, you cannot prescribe, not me directly to the general public of people in that state, you cannot prescribe non-FDA approved peptides, no matter what.

So there's controversy there. Even if the FDA says, okay, we're okay with you prescribing it, is your medical board in that state going to be okay with it? So it's state by state by state laws.

What about with telehealth? So somebody's on the East Coast in a state that, um, allows them to write a script for, let's just call it BPC, because it's effectively what it is, or this other thing where they kind of wriggle through the regulation. Can they send that to California or to Wisconsin or someplace else if the patient is there?

The telehealth laws go into effect where the patient is. So, if let's say in California, it's not allowed to have BPC according to the state board of pharmacy or whoever bans that. Even if you're a New York doctor that's licensed in California, that would be against the California Medical Board, and they would ask you, if they found out, to stand in front of them. Now, are boards cracking down on this? Not really. There's a couple of states that are cracking down on people, and people know to avoid those states, but it's going to be very dicey over the next few years.

Okay, couple of questions. Anecdotal data. We don't want to place too much on it, but the big kind of rumor out there that pricked up my ears a few years ago was when I heard that some athlete before the Summer Olympics, this was two Summer Olympics ago, um, from Eastern Europe, had a complete Achilles transaction. Not just a tear or a pull, but when we think about nerves and tendons, we think like complete cut the whole way through. And the rumor was they took BPC-157 locally injected for a few months and they podiumed in the Olympics. Yep. They still got a medal.

Familiar with that story.

That was the, that was the story that kind of got out there that I feel kind of catalyzed this movement of BPC out of these niche communities and in started it toward the public awareness that leads to you sitting here today, among other things. We also, you have a lot of other knowledge, but we're restricting to BPC now. So, do we have verification of that story?

No. No, I, I think that story was hearsay. I don't think they wanted to reveal what they actually did. I don't think they only did BPC-57. They'd be stupid if they did. They should have, you know, all the best and latest greatest treatments, whether exosome, stem cells, other peptides, anything that wasn't banned. And by the way, I should say BPC-57 was not on the banned substances list at that time. It was so unknown. Just like there are compounds right now that athletes are using and not just in the enhanced games in preparation for the Olympics. I'm not saying they're all doping, but there, it's a common practice that athletes will forage into things that can help them that are not yet on the banned substances list.

And I mean, good luck proving that BPC was injected, you know, a week ago, because by the time the peptide's already gone out of your system. So, or at least we think based on the pharmacodynamics that we understand now.

That story was run with from the research community. They use it as a marketing tool to sell more BPC-157 because what happened in the field is the GLP-1s come online, you know, late 2021 and 2022 with Ozempic and Wegovy. They get the FDA approval for weight loss. There's not enough of a supply from the traditional pharmaceutical versions of the GLP-1s. So, people start looking elsewhere to get their weight loss drugs. I know people that would drive down to Mexico to pick up pens because a pharmacy in the United States would cost, you know, $1,500 for an Ozempic pen. Pharmacy in Mexico, one-hour drive.

Same drug.

Same exact drug. How much relative cost?

$150 versus $1,500.

Wow.

So, 10x.

And this is the thing that Trump has been, you know, very vocal about, like that we, that we're getting overcharged for drugs here.

We, we definitely are. And the Trump Rx has lowered a lot of these prices, by the way, for for a lot of these drugs. Now, that time there was a shortage of semaglutide and then eventually tirzepatide. So the compounding pharmacy game shifted into making these drugs, compounded versions. So they're not the FDA-approved versions, but when there's a shortage of a medication, the compounders are allowed to make these drugs to meet the shortage. And in fact, the FDA was reaching out to these people telling them to do it. Like Brigham was talking to him last week at the Enhanced Games. He's like, "Yeah, the FDA told us to make this stuff, and then they're getting us in trouble."

This is Brigham Beller, who runs Ways to Well? And...

He ran a pharmacy for a long time, right? Compounding pharmacy. Yeah. We've never actually met in person. One of the best ones.

It's not an ad for pharmacies. We have no, I have no business relationship to Brigham.

So if there's a shortage, compounding can jump in the game.

Yes. And they did, and they jumped in very hard on the GLPs.

Yes. And they made a lot of money off the GLP-1s. Like this was, you know, billions of dollars being made.

Were they selling them for less than standard pharma was selling?

They were less than the Ozempic pens. Unfortunately, what would happen is the provider had the discretion on the price. So all these providers also were making a lot of money.

Who's the quote unquote provider? The physician.

The physician or the NP or the PA.

Uh... Who takes the difference?

The clinician, which is I don't think is legal in most states.

Wait a second. Maybe not even federal.

Wait a second. So, let's say I wanted to take a Wegovy. Yes. And there's a shortage. I can't get it from, who's the, the big manufacturer? Novo Nordisk doesn't have enough. My doctor says, "Listen, you need this." Yes. And I say, "How much is it?" And they say, "Well, $1,500." Um, $1,500. But it turns out the compounding pharmacy, through a different doctor, a more benevolent doctor, could have prescribed it to me for, I could get for maybe $300. In the case where I'm paying $1,500, it's going to my physician unbeknownst to me. I don't, it's, I'm cloaked from the process.

If you're getting the, the Novo Nordisk pen, the physician is not involved.

No, I'm talking about if I'm, if I'm drifted towards a compounded version. So the, the most of the times when it comes to compoundies, which I don't think is a good practice, the clinician gets a price from the pharmacy. So the pharmacy will tell you, hey, a vial of semaglutide costs $150.

This clinician can now sell that vial to the patient. Sell it. It's really, they're charging an administrative fee, right?

Right. It's not a sale because technically you can't sell medications like that. They will sell it to you for $200 or $800.

Okay. If I want to ask my physician, how much are you getting the drug for from, because I know which pharmacy it's going to come from. It's going to come in a vial, says like Upstate or Tailor Made or what's Brigham's pharmacy?

Revive.

Revive. It's coming from Revive. What are you paying for this from Revive?

Yep.

And then what are you going to charge me? And I can assume the difference is going to my clinician.

It's going to the clinician. All.

All right. Sorry clinicians, the game is up. Patients are now going to ask, and you have every right to ask, as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, because what's going to happen with the BPC and all these other peptides moving is there's going to be telehealth platforms on every on every corner now that are going to be like, "Hey, BPC $199, BPC $299," and they're going to like checkout, and there's going to be a doctor somewhere in a room that's going to stamp the prescription, but it's just a, you know, e-commerce supplements with a with a stamp of a doctor, which is not good medical care at all.

Okay. To balance this a bit, the route that many people have gone for about a decade now, but primarily in the last three to five years, was to go to these for research purposes only, what we would call gray market. Let's just name names because they're out of business now anyway. They've shuttered themselves. Peptide Sciences, till a few years ago, you could go on there, you could buy pretty much any peptide. It would say for research purposes only, not for animal or human use.

Yes. And you sign that many times. And when you paid them, you would have to Venmo them.

Yeah.

Or you could do it through Zelle. Yes.

But they would ask that you not send it to a Peptide Sciences account. It was like some random name, and the names kept changing. So everyone knew they were in on something like this. By the way, I, I, I want to be very clear. I ended up getting these things, right? I was too frightened to take them. Later, I have taken BPC. I've tried it. I don't take it currently, but I've I've tried it through a compounding pharmacy. So I just want to be very clear what that experience was about.

So eventually they actually got payment processors. Like this, this market evolved with the desire. Okay, there's maybe I'd say $5 to $10 billion on gray market peptides being spent in the United States in 2025, and that's going to grow this year.

So here's my question. Standard pharma, we know goes through of all the things we're talking about, the most stringent process. You may hate pharma, folks, or whatever. That's your right. But the stuff that you get that's non-generic from Novo Nordisk, from Eli Lilly, you can be certain based on the product packaging that it's as clean as it gets, as pure as it gets.

That's right.

Compounding pharmacies are a mix. It depends on the compounding pharmacy.

Do we know that gray market peptides had problems? Because there are people out there right now who are certainly not physicians, people like Robert Breedlove, who's best known for like his work in crypto, who's also now like very open about the fact that he's taken all these peptides and anabolics and things. And I heard him online the other day saying literally that he's tested the gray market for research purposes only peptides and compared them to the compounding pharmacy versions and they're identical. Now, he's not a physician, and I don't think he's lying, but many people are taking that sort of evidence and saying, "Oh, I'll just get it from gray market sources." As a physician, what is your stance on this?

So, the API for all these active pharmaceutical ingredients comes from China. There are no such thing as American-made peptides. It gets finished here. So, the API.

They're all from China.

Everything's from China. The raw materials.

The raw materials, like the semaglutide you're getting from a compounding pharmacy or a research peptide website, tirzepatide included, comes from China and then gets either the raw material gets, you know, packaged here.

Raw materials or or synthesized compound because there's a big difference between getting like the raw materials for something and getting the thing.

The synthesized semaglutide gets made in China. It'd be very expensive to make it here. There are people starting to look at that because that's the next, you know, thing in the arms race to make American peptides, right?

So, they're all Chinese peptides.

Everything's Chinese peptides.

There's no, uh, Guatemalan peptides. There's no...

China is the best at it at doing it. Now, the compounding pharmacies vary in grading. Some of them are really good. They do all the testing, sterility. They have very good quality control. So, you get a good product, but they usually have to compound it with something else to get by the regulations, like they'll add in a B12 or a B6 to say like the patient had nausea from the traditional semaglutide. We can compound them with B12 or B6 to get around the nausea, and that's that, that's meets the patient rule because there's two ways to get compounded medications: either a shortage or there's a unique need that the patient has.

Do we know that compounding with something else actually deals with the nausea or is that just it?

It might help some people.

Anecdotally, people will say that they respond better to the pens, like the actual pharma pens, than to the compared to the compounded stuff. The research stuff is all over the place. Like some of it could be better than compounded stuff. It could be the wrong substance. Like there's a, there's a guy went viral on Twitter a few weeks ago. He got rid of tirzepatide, started getting darker. He's like, "I don't think I'm injecting tirzepatide."

Got it.

Yes. He was melan, he was injecting melan too.

And folks, I realize that we're, we're going places that not even I predicted we would go, but this is super informative. So all of the raw materials are coming from the same source. Yes. Then they're getting filtered into these different, let's just call them stringency bins. Standard pharma, quote unquote big pharma, being the most stringent.

Yeah, some of the raw materials are overseas. Like I think Lily's opening some China factories. Some of it's here.

Okay. Some are going into compounding pharmacies, and compounding pharmacies, I think it's fair to say, have varying levels of stringency. Some are going to be excellent, some are good, some are going to be lousy.

That's right.

Fair. Okay. The quote unquote gray market peptides, the ones where it's quote unquote for research purposes only, but I made the joke on X a few weeks ago, like how many of you are running experiments in your home, not on animals? Were you doing cell culture at home? Like, come on. I know what's involved in doing cell culture. You're not. No one's doing this at home.

So those presumably also come in anywhere from excellent to dreadful.

Yes.

Um, but we don't know which are which.

Nope.

We don't know that.

And batch to batch. That's the big problem.

Gotcha. Okay. So, it is risky to get re for research purposes. I mean, like that's the majority of...

way people are consuming peptides. Unfortunately, we should just because of the the the move in 2024 to get these from the category one to the category two list and make them banned, quote unquote. That opened up this gray market zone. Like the gray market existed for the last 15, 20 years. Bodybuilders would, you know, have anecdotes about BPC157. They'd inject it post, you know, post squats for different injuries. Nobody really cared about it. It was with the GLP-1s and then the banning of the peptides plus this, you know, anti-medicine kick that's been happening over the last five years.

Yes. Since the pandemic that people are like, you know what, I want to inject this because it gives them a sense of autonomy or they feel like their bro recommended it. Like I said, the best job in 2025 was to be a peptide affiliate. Like people made my yearly salary in a month selling peptides illegally on TikTok.

And I will say because for people that think it's just bro science, it's also gal science. I will tell you, I don't even know this a term. Um, someone needs to come up with a better term. Um, my understanding and not from Reddit is that more than half of the peptide market is female.

You know, there's this perception that it's like, you know, only guys who like to lift weights and want to be jacked and, you know, jacked and tan or whatever, they say, you know, no. No. Especially when we start getting into things like GHKU copper and we start talking about things for collagen and skin rejuvenation. There's a big peptide market in towards women. I actually think in the long run it's going to exceed at least financially peptide market in men.

I think it already has because like soccer moms have become like affiliates like like you know Amway and Herbal Life was the big thing 20 years ago. Now soccer moms just do peptide affiliation.

Research research grade websites.

The gray market. Okay. We already know that they're not recommended, but what about black market? What what would be considered black market?

Black market is like if you bought it directly from China like like it's very cheap. Like a vial of BPC costs five bucks to make. Like now someone will sell it to you for $1.99 plus depending on where. But black market is either like you know your friend in China on WhatsApp sent you a vial of BPC. Do not do this or someone synthesizes claims they synthesize it in their bathtub. Like just like the underground gear like all the steroids that were in the '90s and the 2000s. It's like, who knows what that is.

What's so interesting to me is with steroids, it went from bodybuilding community to eventually hormone replacement. It was like TRT or what I call TRT plus because a lot of guys are taking a lot more than that. Some are taking less, some are most are taking more, some are taking what they're prescribed. And then HRT has become very popular in women. So now HRT is kind of like a thing that it's not like, oh my goodness, like so and so is taking estrogen replacement or testo. It's not not a big deal. Peptides is different because it came, you know, the big explosion in this came through the GLPs. And I would argue, I'd love your opinion on this, why so many people are now peptide curious is because people because of the GLPs are now also very comfortable injecting themselves. Like like five years ago, if you're like, you're going to inject yourself, people like, oh my god. Then they realize it's like this little tiny pin. It hurts less than a, you know, Texas mosquito bite. People are doing it on their skin and like, you know, and somebody's, you know, your girlfriend or wife is doing it as if it's nothing. And, you know, like heroin addicts or diabetics.

Right? You're not going intravenous. So, that changed everything that de-stigmatized it. Now,

To be fair, I I want to touch on the question about adverse events. Again,

We're going to spend a couple minutes talking about some incredible things that we've seen and heard about BPC57 in terms of its positive effects.

The concern I've always had was the angiogenesis, the growth of vasculature. If somebody happens to have a little tumor or what will eventually become a tumor sitting on their liver or in their gut or in their pancreas, in theory, it could vascularize that tumor and cause it to grow more quickly. Is there any evidence that that's actually happened? I want to be very clear. I'm not loading this question because it sounds like I'm kind of like leading the witness when I say that. I want to know.

I'm not currently taking BPC57. I'm fortunately I don't have an injury at the moment. So that would be the only condition which I'd take it unless you told me there are other reasons. But I don't want to give myself that risk.

That risk. And I think most people don't want to give themselves that risk. So what is the the realistic risk based on observations in humans or animals? Have we ever seen tumors grow more quickly?

No. Like for example, most compounds if they're, you know, carcinogenic, we will see that signature in the animals like you know with cardarine GW uh was a drug that was very was very promising because it had you know diabetic implications for metabolism and now it's a bodybuilder drug that they use for more cardio.

What is this?

Cardarine GW. Mhm. Uh you might have seen on on the Reddits and those forums, but people use it for I stay out of Reddit.

Yeah. Good. Uh increases your cardio um capacity. Got so banned on on the water list of course, but it was it had promise for treating diabetics because it changed metabolism in the liver. It had a signal of cancer in animal data. So that whole thing was scrapped.

There's no signal from the animal literature on BPC57 for for you know cancers. Now that all that literature comes from one group. So we have to be very careful. That one creation group that tells you that that's it's the safest thing in the world.

All the animal data come from one group.

Almost all of it.

Interesting.

Almost all of it. Very few. Like there's a couple of Chinese studies on on BBC57. Now there's starting to become more interest here. Like I think it's a phase two trial on hamstrings happening here in the United States.

Really? Yeah. Humans. Yes. Phase two.

Yes. Uh we talked to a group, an orthopedic group somewhere on the East Coast. They they wanted to do a BBC trial. So we consulted with them to kind of Great.

Yeah. So it's it's going to happen. Especially if it moves to this category one list and people can be prescribed it. At least we can get like a phase four trial where it's being prescribed and we can see what's happening to the people as they're getting it.

And we can, you know, aggregate all this anecdata into one place ideally and report on it. So that's something we're working on in the in the background.

Is that something you personally working on on aggregating all this all this data together into a anyone nest study to put it all all together because all the ane data exists but like put it together somewhere at least we can see what the signals are. For example, on Reddit, you'll find signals of hematomas getting worse, which makes sense with the with the VEGF pathway.

I've heard this. So, a friend and physician who is, I would say, peptide curious/positive told me that when he takes BPC-157 for, you know, a shoulder or knee or whatever, that angiomas on his face, um, the sort of spiderweb angiomas, not the formal term, forgive me, derms, but, um, get worse. That's his his personal observation. I think a lot of people don't want that. It makes sense though if it's promoting angiogenesis.

Based on the the mechanism it does make sense. Now BBC157 is not a uniform androgenic um upregulator. In some models it decreases VEGF in a melanoma model a cell line.

So it might be potentially anti-cancer but we need to test it.

We don't know and which is what's really unfortunate about this compound. It's very promising. It has all this cool literature in animals and we just don't know when it comes to the one.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And and we'd love to know because like if it does work like I could see a million use cases in the ICU that we could use, you know, BBC157 to really help people out especially during the critical illness because like in ICU people get gastric ulcers. Like if if we knew that it would work, I would love to give them an infusion of BBC157 and that's the future I could see happening. But we need data. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for nearly 15 years now. I discovered it way back in 2012, long before I had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since. AG1 is, to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market. It combines vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, probiotics, and adaptogens into a single scoop that's easy to drink, and tastes great. It's designed to support things like gut health, immune health, and overall energy. And it does so by helping to fill any gaps that you might have in your daily nutrition. And of course, we should all eat high-quality whole foods, but most of us are probably not getting enough prebiotics, vitamins, and minerals, and AG1 ensures that those gaps are filled. I get asked all the time by people if they were to take just one supplement, what would my recommendation for that supplement be? And my answer is always AG1 because it's just been so critical for supporting all aspects of my physical health, mental health, and performance by covering those nutritional, what we call foundational bases. And I know from my own experience and from everyone I've heard that I recommended it to that they simply feel much better in a number of different ways when they take it regularly. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer. For a limited time, AG1 is giving away a week supply of AGZ, which is their sleep supplement, and a free bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your subscription. AGZ is something that I help design. It tastes great, and it's the only sleep supplement I take. It has a collection of different things in it that has dramatically improved my sleep. Both my slowwave deep sleep and my rapid eye movement sleep and I absolutely love it. Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman to get a week supply of AGZ and a bottle of D3K2 with your subscription.

When is there going to be a formal randomized control trial on BPC and who holds the patent?

There's multiple patents on BPC 157 depending on which salt they're in. The patent has been passed around a couple of times to through different places. Unfortunately, the company that had the patent under the pled got acquired by TAVA. TA is this generic pharmaceutical company and they don't they make, you know, Adderall. So, they they have they're making tons of money making Adderall. They don't really care about PPC157. So, they have one of the patents. The other patent expires in like 10 years. I think Crick still has it. Dr. Crick is is the guy behind BBC157. He's

He's in Croatia.

He's in Croatia. Yeah.

Would Tava um sell the patent?

I'm sure they would if someone made an offer. The the problem is I don't I don't see the purpose of even having the patent because you can add on one chain to the amino acid. This is the problem with with peptides. This is what Luli Eli Liy is coming into when it comes to making rea is that patent laws for peptides kind of suck because you can add on one amino acid. You can modify one thing on it and suddenly it's a different compound.

This is true for other pharmaceuticals. Like I'm familiar with some of the ketamine and ibogaine trials and there's a company that took ibogaine and basically added a magnesium component to it and you can make that a completely new drug. I'm not saying that doesn't work. I think they have a good rationale for doing that. But so this game of sort of protecting patents rough and plus millions of people have already used BPC157 through research use only websites. So I think millions is fair. But now how do you reel that back? Like it's already the cat's out of the bag. So like there's no financial incentive to run the giant study.

Unless like we we crowdfund it as as you know peptide curious people.

And in your role as a physician, I realize you're not suggesting these things, but you you have a different picture of this stuff at the level of mechanism and you're a clinician that works with, you know, truly FDA approved drugs and you're you're I want you to share with folks. I said it in the introduction, but internal medicine means that you spend your days what.

I'm on the on the wards of the hospital admitting patients from the ER to the floor to the ICU, managing very complex disease ranging from, you know, a simple pneumonia to a coronary artery bypass patient. So, yeah.

That whole spectrum.

Okay. So that lens applied to this as much as one can would you say that like of the the reports that you've heard directly from people you trust and from people that who are not incentivized to say these things like oh you know it made me happier you know their skin looked better all the things that one can find in it with an affiliate code attached to it of those what do you think are the most interesting potentially valid claims and I asked that because If we were going to fund a clinical trial, we need to pick an end point or a couple of end points. Is it going to be recovery from injury? If so, what kinds of injuries? Is it going to be the gastric stuff? Is it mood interaction with dopamine receptors? I mean, I've heard so many different things. If we had a chunk of money and we're going to we're going to design a study and have someone else do it so it's truly independent. Like what are the top three to five outcomes that you've heard that you have a good feeling there's quote unquote something there?

And then we narrow it down to maybe one or two for sake of the study. What What are those five? I would say to complete the phase one, phase two on the ulcer of colitis, do that phase three trial on proven that it has benefits for ulcerative colitis. And I don't think we need to use enemas. We could probably have an encapsulated version that releases deeper into the intestines.

So fix the gut, fix the ulcered gut.

Yes. In conjunction with that, you could do a trial on like, you know, GERD. That's a simple condition. A lot of people have it randomized to BPC157 oral capsules versus pantoprazole.

Okay. And you're basing this on the fact that you've seen and heard that people who have GERD get better, feel better when they take it. Okay. And it could be placebo.

Yes. I mean, anecdotally, when when I travel, I I have a bottle of BPC orally.

Why is that?

I don't get, you know, travelers diarrhea or or, you know, when I, you know, eat exotic foods on in random places. My friends all get sick and I happen not to. Anecdote, right? But that's interesting. There seems to be some kind of gut protective effect. And that's what they noticed in the the mice literature. They would have an offending agent into the gut and they'd notice that there would be protection deeper down in the in the gastric tract from that offending agent because if you think about it the gut is the most vulnerable part of the body like it's open to the outside world it's a tube that runs through you can eat something and it could completely destroy you so you have to have some kind of mechanisms the prostaglandins uh the you know all these different hormones that are made potentially BPC17 is part of this robust armory that the gut has to protect itself from further injuries.

What are some things outside the gut or indirect from the gut that are also compelling?

So, I would love to see some neuro psychiatric um BPC studies when it comes to um addictions. There's enough anecdata about people talking about addictions and and like hey I don't need to crave insert drug here not recommending that anyone tries that out but for alcohol or whatever it may be. Do you think that is likely due to the we're speculating but likely due to a um interference with the reinforcing properties just like earlier you said people are getting less drunk so people are getting less high becomes less reinforcing or is it somehow touching the craving mechanisms themselves?

It's probably touching the craving mechanism through the gut-brain axis because I don't think it's going systemic either. I think it's it's locally in the gut shutting down the neurons from from if you think about it if BPC is what they claim it is right and that's a big if that if you have a noxious agent going into your gut your body has to have a mechanism to lock down, you know, protect your your vital organs, right? So is BPC part of this giant transduction pathway to protect your vital organs, your brain, your heart, your kidneys from further damage? We had Dr. Diego Borquez, I can never pronounce his last name, forgive me, Diego, who's out at Duke, who's really the world expert on these neuropod cells in the gut that signal through the nodose ganglion up the vagus nerve to either promote or suppress release of dopamine to make you either approach or avoid certain foods. Very, very interesting. I would be more than happy to encourage his lab, even if get funds for his lab, to do something on this.

What are some other categories of interesting effects that deserve careful study?

So we need to see what BPC does on the musculoskeletal system. Like that's what the hype is. That's where everybody's is is going. So as I look through like what model I would look for, you want something that's not very vascularized but could be improved if the blood flow was good like a tendon injury. So perhaps, you know, a bicep tricep tendon type of post-surgical outcome. So like you get your bicep tendon torn, you get a repair, you get BPC either inoperatively or postoperatively and see if if that person heals faster because the idea is not to use BPC. It's not going to magically reattach an ACL that's torn, right? But can it further accelerate the healing from an ACL surgery so you come back in six months rather than 12 months? That's the big question.

And that's what like a lot of athletes are are using BBC157 for that use.

Has anyone ever done the one limb versus opposite limb control experiment? I mean, I know that people take it orally or inject it systemically like under the skin or into the muscle goes systemically in the bloodstream if you apply it that way. Um, if you can get to the injury site sometimes people will inject locally. But it seems that the challenge is that let's say you have, you know, tendonitis in one elbow and tendonitis in the other elbow, you could inject into your left elbow, not and not your right, but there's going to be systemic transfer. So it's hard to do that internal control experiment.

Yeah, I know. I've had I've used BPC for one injury and I've had results on a different injury.

Positive results.

I had positive results. I'm like, "Oh, interesting that like that that my shoulder feels better even though I was doing it from my elbow or whatever it may be." This would be a good time for us to, you know, bracket what we're about to say by saying this is purely anecdotal, but filtered through I consider myself a skeptic on many, many things, especially things I would put into my body. I'll tell a story.

What's your favorite personal BPC story involving you and your body?

Yeah, I tore my tricep a few months ago. Tore. Yeah, tore triceps lifting with people I should have been lifting with. They're much stronger than I was. Purple from here to here.

Like the pictures I posted on on X. It's it's brutal. I'm like, I'm going to have to have surgery. This sucks. I I don't have time to have surgery because you're you're in a brace for like three months. And I put BPC in locally. Don't try this at home. Not medical advice, but locally in the tissue spot with a couple of other peptides. And within three weeks, my my PT is like, "What the hell are you doing? Like, this is healing so fast." Would I have healed that fast anyways? I don't know. But that's typically a grade two tricep tear with with purple arm from from top to bottom. It wasn't grade three. Uh, because I could still extend my my elbow. That's usually a three-month recovery. And to be back in three to four weeks was was fantastic for me, which is why I'm so excited.

What dosage were you injecting?

Uh a larger dose than people would uh not micrograms. No.

You were up in the grams.

Yeah. Yeah. A lot higher. I I think um personally and in some of our our our people, we've used bigger dosages. I think that's the problem. The low dosages even though that translates well from the mice data for humans, I think the dose is way higher.

But people just go based on the dosage that would fit in the pile through a, you know, peptide sciences website rather than what actually we don't know what what the human dose is for BPC157 so there's a lot of work to do just to figure that out like when we spoke to the to the orthopedic group like yeah we're going to start with, you know, 250 micrograms. I'm like, I don't know if you're going to see an effect at that low of a dose. You might need to to raise it up like that, that's what people do online.

I'm like, yeah, but that's just because someone's peptide website says to do that. There's no data there, but you know, tricep was back to normal.

Amazing.

That was a an interesting BPC case. I've seen other injuries where BPC didn't really help much. I can't match your story. That's that's a bigger result. I can just say that I had a bad trap neck pull where I couldn't turn my head and I was like, "Oh, one of those." and you know had some BPC so it was only I think only 200 micrograms and just pinned it right into the that's street talk for injected right into the kind of like upper trapish area two days later completely gone. Of course.

I don't know what would have happened had I just waited.

But it seemed um eerily fast and then I stopped taking it.

So this is a guy that you know and by the way that was um not gray market. It was obtained through a doctor's prescription from a compounding pharmacy labeled BPC157 not PDA PDA. Okay. Those are anecdotes. I've also read just to be fair we should balance this out certainly on X, you know, people can say anything they want. People saying, oh, you know, I didn't feel well, I stopped taking it. Okay. Could be due to what it was dissolved in, could be due to their own unique, you know, response, could be due to bad sourcing, you know, contamination, so we don't know. But not everyone has a great result and some people have no result. Right. But many, many people report what can only be described as pretty astonishing positive results.

That cannot be directly ascribed to the BPC because of the placebo effect, etc. And I'm not saying that to protect myself. I'm saying that so that people can couch this in that like how we got here.

Is because of stories like this.

Well, there's two possibilities. Either BPC is as amazing as we think it is and it's unfortunate that millions of people don't have access to it.

Or BPC is actually either ineffective or harmful to people and millions of people are injecting it right now by buying it through online sources. Both cases are very bad endpoints. One's worse than the other. You can argue which one, but that's why we need this data. We need people to push this forward to figure this out because we don't want these endpoints because if if in 20 years we find out BPC is as good as, you know, Secrets Lab says it is, then man, people are pissed off all the, you know, joint replacements and injuries didn't heal and all the athletes that maybe could have had a longer career, that would be very unfortunate. But if it's the opposite and like, you know, every 18-year-old kid in the in the gym will come up to me and like, I'm going to inject inject BPC. Like, where do you get it from?

I'm like, dude, you're 18. You have all the peptides you need in you like the parabiosis studies that these are young animals like you actually take your blood and we had Tony Weiss Corey on the podcast that was, you know, young blood is rich with these things and no, we're not talking about harvesting blood from babies. Check out the Tony Weiss Corey episode, we'll provide a link.

I mean, what you just said about young guys coming up to you in the gym and saying should I be taking or I'm already taking BPC is, you know, we could have a whole other conversation maybe another time we will talk about testosterone and synthetics and things like that. I see a lot of young guys taking everyone.

I don't know if it's everyone. I don't know if it's everyone. I see a lot of many many people are taking testosterone exogenously who truly don't need it and potentially permanently shutting down their fertility or causing other issues.

With the looks maxing trend, too.

With the looks maxing trend, you know, they're walking around with hammers, sledging on their face, this kind of thing. You know, I'm sure when I was in my 20s, you know, people in their 50s were probably like, "What are these kids doing?" You know, and it wasn't anything like this, but who knows? It was like baggy pants and like, you know, and like there was weird stuff going on like hacky sacks and stuff. So not me, not me. But I'm confident that thanks to you, we've framed the history of this which by the way is fascinating and kind of where we are now very, very well. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I have two questions. Um, well one comment and one question. The comment is I think there's a third category of problematic outcome. One you said is this thing works spectacularly well for a number of important problems to solve important problems and we don't find out about it because it wasn't looked at carefully. The other is it's detrimental. There's the other one which is we start hearing about adverse events.

And it goes kind of the way of the dodo or it kind of drifts back into who you know and is it the good stuff or not the good stuff because we don't actually know whether or not the the adverse outcome was due to BPC itself, to misuse of BPC, or to like, you know, like the factors that it's it's dissolved in or something like that. And I think that's the most likely outcome unless we get our arms around this and that's where you could say like the hormone replacement therapy field has actually enjoyed the fact that if a woman decides she's going to take progesterone or estrogen replacement therapy perimenopausal or or menopausal or something for PCOS or whatever that wouldn't be what to take for PCOS, but you get the idea or a guy decides in his, you know, 40s or 50s or whatever it is, okay, he's going to go on TRT, he can do it carefully, she can do it carefully and knows what adverse outcomes to look for. No one's thinking, oh my god, the sesame oil that's dissolved in is possibly causing these problems.

Well, some people will be very particular on which oil their testosterone comes in.

That's in the gym community. Yeah. Yeah. Totally with you. And where to inject and so forth. But that aside, my concern is that it is kind of wild westish.

Yes, it is.

And I'm not so concerned I'll get in trouble for this, but whatever. I'm not so concerned that these actual compounds are necessarily harming people. I worry that the way they're arriving to people is harming them, and we're going to miss out on that first possibility that these are very useful. And of course, I don't want anyone getting hurt.

So, here comes the question. As a physician, I realize that you are more than peptide curious. You're very peptide friendly in your own life. You know, if you have a patient who has, you know, just their gut is a mess or they're dealing with, you know, post-surgical issues and you know that BPC from the right source is either going to be benign or could potentially help them. What kind of position does that put you in?

As an American board-certified physician.

Very uncomfortable position because if I'm, you know, rounding on a patient in the wards of a hospital and like, hey, you should take BPC instead of your pantoprazole, I'll probably get my license revoked. So, not a good idea. Don't do that.

What about in addition to?

In addition to so like if they come see me in clinic, that might be a place where we can have that discussion. We're going to see very shortly here what the FDA is going to tell us about BPC and all these other peptides and the legality of them. If they get moved to the category one list and then the states say like hey the FDA said so we're not going to look we're not going to care about this you can do what you want to do as a physician and you counsel the patient like you have an honest discussion with the patient. I think that's what it should be. It should be between the physician and the patient like hey there's this promising compound it's not FDA approved we have minimal to no human data but we have anecdata are you willing to try this on yourself and we'll monitor you we'll have clear endpoints for that should be what this looks like frank discussion between a physician and a patient. Now, if that patient has an adverse effect, they can go to a medical board and say like, "Hey, Dr. so and so gave me BP157 and I had a bad effect and I would be like, "Hey, you gave them a non-FDA approved compound." A for injectable. B, the problem is there's orals that are being sold as supplements now, like BBC57 as an oral available supplement because it's not a medication. It's never been approved as a medication in the United States. So, what is BBC's legal status? Is it dietary available? Therefore, because if you, you know, cut up an animal and ate its stomach, you'd probably get some BBC in.

Well, I can buy desiccated liver.

I'm eating livers.

There there's tons of.

You can go buy liver at the this like one Michelin star restaurant, not down this road, but a different road.

Yeah. I mean, like Dr. Cavson identified many peptides in livers like Ligen Ovagen that you'd find in your desiccated liver supplement that you're eating. It's like the the biggest distributors of peptides have been these organ meat companies because each organ has a signature peptide that comes out of it.

Do they get absorbed?

Yes.

Are they bioavailable active?

Dr. Dr. Cavson's work suggests that it is. Dr. Vladimir Cavson is this Russian Soviet scientist that gives us Epitalon and Thyrolen and Pinealon and all these Russian peptides. Di and tripeptides can be orally available if they're the right shape and size.

They're not very well uh available, but they can be available. So, you won't necessarily get it from the organ isolate or from the or eating the organ like like if you eat heart, probably very rich in L-carnitine. Can my body make good use of that? I mean, there's Cardiogen, which is one of the the heart peptides that that was scantly studied in the late 2000s that may be orally bioavailable. The problem is no one's doing the work to figure that out. You painted this picture where not you perhaps, but let's just say um another physician has the awareness that BPC57 might be useful to a patient of theirs that's dealing with a they had like an ACL tear. They're not recovering very quickly. Doctor says, "Listen, you're doing everything correctly. There's this new category of stuff. We don't have a lot of data on it. I'm not aware that there are any severe risks, but they they could be there. So, if you're willing to embrace those unknowns, you could take x number of micrograms or milligrams per day for two weeks and see how you feel." Patient says, "Okay, I'm willing to do that." The physician says, "Okay, you want to make sure that it's real and you want to make sure that it's clean, there's not no contaminants."

If that physician says, you know, I can write you a script for it and this compounding pharmacy will send it to you and they're making money on it. A lot of people, well, the moment they hear that, they think, oh, well, they're totally incentivized to do this because they're going to get a cut. But if we go back to the original pharma model, it is a little bit of a different situation, right? Because let's say Lily charges $1,500 for a pen of some sort of GLP. The physician who prescribes that, are they getting a cut of that $1,500?

They don't. They don't.

But there are kickbacks and, you know, pharmaceutical incentives and pharma deals. Those are real.

It's flights to Hawaii for a conference.

Really? So, there are real incentives even though they're not getting paid directly.

Yeah. There's there's always incentives in in any kind of business, especially a business as big as pharmaceutical.

Well, physicians are already getting paid. So, I'm not saying that. I mean, these are these are peripheral incentives. Well, the the pharma also lobby a lot of the medical schools and they, you know, got there's a lot.

So, there's a relationship there, but it's not cold hard cash.

Sorry, as direct as the compound.

But in a compounding pharmacy now, this physician, hypothetical physician, could say, "Hey, you know what? You can get it from this compounding pharmacy and it's going to be $500." The patient, we've now established because they've heard this podcast, has a right to say, "What are you paying for it versus what you're charging me?" They might lie. They might tell you the truth. Or the physician could say, "You know what? I'm not making a dime on this. It's just I think it might be useful to you." That physician is protected or not protected if something negative happens to the patient. Something happens to they is somebody suing a compounding pharmacy or they're suing their physician.

They're suing all three. They're suing the physician, the compounded pharmacy and and anyone who recommended it.

That's pretty scary.

No malpractice provider is going to give you coverage for peptides, especially non FDA approved peptides unless there's, you know, high risk malpractice providers that that will cover you for that. Let's say somebody gets hurt taking uh one of the prescribed pharma GLPS and they they're pissed and they and they sue, they sue their doctor or they sue the pharma company depending on who who had the liability. So if the doctor didn't warn you that, you know, injecting 10 times a dose might cause pancreatitis and you had pancreatitis, they can claim the doctor is at fault. If someone has deep pockets, they can go at Lily and say like, hey, Lily, you didn't disclose this risk. I think now people thanks to you are armed with enough information to be able to make really good decisions about whether or not to say, eh, waiting for those clinical trial results, or I'll stick my toe in the pond, or I'm going to continue to learn more, but I'm going to now learn more thanks to you genuinely with a lot more understanding about how this stuff flows from website or from doctor to patient.

Let's talk about Pinealon.

Yeah.

Pinealon is one that most people probably haven't heard of. Mhm.

I'll just go on record saying I've tried it a few times or more. I don't take it regularly, but I tried it before sleep.

If I take it at the beginning of the night, it reduces my deep slow-wave sleep and gives me far more REM across the night. Not a great situation.

Great situation is if I go to sleep, get my usual ration of deep sleep. If I happen to wake up in the middle of the night to use the restroom once or so, not uncommon, if I do a very small injection of Pinealon at that point, the one and a half hours of REM that I would get in the final hours of my sleep, now I'm getting three hours in the same amount of sleep. It's just a higher fraction of REM.

Sometimes wake up feeling a little groggy, but it is a whole other life to get that much REM. I don't do it regularly. It's not, you know, I would say maybe three times a month, but here's the interesting thing. It improves my percentage of REM on all the other nights in between those three injections.

So I'm coming clean here.

Lingering effects.

Very cool. You're interested in Pinealon for a whole other set of reasons. But first of all, what is Pinealon and where does it act? Does it have a known receptor?

No known receptor. So Pinealon is a tripeptide EDR discovered by the mentioned of Dr. Vladimir Cavinson. He's a Soviet researcher that comes out of this Soviet era research to make soldiers, astronauts, and pilots uh better. There's concern that the US might be using lasers to to shoot at soldiers. So, the Soviet Union um tasked him with identifying peptides to defend soldiers, their eyes, and then their aging because what would happen is they'd be in a submarine for a few months, there'd be a nuclear sub, and they'd they'd come back to shore and they'd be like, you know, these submariners, let's call them, would look 10, 20 years older. Also happens to astronauts.

Yes. So then the same the same thing as astronauts are coming back, they're they're aged. So Vladimir Cavson is looking at this and he's like, hey, there's there's got to be a solution for this. There's been literature about using extracts of other tissues, notably the pineal gland and the thymus from, you know, late 1800s till this this 1970s point that we're you know, starting our story. And he starts grounding up these um extracts and injecting it into these people and then undoing a lot of this aging effects through pineal extracts and thymus extracts because these what do these soldiers have? They had very bad circadian rhythmicity. So they they can't couldn't sleep properly. They had terrible immunity. They'd get sick often. They'd be uh have autoimmune problems. All these conditions that come with it. And then they were able to undo this using these organ extracts. So Vladimir Cavson takes it a step further. He looks like, hey, what's causing this effect in these in these tissues? Like people have been injecting pineal glands in different research models or taking out pineal glands from rats from the 1800s onwards. He finds peptides in these extracts. He's like, "Huh, I wonder if these effects are from the peptides, not from this the gland itself." So then he sequences from the pineal gland Epitalon and from the thymus gland a couple different peptides, Vyon, Thyogen, Cristagen that you'll be hearing about in the next few years that on their own do a lot of the effects that the whole extract would would do. Now you're talking about Epitalon but Pinealon and Epitalon.

Is not from the pineal gland.

Is not from the pineal gland.

Even though everyone.

No, I think it's called that because there's there's as far as I understand, please correct me if I'm wrong, there are animal data suggesting that Pinealon can help either regenerate or enhance the the general functioning of pinealocytes. So it's having an effect on the pineal when cultured like you take cultured pineal glands, like little pineal gland, you put it in a dish and you dissociate the cells or keep it, you know, as a little pea-sized thing and then you give it Pinealon and it seems to improve the timing and perhaps even the amount of melatonin output from the pineal these kinds of.

Epitalon does that. So that's a big confusion. I don't know why he named them the way he named them. If anyone knows, please let us know. But Epitalon is from the pineal gland. Pinealon comes from a ground-up brain extract called Cortexin.

And brain has a pineal in it.

Yeah. But it was the cortex specifically, not not the subcortical regions. So he specifically not the subcortical regions. So Flavon identifies he makes a drug in Russia. It's called Epilamine, which is the pineal gland extract and had great effect on circadian rhythmicity and it's rich with melatonin, basically giving people melatonin.

But also you up with enzyme that creates melatonin from from serotonin to an acetyl serotonin to melatonin. So like um when he gave it to young monkeys, the monkeys had no effect, but he gave it to aged monkeys that have decreased melatonin and, you know, from puberty onwards your melatonin levels dramatically decrease. He was able to restore melatonin production in these aged animals and eventually replicated it on humans.

I want to talk about thymus because it's fascinating and you are truly a versed in this. But before we do that.

So pineal comes from the cortex, not the pineal. That's annoying.

Yes, very annoying.

Um, maybe we just rename it today. I'll let you do the renaming. We'll call it EDR.

EDR.

That's the three amino acid sequence.

Great. We'll call it EDR so people don't get confused. What are some of the known effects? Or am I just imagining this REM increase? Because I can't change what's happening to me during sleep.

That would be an amazing placebo effect. And the reason I say amazing is there are many things that one can do to improve the amount of slow-wave deep sleep. Not eating too close to bedtime, doing some exercise early in the day, etc., etc. Very hard to increase REM except by heating your sleep environment in the last third of your night and maybe some alpha GPC in the late day can bump it up a bit, or you can REM deprive yourself, or you can smoke cannabis for 10 years then quit and then you'll get a lot of REM because you got no REM for 10 years. Do not recommend that protocol.

But for me, it was just striking. So why would EDR.

Tripeptide with no receptor.

Right. Previously called Pinealon, but from here, uh, here forward EDR. Why would that have this effect on on REM sleep?

Yep. And and I actually searched through all of the literature from Cavson. He never mentions REM sleep once in his studies. He studied Pinealon quite extensively on different neuronal tissue extracts, animal studies, even in in athletes and never mentions the REM sleep. They weren't having they didn't have Whoops in the 1970s in the Soviet Union. They didn't have an eight sleep.

You're kidding me.

No.

So they didn't have, you know, sleep trackers in the 1970s uh when it came to to these. So there was no reports on on that. But what seems to be happening, let's see, what is this on this EDR? It's a tripeptide that um meets the groove of the DNA of different key regions and helps the promoter region be exposed. So then that DNA transduction can happen, uh, translation, transcription. So you get.

It's turning on genetic programs.

Yes.

It's acting a little bit like a transcription factor.

Yeah. Yeah. Almost like that or maybe assisting transcription factors in accessing the DNA in the right places. So Pinealon in in one sentence, it's leading to better brain metabolism through modulating all these different pathways. For example, GDF11, SOD1, SOD2, Iris, PPAR alpha, PPAR gamma. So what seems to be happening, so he made Pinealon as an anti-stress, um, cognitive performance compound.

Uh, and it was available orally in like Kazakhstan to.

That I'm taking before sleep. I should be taking in the morning.

Yes, so if you take a high enough dose, there is sedation from it. But if you take it in the morning or pre-hit workout, you get quite an interesting effect. So he studied this compound on athletes and he would have them do their training session, go to exhaustion, and then do a test afterwards. And there's two groups, pinealon and the placebo. The pinealon group could keep their performance up despite being maximally exhausted from their training.

I feel like such a dummy. Here I am having like these elaborate dreams I don't really remember or care about when I could be actually thinking better during the daytime.

Yeah. So, a lot of people report less brain fog, you know, better thinking. A friend that has a nine-figure company has all of his employees on pineal on. They're taking it in the morning.

In the morning, uh, or at night, depending on...

Do you know the dosages? Not that we're recommending it.

Orally, people will take anywhere between, you know, half a milligram up to three milligrams is what where people um, settle in. Um, the Cavson ones that that come from Russia are like 200 micrograms.

Some people are injecting it.

Some people are injecting it.

It goes systemic.

It goes systemic. It's orally available through these uh, Latin pep transporters.

Crosses the blood-brain barrier?

Most likely. Yes.

Okay. Okay. Cuz it's coming from cortex, but otherwise we're the way you're describing it, we're putting no one's infusing into the brain.

No one's. So we're assuming it's small enough. It's a tripeptide to cross the blood-brain barrier.

Have you tried it?

I mean, I took some last night, but...

Okay. At night.

Yeah. So, I I will take larger dosages if I want to get good sleep. I'll describe as 8K. Some people it will cause them to have a little bit of awakening at first. That may be why your deep sleep was going away. I'll say this.

If I take half of what was recommended, I'm great. But I'm very sensitive to everything. Just sensitive. If I take what was recommended, I fall very deeply asleep. I have elaborate dreams and I wake up. Yeah. And I couldn't tell if that was a disruption in sleep architecture. I just found, and granted, I'm only doing this three times per month maximum. And I often forget and then I go months and months and I was like, "Oh, maybe I'll take a little pineal." Whoa, this is wild. And then I'd stop taking it because because I don't know enough about it. Now, I know it's cleanly sourced because I trust the compounding pharmacy it's coming from, but I should ask, are there any known risks of EDR?

So far, nothing in the Russian literature. So, big caveat, it's Russian literature. It's not gold standard American research that we love here. Um, so there's nothing that's come up as a, you know, clear sign because what what it seems the big theory of Cavson is that as you're when you're younger, you make a lot of these peptides naturally. These tri-di-tri and tetrapeptides. And as you age, they go down in function and quantity. And by replenishing these peptides, you're restoring some aspect of youthfulness.

Something similar happens in America with GHK copper, which is another tripeptide that's technically like the collagen regulator. So the brain regulator and GHK copper is the collagen regulator. But so far, the side effects we've noticed, we have the probably the biggest anecdotal compilation of N equals one. Every every day I wake up, someone texts me, "Be like, hey, Pineelon did this to me." Some will have a little drop in blood sugar because it activates PPR alpha, PPR gamma. So it'll have positive metabolic effects. So that's something to keep an eye out. And in some people, even had their A1C's drop.

Hypoglycemics and other people with blood sugar issues take extra caution.

And then very vivid dreams for some people. That could be disheartening if if they have like, you know, nightmares or something like that. But very, very vivid dreams as a result of a pinealon, especially like the the color and the the quality of the dreams is very different than you'd normally expect. What seems to be happening...

is like just like, you know, psychedelics change the redox state of the brain. Pinealon is doing something similar where you're getting more alertness during the day.

Like you don't wake up with as much brain fog, at least anecdotally. Uh, you get better performance during like high-intensity interval training, and then you get more REM sleep at night. Um, because the neurons are in a better oxidative state thanks to the PPR alpha, PPR gamma, iris, and all these different pathways that it's modulating.

Um, with no clear one, you know, receptor that it's doing it through.

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What about epitalon, which turns out comes from the pineal? I'd love your thoughts on this. I've heard, and I thought it was complete nonsense when I first heard it, that the pineal becomes calcified as people age. The reason I thought it was nonsense is I used to co-teach neuroanatomy when I was at UCSD before moving my lab to Stanford with a guy named Harvey Carton. You guys can look him up. Unfortunately, he passed away. He was in his late 80s and he had this incredible career as a, I think one of the greatest neuroanatomists of the last hundred years. It's a, that's a good category to be in because we have like Cajal, who's like discovered everything basically, and then the rest of neuroscientists are just kind of tinkering around with what he predicted. And then a few other neuroanatomists like Ted Jones is there, but he's like the neuroanatomist of my generation. And I asked him about this calcification thing because he had looked at the brains of so many different species, including humans. He was also an MD, by the way. And he goes, "Yeah, I don't know whether or not this calcification thing is real."

And he kind of brushed it aside. And I thought, well, Harvey doesn't take it seriously, so I'm not going to take it seriously. But even though he was absolutely right about many, many things, I think he might have missed that one. Because when I go to the literature now, it's a little bit tough because the cadavers that you looked at in medical school are not all of them are processed on the same timeline, right? It's not, thankfully, it's not a controlled science. These are people that generously donate their bodies to science.

Does our pineal calcify? And even if it does, does that somehow inhibit its ability to communicate with our other tissues?

It's, it's a big kind of debatable thing in in the pineal research. If you look at the pineal gland Wikipedia, it's very underdeveloped, let's say, because it's kind of woo-woo. Like when you think of pineal gland, you think of someone who's going to sell you...

A neuroscientist chooses to work on the pineal.

They should, but it's not a very sexy.

It sounds like someone's going to sell you crystals or something about your...

It's not very sexy. Yeah.

But I think it's, it's a key aspect of aging and longevity. So that's that's what gives us, you know, our interest in it. The pineal gland. Um, it seems from Cavson's work that the decrease in pineal gland function with aging is more of a physiologic than a anatomic problem. Now, I will see some calcification on MRI is when we have a patient come in for like a stroke or, you know, TBI, we'll look at their MRI and I'm like, "Hey, there's that looks like a little bit of calcification there." Uh, maybe my neurology colleagues will disagree, but that seems to happen. But the question is, what is actually leading to the deterioration of melatonin synthesis? Because it decreases quite dramatically. And some people even think that might start at puberty. Like if you have a pineal pineal cyst, you can have precocious puberty, like eight or nine years old.

The rhythmicity in melatonin. Because a young baby, very young baby, their melatonin secretion is not very rhythmic, but they're in REM like a lot, a lot of their sleep is REM. It's a beautiful thing, right? With time, it becomes more rhythmic. And of course, in today's day and age, with all the artificial lighting and the lack of sunlight exposure, things that you and I care a lot about. Um, people are making themselves somewhat arrhythmic or phase-shifted.

But epitalon is somehow restoring pinealytes, is somehow enhancing function of the pineal and other tissues?

Yep. So, uh, in in Cavson's work, he's found that it will increase the expression of the different clock genes. So, in like, you know, lymphocytes that he'll measure in peripheral tissues, he'll notice that the clock genes actually change. So, in a more rhythmic pattern, he'll notice that morning cortisol is higher. Great. Which, by the way, folks, I've said this in the cortisol episode. You want your morning cortisol super, super high. You want your evening and nighttime cortisol low. If you're a resident in medical school, just listen to what your superiors say. They don't give a [ __ ] about your cortisol levels. You got to do the hard work, and then, uh, later, you get to, later you get to go to bed. It's a little weird that the medical profession tortures their own by disrupting one of the, one of the primary anchors of health.

Yep. And and cognitive function, right? I mean, I've had 28-hour shifts, and that's what got me interested in security.

You're young. You're good. You're good. But yeah, the idea was it was restoring a more, um, circadian appropriate hormonal profile through, you know, HTH cortisol.

Taken when?

Anytime. Because the idea with these bio-regulators, unlike, you know, a GLP-1 drug that you take today and have the effect for the next week, the idea from the Cavson model is that you take these, and then you accrue benefits when you're off of them. Like you notice with pinealon, you took pinealon for a day or two or three days a month, and you had effects until you took the next dose. So the idea is, can you accrue benefits from these compounds as they upregulate or downregulate certain genetic pathways in a more favorable state and then keep those effects later on? So, in the Cavson seminal work was this 15-year um longevity study. He got people in nursing homes, two groups. One of them got echalon in the form of epithalamine, which is the whole pineal gland extract, and then a thymus peptide called thyolin, not thyulin. There's two different peptides. A lot of people confuse them. Every peptide website confuses them. But I inject them for 15 years, like a 10 or 20-day course per year, just just the beginning of the year, middle of the year, and that's it. And they had a significant lower mortality when it came to cardiovascular disease, uh, infectious risk, and for, um, cancers. So, Russian study, caveat, but that would be the most interesting longevity study I've seen done, if accurate, if true, uh, because he was able to take nursing home patients, give them peptides for, you know, very small amount of the year, and yet they accrued benefits the rest of the year.

Impressive. Uh, one of the things that really got me excited about epitalon is italon or talon? The Russians say epitalon is the way they say it, but it's spelled with a th. Okay. So, I'll say epitalon, whoever wants, you know, we're making the rules today.

So...

Okay, epitalon is also a DG. That's that's the amino acid for amino acid.

I'll say epitalon because it's easiest for me, and forgive me if anyone takes offense. I took interest because, uh, in my former life, running a lab focused on, among other things, uh, visual pathway repair, y. Um, to reverse blindness or impending blindness. Um, there's some interesting papers, and I can really gauge the data, even though they're in mice. I can say, "This is a real effect," or like a "meh effect," or like a "whoa effect," using epitalon to combat some of the neurodegeneration in things like retinitis pigmentosa, downstream neurodegeneration in RP, which is a very common, unfortunately, blinding disease, or even in glaucoma. Y.

I should mention that BPC-157, to my knowledge, hasn't been looked at extensively in terms of optic nerve repair, but it absolutely should be. If if someone knows those papers, please put them in the comments. So, I was intrigued. Yep. Like, there's this molecule that's somehow involved in DNA repair.

And it's either maintaining or restoring some of the machinery that would otherwise definitely be lost in one of these optic nerve damage conditions that models things like glaucoma, retinitis pigmentosa, stroke, uh, traumatic head injury. It's a big deal. Yep. Vision and movement are kind of the biggies. I mean, there are other things too, but like, you know, you don't want to lose those. And if you do, you can get by, but you need additional support, obviously. So the reason it's so interesting to me is that it's getting to DNA repair as opposed to these downstream, um, you know, working on any number of vague receptor-ish, maybe no receptor things. And this is what gene therapy is about.

Yep. So, do you think of epitalon as kind of a gene therapy of sorts, or do you think about it more as support for genetic machinery that has lots of downstream targets?

Yes, I think it supports this genetic machinery. Um, when it comes to the eyes, it seems to be repairing some of the photoreceptors that might get damaged in retinitis pigmentosa. Melanopsin wasn't discovered when when Cavson was was kicking it around. But I would, my my theory is that epitalon is working on melanopsin.

Interesting. And that it may be upregulating melanopsin levels and then making that morning sunlight that everyone likes...

to be more effective because the big problem is a lot of people will tell me, "Doc, I did morning sunlight, didn't I didn't feel the effects." I'm like, "Have you had enough darkness to regenerate melanopsin levels?" Because we know that in animal studies, five days of pure darkness dramatically increases the amount of melanopsin in the retina.

This is interesting. And I certainly have a lot of close, close friends that are in a position to do these studies. And, you know, the podcast is obviously available free to everyone, but we have a premium channel that funds research. We don't talk a lot about it, but we've given a lot of money away to excellent laboratories where they're free to explore these things. I'd love to see some of the studies that we're talking about today supported. And by the way, that's done in collaboration with donors that do a match. So, we could get the right people to do the right studies with no bias toward what the preferred outcome is. In fact, the scientists that we both know, the right ones, would try and disprove the hypothesis that any of this stuff was real. And if some makes it through that filter, then they would conclude it's real. Otherwise, they're trying to essentially knock down the the quote-unquote positive outcome.

Yep. I mean, and I think as a clinician, one of the key things to for people to remember is that we've screwed up a lot of times as clinicians through different grotesque abuses of our, you know, trust. We've done, you know, interventions or drugs that weren't the most efficacious. For example, like in the 1910s to 1940s, we irradiated the thymuses of young kids to prevent SIDS. This was considered gold standard medicine.

Does it have anything to do with SIDS?

No, they thought that sudden infant death.

They thought that the thymus was too big and was sitting on the heart and that might be the cause. So tons of these kids, you know, I think at least 10,000 died from cancers. No, I think the only person that's talked about it is he has a video talking about this. So we've had a lot of issues as a, as a, as a field. We have to be very cognizant of that and know the history of where we've been. Like, like Virchow of the famous Virchow triad. He was like, pro this therapy.

And we all know, learn about it in medical school, but no one talks about this aspect. So there's a lot of grotesque abuses of medical power. Let's say we have to be very careful in which interventions we give people. And the first thing is like, do no harm. So while we are, you know, excited about these therapies, we have to be kind of careful in where we're taking people.

Appreciate that. I wasn't aware of that study. Perfect um tea up for, uh, no pun, for the thymus. Tell me about the thymus.

Um, super interesting organ.

Yep.

We gland.

Yep.

We all have one when we're born.

Yep.

By the time we're, what age is it mostly gone?

So the thymus is grown under the influence of a lot of these youthful hormones, melatonin, growth hormone, um, DHEA, um, and then is shrunk at the moment you hit puberty. So until from your the day of birth until puberty, you grow this massive thymus.

Where does it sit?

It's right above your heart. Right behind the collarbone.

How big is it?

It's a, in in a baby, it could be quite large on on the chest, like a baseball.

Like maybe the size of half the heart, let's say. Maybe bigger. Depends on on on the size. Right now in our bodies, it's going to be a bunch of fat with a couple of different globules of thymic residue.

Tiny, tiny.

Very tiny. In fact, most surgeons will just remove it um when they do surgery nowadays for like open heart. U, but there's, you know, good data from New England Journal of Medicine that removing the thymus tissue, residue tissue leads to uh, a mortality signal within the first five years after those surgeries.

So people have died because of thymus removed.

They'll have like either higher rates of cancers or, you know, higher rates of autoimmune diseases if they have their their thymuses removed. Now, there are thymomas where people have to have their thymus removed, but we're talking about people that, you know, the surgeon is going in to do a coronary artery bypass surgery.

Is the thymus neurally innervated?

Yes.

So it's getting signals from from brain?

Vagus nerve. Yep.

So it's getting, sorry to get technical here, but I since I did the episode on the vagus, some people might remember there's a lot of ascending sensory information from the vagus going up to the brain. There's also motor control from the brain going down through the vagus. So it's two, two-way street, mostly up, some down. Is the thymus controlled by the descending? Is like, in other words, is something going on in our brain like stress level or or sleep controlling our thymic?

There's sympathetic and parasympathetic innervations for the thymus.

Um, that dictates its hormonal output because the thymus, what, what is the thymus?

Yeah, it's, it's a gland that both secretes hormones.

And develops the T cells. So your your lymphatic cells are found in your bone marrow, that's where they're made. The T cells will travel up to the thymus and get trained so they don't kill you and they don't attack your own tissue, but attack a foreign invader or a cancer or whatever it may be. That process is very good in youth. And as you age, you get more autoimmunity, more cancers, etc., etc., because the immune system is not as robust.

Both because the thymus makes less of the hormones that train the immune cells and makes less of these immune cells themselves. So when you're, you know, 15, you're making, uh, 10 to the eighth magnitude of these cells every single day. They're called naive T cells. They will eventually become your CD4 and CD8 T-cells. Uh, as you age, this number dramatically decreases. And those cells will live somewhere between 10 and 15 years. And that can kind of gauge when the mortality window kicks in for a lot of these different disorders. When your thymus reaches a, you know, minimum level of output, you get a lot of these disorders like cancers, uh, heart disease, autoimmunity. If you put almost any disease and look at the thymus, um, risk associated with it, it increases as the thymus, um, function, uh, decreases. There's a Nature paper, uh, 2026, just came out that looked at cardiovascular disease and cancer mortality and all these different metrics. They did MRIs of people and the people that had the higher thymic scores had less mortality across every single one of these conditions. But you said, not challenging this, but what's surprising about that very interesting result is that you said that by the time you reach your, you're in your 30s, I'm in my 50s, those ages, our ages, you there's just a bit of residual tissue there. It's just a few cells, and yet it's somehow maintaining function. The rate of decrease varies dramatically from person to person. So we call this thymic involution. So from the moment puberty starts till, um, you die, your thymus is slowly shrinking. That really happens in your 20s and 30s. The majority of that, under the the pressure of androgens, estrogens, progesterones, and corticosteroids. Those are driving a lot of the shrinkage.

So the hormones that everyone seems to want to increase the rest of their life and that, uh, become, you know, active a lot during puberty actually cause thymic involution.

Yes. So like, uh, castration will undo some of the thymic involution. Um, pregnancy is a great time to involute your thymus, which makes sense because you don't want to be having an autoimmune attack against the baby or an immune attack against the baby.

Do women's thymus disappear after pregnancy?

They, they involute and then will regrow during the breastfeeding period under the influences of growth hormone and prolactin. So, hibernating animals will have a dramatic shrinkage of the thymus during hibernation and then a regrowth, um, during the feeding window. Is there any benefit to doing or taking something to either maintain or regenerate thymic size?

So there was, as an, as a, let's just say somebody 25 or older.

Yeah. There's a, um, interesting study, TRIM trial from Dr. Greg Fahy. He's doing a study where he's giving a cocktail of growth hormone, metformin, and DHEA. Gave that for 12 months and had the thymic size increase on imaging. The amount of CD4 or CD8 T cells increase and the ratio of which improved. Uh, and then some of the markers that would show like immune cell exhaustion like PD-1 and all these different aspects of T-cell, um, dynamics also improve. So they're, they're trying to use growth hormone to regrow the thymus.

Getting us directly to peptides. Many people who are peptide curious start asking about thymosin alpha. Is thymosin alpha a peptide that comes from the thymus?

Thankfully, they named it appropriately this time. Uh, great, uh, for that. What does thymosin alpha do endogenously when you're not injecting it or taking it? What's its normal function?

So thymosin alpha-1 is part of this thymic family of hormones that gets secreted. It's like at least 21 amino acids. It, uh, increases T-cell development in the thymus, increases T-cell proliferation outside the thymus, and makes the T-cells more likely to properly attack a pathogen.

Um, like it's like a, you know, jet fuel for the for the T-cells.

So it's like pro-immune.

Yes. I've heard of people taking it when they feel run down, if they're traveling, they're sleeping less than usual, they're a new parent. So, obviously, that's kind of, you know, uh, peptide wild west kind of indications.

It was FDA approved as Zidaxin, um, for kids that were born without a thymus or a malfunctioning thymus, like DiGeorge syndrome, these different kind of genetic abnormalities, um, to be used for these kids to help develop the T-cells that they had that weren't, um, in the thymus because they'd have like bone marrow T-cells that weren't properly developed. So there was good support from thymosin alpha-1 for these kids. I don't think that FDA approval still exists. So the people are trying to, you know, grandfather thymosin alpha-1 into these this peptide conversation. Um, in other countries, it's approved for adjuvant therapy for like hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and in different cancers. So far, the sepsis literature and the infectious literature is not that promising. It might be like if you take antibiotics with thymosin alpha-1, you might have a quicker bounce around. What, what I would be interested to see is like, if you, you know, went to nursing homes, injected everybody with thymosin alpha-1 in November and December, would you have less flu in January and February? That'd be like the interesting thought experiment. Both thymosin alpha-1 and thymosin beta-4 come out of the Goldstein lab. That's the very famous lab that studied the thymus in the 70s, '80s, and '90s. Um, but thymic research kind of fell out of favor the last few decades, but now...

Also sexy as the pineal. I say that sort of tongue-in-cheek because, I mean, I think these are fascinating glands. And, um, the reason I ask if they're neurally innervated is that, you know, nowadays there are a lot of reasons why people choose to study one thing or the other. But these, um, understudied glands, if neurally innervated, then open up a lot of interesting questions about brain control, behavioral stress control, and the, and the experiments kind of write themselves. Doing them still takes a lot of work. Interpreting them is no easy task either. But, um, I think there should certainly be more work on, um, on the pineal and on on the thymus. So I want to make that clear. Have you taken thymosin alpha?

Oh yeah, I've used thymosin alpha-1 when, uh, when I travel to to avoid the, uh, cesspool of planes and hotels and all these places which, like, I would say traveling and then this year on the wards, the first time I don't get flu, cold, whatever kind of infection, I do one throughout and I didn't get sick a single time.

What time of day or night are you injecting?

Uh, twice a week, time agnostic. Uh, we're talking about, you know, 2.5 milligrams as a prophylactic. That's not FDA approved or...

Yeah.

Or this is just you doing your thing.

I'm I'm curious and see if it would it would work.

You're trying to stay healthy so you can, uh, take care of patients.

Exactly. So you're willing to be your own experiment. When we hear about thymosin alpha, we usually hear about TB-500 also. What's TB-500 and how are the, are the two related, if at all?

So while Cavson's finding thymolin and he's injecting that into people, the Goldstein lab finds thymosin fraction 5, which is this giant protein that has many different peptides in it. Thymosin alpha-1 being one of them, and then thymosin beta-4 being the other one. Thymosin alpha-1, thymosin beta-4 were discovered in the thymus, but they're not exclusive to the thymus gland. They're also made in other tissues. Thymosin beta-4 seems to be, uh, this 43 amino acid peptide that helps in the actin cytoskeleton of cells. So if you think about it, immune cells have to move a lot. So they have to reorganize their actin cytoskeleton quite quickly. So it seems to upregulate that movement.

Which, you know, the horse community for doping, uh, and other athletes have found a niche for thymosin beta-4 to use it as a...

The horse community.

Yeah. The horse races. Thus, beta-4 is a very common doping agent.

For the riders or for the horses?

For the horses.

Yes.

Do they test the horses for it?

Yeah. No, there's like a big doping scandal when it comes to to horses. And I don't know if they test them or they like...

You know what's funny? This is a very relevant tangent. Occasionally someone will say, "Hey, does all this morning sunlight stuff, does that work on like dogs?" And I go, "Listen, I hate to tell you this, but like a lot of the literature came from animals, not necessarily dogs, and they have melanopsin, ganglion cells, they have suprachiasmatic nucleus. Like, yes, yes, and yes, same physiology."

And then recently, won't say who, wasn't me. Um, truly, I have a friend whose, uh, dog was injured. And the question becomes like, would BPC work? And you can actually say, well, there's a lot more animal data than, uh, human data. Talked to a couple vets, and vets are, they're a lot more adventurous than we might think. And I thought, well, listen, you know, now, of course, these are pets, they're, I love my dog, you know, not the same as a human. I am a bit of a speciesist, but love them tremendously.

And I think the...

Pet peptide industry is going to be enormous. Already.

So here's the question, and then we'll go right back to what we were saying before.

There's been so much interest in NAD, NMN, and NR to upregulate NAD. What NAD is, is pro-longevity. NAD for, you know, one of these things that drops over, uh, over the lifespan.

Although the paper last week says that it doesn't drop in blood. The landmark paper.

I will say, which, the news stories on that claim that I called it a longevity drug. I've always said that NAD, I do augment NAD using NMN. It gives me more, uh, morning energy. I will say it does make my nails really thick and my hair grow fast, two effects I was not looking for, but I like the energy effect. I've never said it increases lifespan, ever. So, um, this was mentioned in the New York Times and elsewhere, and it's absolutely false that my name is included in that statement. So, their fact-checkers need fact-checking. NAD has been kind of the thing for a lot of people who want to go beyond supplements, right? They go beyond creatine, beyond magnesium, beyond what they can get, you know, just on Amazon or whatever, but...

They don't want to go all the way to, you know, like blood cleansing and all this other stuff, which I, I certainly don't do myself, and I think that's too extreme, at least for me. When I hear about thymosin alpha, TB-500, BPC, it occupies this kind of middle ground, right? And so I think this is why a lot of people are saying, "Hey, Allison, I love my dog. I love my cat. I don't know if NAD is going to do anything for their longevity. It doesn't look like it may or may not. I don't know. But I think a lot of people are starting to think, oh, you know, like..."

And here we go, Pavlov and his dogs. So, I do think this is another category of interest. And of course, we're the curators. They don't get a vote. They can't consent. Right.

Right. So, we have to be very thoughtful there, too.

Yep.

If I ask you, let's say I had an aged dog and I come to you and I go, "Listen, I know you're a human physician, but he's getting sick a lot. I don't know, maybe getting some thymosin alpha. He's got creaky joints, some BPC. He's probably got a couple years to go and that's it." Would you say like...

"Well..."

"I know you're not a vet."

"The veterinary board is going to sue me now, but..."

No, they're not. Actually, I have relatives who are vets. They are very open.

Interesting.

Very open. The veterinary community has been very open. I injected my previous dog, yeah,

with testosterone later in life. And I expected the vets to come after me with pitchforks. And I got calls that, "We would love to prescribe this. In fact, we wish we could just do vasectomies on male dogs. Let them keep their testosterone, and then you don't have to worry about this breeding problem. And you let people train them not to hump."

Yep. No, my my sister was at a compounding pharmacy here locally that would give dogs their testosterone. And it made them so much healthier and happier. I have zero regrets.

I'm pro-peptide for pets. Let's say, let's say I think there would be beneficial effects. We know dogs when they vomit, they end up licking some of the vomit. You've seen this before.

Yes.

Unfortunately, is he trying to get peptides back from the gastric tract? Like the first from a Pavlovian dog?

Being kind to dogs.

So I'm like, but I mean, intuitively, instinctively, there might be something there. Like they might be trying to get BPC out of that. Who knows? But, um, I think there would be less hesitation for people to use these on animals. They come from animal literature. Like you said, we don't want to be harming these pets, right? But a lot of, I think a lot of the positive signals are going to come out of people giving them to their pets. Unfortunately, there are so many brands now that are popping up every day giving, uh, their pets peptides.

Um, because BPC, is it going to be treated as a supplement when it comes to oral capsules, or is it going to be treated as a med? Like, we haven't got that answer from the FDA. RFK himself has kind of said like, these are supplements. They're not, they're not medications. So FDA said that, he said that, "We're not going to regulate them as meds because they're not meds," which I don't know if the agency themselves is going to be too happy with that. I mean, there's a big, well, McCary, just McCary, I don't ever know how to pronounce his last name, um, recently left. So that there was a, from what I understand, a kind of a split. I don't think he left because of peptide anything. I think it was related to other things that I'm not aware of, but I do think the question that you're raising is one of the most important questions.

Is BPC going to be taken seriously as a drug?

Yeah.

Or is it more creatine-ish?

Yep. I mean, for example, I could give you a B12 supplement, you could buy that on Amazon. Or I could prescribe that to you. But if I was to give you an injectable B12 shot, you would need a prescription for that.

So, is that distinction going to apply to peptides also? Is the big question that no one's answered. And is a, you know, pinealon is a supplement you can find in Kazakhstan and Russia and Ukraine, wherever all these different countries, over the counter in different cities.

Is pinealon available as a capsule?

It's available as a cap.

Does it work as well as a capsule? In a capsule?

Higher doses as needed, but it still works.

What are the doses, dosages, excuse me, that people are injecting versus taking orally?

So when it comes to the bio-regulators, the epitalon, pinealon, the Cavson literature looks at like microgram dosages from 10 to 100 micrograms of, um, of the actual raw peptides. Of the peptide mixes, we're talking 10 milligrams. So 10 milligrams of, you know, desiccated cow brain that might give you a few hundred micrograms of pinealon.

Oh man, desiccated cow brain makes me think of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, aka Mad Cow. First patient I had on on wards in third year of medical school.

Had degenerative brain from Creutzfeldt-Jakob.

There was, yeah, it was a bad, bad case on neurology wards.

Yeah, please folks, do not be consuming brains. I know there's some people like, "Oh, he's got all this stuff that can help you." Like, please, please, please. Like these, these prion things are really serious.

Yeah, scary.

It's really scary. It's really, really scary. And not just from wild game, but it's, it's really scary.

By the way, I think this set back all that research in the, when the, you know, the prion stuff happened in the early 2000s, that set back a lot of these animal-derived peptide research dramatically because people were like, "Oh, we don't want to touch these extracts anymore." Makes sense.

Because there was thymus extracts. There were like, there was about, you know, 10 different groups in Eastern Europe that came up with their own thymus peptide drug.

Which was a polypeptide fragment with, you know, thymosin alpha, thymosin beta-4, thymolin, thymogen, crystallike, all these different peptides that you'd get together. The the Eastern Europeans went down like this mix of just mixing up young thymuses because you don't want an old thymus from a cow. You want a six-month-old cow that has the giant juicy big thymus with all the healthy hormones in there. Uh, they'd grind that up and inject that into into humans with positive effects, like, you know, hundreds of papers on that. The American side, the Goldstein, um, group came up with thymosin fraction 5, which has thymosin alpha-1 and thymosin beta-4 in it. Also thymosin beta-10, thymosin beta-9, a bunch of different thymosins, but studied these two dramatically, thymosin alpha-1 and thymosin beta-4. The French came up with the actual main thymus hormone, which is thymulin, not thymolin. Thymulin is the Russian polypeptide mix. Thymulin is a nine amino acid peptide that is the marker of thymus function. It also has very interesting neurological effects, which I think you'll, you'll find interesting, because it modulates the, what we're calling the thymus-pituitary-adrenal axis, thymus-pituitary-gonadal axis. Thymulin is this peptide that's secreted by the thymus, dramatically decreases with age, as zinc-dependent. So biology likes to use metals with different amino acid structures. Hemoglobin with iron, GHK copper with copper. Thymulin is zinc-dependent. So it's a nine amino acid peptide with zinc inside, inside of it to do its effects. That will develop NK cells and T-cells, stimulate the immune response. But also in the animal models, not replicated in humans yet, when they take out the pituitary and then inject, you know, ACTH or hCG, the amount of thymulin sensitizes the end organ to production of the targeted hormone. For example, if you were just to give ACTH alone to the animal...

hCG, synthetic luteinizing hormone.

Yes. Yes. Yes. ACTH is is binding to the, it's called the ACTH LH receptor. So they would get more testosterone produced when they got ACTH with thymulin.

Versus ACTH alone.

So what you're saying is that thymosin alpha potentially or TB-500 or other thymic hormones...

Thymulin specifically.

Okay. Thymulin specifically. Okay. The other ones do different effects on the on the pituitary axis.

So thymulin specifically can augment.

Yes.

The effects of endogenous and perhaps also exogenous hormones.

Yep.

Interesting.

And it makes sense because if you're not robust when it comes to immune status, because you can think of your thymulin as high in youth, low in aged,

you have no business investing in reproduction. You have no business in creating a lot of corticosteroids because that gives you that, you know, youthful energy in the morning. But if you're making a lot of corticosteroids, you're shrinking your thymus. So it creates kind of a feedback loop, negative feedback loop to prevent you from overrunning your system. A lot of young guys will be like, "Oh, my immune system sucks and my testosterone is low." Like, is there a thymus link? There is the question.

Interesting. And I, I'm sure that you're the first person in the last 20 years to be talking about this publicly. Um, and I really appreciate that you are, because of course, you knew what the thymus was. Don't know a lot about the biology, but you've really, um, opened people's eyes to, and, um, what it is that it goes away over time. People taking thymosin alpha, TB-500, and, um, thymulin.

Yep.

Is this something that people would cocktail, or is taking thymulin something that generally could be a good idea under certain circumstances?

Thymulin itself has a very short half-life. The goal would be to increase endogenous production of the thymulin itself.

How would you do that?

So sufficient zinc status is necessary to make thymulin. The first sign of zinc depletion, before RBC zinc or serum zinc decrease, is your thymulin levels tank. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are vital for the functioning of all cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking Element makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. My days tend to start really fast, meaning I have to jump right into work or right into exercise. So, to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes, when I first wake up in the morning, I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an Element packet dissolved in it. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors. In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So, if you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com/huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's drinkelement.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack. GHKU copper.

Yeah, most of the questions I get about it are from women.

Yep.

I sent out a little informal poll to the, uh, be careful how I say this, women in my life, um, including siblings and things like that, and almost all the women said, "What about GHK copper? I hear it can be good for my skin. Should I use it topically, take it orally, or inject it? If I inject it, should I inject it locally?" I'm like, "Please don't inject it in your face because I don't, as much as I'm comfortable with people giving themselves like a little, you know, sterile injection in their belly or something like, I get worried about non-experts injecting themselves in the face and other other tissues." So, a lot of interest in this.

What is it? Why has it made it into this kind of, um, aesthetic category? Because I'm guessing it has a lot of other effects too. But it's kind of funny how things kind of land in one region. Like creatine was like the muscle thing for a long time. Then it got some kind of, like, maybe it's good for cognition, maybe for people with Alzheimer's. Maybe women should take it too for all those reasons and more. And it kind of reverted back to like the muscle thing. GHK-Cu is a tripeptide, um, with a copper, uh, ion in the in the middle. It's glycine, histidine, and lysine. Um, it's actually found in type 1 collagen fibers. So...

It's only where type 1 collagen fibers are?

All over your skin and hair and connective tissue. So...

Uh, just like Vladimir Cavson discovers these 40 different peptides, liver peptides, brain peptides, pineal peptides, whatever it may be, there's an American researcher, Lauren Pickart, Dr. Lauren Pickart, uh, who's passed...

Now he discovers GHKCU, uh, in the collagen tissue, and he's like, "Hey, this might be the, the factor that controls collagen synthesis and also collagen breakdown." So he does a bunch of studies. His work is all about this. So almost all the literature comes from this one lab. A common theme in peptides, unfortunately. Um, he discovers it in maybe the mid-70s. It's, um, found to be very high in youth, in, in serum levels. So you'll find this in the blood of, of anyone that we test, um, up to like 200, I think nanograms, whatever the unit was, and then gets down to like, in the levels of the 60s by the age of 65. So dramatically decreases with age. It's thought to be maybe what leads to the youthful appearance of young skin, and with age, you lose that effect.

So he did a bunch of trials, both topically for skin, for hair. Um, there's now injectable work being done. So, similar to the BPC, they would, you know, cut rats open, inject GHK copper, uh, in a different site, and they'd get faster wound repair, uh, of the skin tissue from injecting this. So, that's, you know, it's become synonymous with BPC-157, TB500, Wolverine stack, which is someone online just made up. And >> that's that's the Wolverine stack. >> It's those two. Yes. >> TB500 and and alpha. >> No, the TB500 and BPC-157. >> BPC-157. Okay. Now people will add on GHK copper and call it the Glow Stack. >> The Glow Stack. >> Oh, interesting. Okay. >> Someone has made it up in a research chemical. >> Like a Glow Wolverine. Yeah. >> Yeah. There's there's a big debate about whether or not if mixing those together causes, you know, denaturing of different peptides. That's beyond this discussion. Point is GHK copper. It both upregulates the synthesis side of collagen and the breakdown side of collagen. So, because when you're remodeling tissue, if you're just rebuilding it, you're going to get like very pathogenic, uh, structures. And if you're just breaking down, you're getting bad structures. So you're doing both.

So the idea is, does it, number one, have a skin effect, which it seems to be. The Picards, you know, compared it to retinol and vitamin C creams and all these things with positive effects, and people anecdotally talk about like, you know, their crow's feet going away, and topically it does good for them. There was a study on hair that didn't seem too promising. So it's not going to the peptide sites try to tell you like, this is better than minoxidil. Not really. Maybe it could be an adjunct, and a lot of patients will have that success using that with some of their other topical, um, hair loss agents. And now there's a Chinese group studying it for, um, lung regeneration because there's a lot of connective tissue in the lungs, uh, between the different alveoli, and there's some, you know, hype there of using, um, GHK copper as a regenerative from that side. How many people are trying to regenerate their lungs? Is it for like COPD? >> COPD and and smokers, it's a big, big issue. >> Maybe long lung CO, from what I hear, is a real thing. Lung damage from COVID. Y I know some people debate it, but it seems like there are enough people walking around >> who were vaccinated and non-vaccinated who claim that they have >> symptoms post-COVID that have lasted a long time, aka long COVID. So that might be an interesting place for them to remain peptide curious. >> Yeah. And thymic atrophy is a big part of the, I suspect >> post-COVID. Yeah, because any infection actually leads to, we talk about the thymic involution that happens with age. There's thymic atrophy that happens after every infection. The thymus kind of shrinks down, and then the idea is that you, you know, recover, you convalesce. We just have convalescent homes for sick patients, and then you regenerate your thymus in the state of health. I think the problem in modern day, people are stressed out, they're at work, they get sick, and they keep getting sick. So they never get this chance for that thymus rejuvenation. So then they're constantly getting hit down, and they're ending up with these diseases of aging that could have maybe been augmented, ameliorated, maybe pushed down, had their thymus function been better in youth. Raise my hand, Professor Bachery. Um, I'm only half. I really feel like I'm in school. This is so cool for me. I, I'm truly in heaven right now. If you look back at the literature on convalescing, how long were people uh recommended to take some time off after a cold or a flu or some other? That's a good question. Because I think this would tell us, like, are we just, like with, um, sort of, uh, how long, um, maternity leave type things? Like, you know, the idea now is people are being forced to go back too quickly. In countries like in Scandinavia, perhaps, where they get more time, positive outcomes for baby and mom. Like, I think it's an interesting and important question because our biology hasn't changed that much, no, in the last, you know, couple thousand years, at least. Like, after one has a cold, typically people go back as soon as they deem themselves non-infectious, which really worries Um, but do you think people are getting back to work too quickly? I mean, I understand the reasons why, but do you think that adding a stage of really getting back to full functioning without getting into the, you know, back to the gym, back to work, back to everything, is could be beneficial for these longevity effects? >> Right. Right. Well, I mean, if you think about it, nothing that they do once they come back is, you know, additive to healing. Their circadian rhythms are thrown off. They're under malilluminative lights all day. Okay, they're not getting sunlight. They're not, their vitamin D levels are atrocious. Their blue light exposure at night is high. Their stress levels are very high. Their guts are inflamed from eating processed, hyperprocessed, hyperpalatable foods. They have obesity or they're pre-diabetic. So all these things now lead to this inflammatory state, and they just got sick, and their thymus didn't bounce back. So then they get sick the next time in two or three weeks. Like, post-pandemic, a lot of my colleagues were like, "Dude, I get sick three, four times a winter now. Before, I'd get sick, you know, once a winter." So this is where the interest in thymic peptides is very elusive. We have to figure out if the STPs or the PTE are the more interesting ones. There's synthetic thymic peptides, thymulin, and then there's purified thymic extracts. There's the two different research committees that exist when it comes to the thymus. Which one will be more advantageous? Vladimir Cabin came up with the thymolin injectable and oral versions of that, and he had positive immune markers, and he showed like CD4 cells come up, and CD8 cells improve, and all his immune markers become a more youthful state, let's say. >> But unfortunately, what's happening here is we don't have thymologists. Like, we don't have a branch of medicine that's dedicated to this aspect of immunity. Like, there's allergy and immunologists, but they focus more on, you know, allergies to different agents or very severe immune diseases. They're not really addressing the immunity of the general public and how you can boost that. And I think post-pandemic, a lot of people started to ask, "Hey, how can I have better immunity for myself?" Uh, and now finally, people are starting to talk about the thymus. Unfortunately, it's been too little too late. That would have been great during the pandemic, uh, because we could have used these thymic, you know, focused interventions, whether it be zinc or, you know, thymic peptides or your purified thymic extracts to augment immunity of the population as a whole, especially because Dr. was doing this in the 70s in Russia. Even in Russia, they don't really look kindly to this research. Um, the Soviet era research has been kind of pushed aside, and it's like more big pharma style because it's more profitable because how many thymuses are you going to inject into people? And how many thymuses exist on the planet to make these different peptides from? >> But you could inject a lot of synthetic thymus. And alpha TB500. Yes. >> Um, and maybe BPC. So Wolverine stack plus, you know. >> Yeah. So it'd be very interesting if if we can get that. Cuz now that everyone's getting like these full body scans and different full body MRIs, we can see the thymus size. >> I was going to ask, can I get some sense of my thymic size and output from a blood draw, or do I have to do whole body imaging? I've done whole body imaging. It is somewhat costly, and that's a prohibitive barrier for people. But if people can afford it, I actually think it can be useful. I have a number of friends, including a neurosurgeon friend, who said that he's, some people are still alive now because they got that scan. A lot of people get scared about what they see. Wouldn't you rather be scared about what you see and be told that it's okay than not know it's there and then have a catastrophic event? >> We always have a patient that comes in, you know, car accident, young 45-year-old car accident, comes in, has a pancreatic mass that they would have never known about had they not had that accident. They get a CT scan just to check for any kind of internal bleeding. They find the pancreatic mass that gets removed. It ends up being a malignant mass that had they waited six months, they would have, you know, had stage four pancreatic cancer and passed away. So that's that's a theory. There is a concern about false positives and false negatives when it comes to these screening modalities. Like any screening modality, it's not perfect. So there's a big debate on whether or not to do these that will leave to people and their physicians. But I'm, I've been trying to lobby them to give the thymic score to everybody who gets one of these scans because they could see like, "Hey, can you see where the thymus is at?" >> Because, you know, someone might come in, you know, for five different scans over five years, they did a TRT protocol or a GH protocol or whatever it may be. And we could see, did that improve thymic status or make it worse or different infections, different interventions? That'd be very interesting to tease out on blood tests. We've been trying to work with a couple different labs to figure out a thymic score. M. The most commercially available is going to be a lymphocyte count, which look at CD4 to CD8. There's an ideal CD4 to CD8 ratio that's more youthful. You don't want to have more CD8 cells than CD4 cells. You don't want to have too few of either of them. That goes more into like the HIV literature. But the most simple thing that almost every single person has gotten done, but no one's looked at, is their lymphocyte to monocyte ratio on their CBC. So almost everybody's gone to CBC with diff. It's a $3 lab test. If you type in any disorder, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and put lymphocyte to monocyte ratio, there's a study that will talk about how like low lymphocyte to monocyte ratio is associated with poor outcomes when it comes to that disease state. So it gives you kind of a general gestalt of what's going on with immunity because you want a high absolute lymphocyte count, not too high because it's associated with like lymphadenopathy, but somewhere in the hazard, when you look at the charts, around 1,000 total lymphocytes is, um, where the hazard of different cancer sites starts to increase. A young healthy person will be between, you know, 1,500 and 33,000 total lymphocytes, and you want the ratio to the monocytes. Monocytes are different types of immune cells that are more inflammatory. So if you have a robust amount of lymphocytes with a low amount of monocytes, that suggests you have a more, let's say, ready and robust immune state. >> So a $3 lab test that everybody gets, almost every lab testing company now checks it, and no one really reports on it. But you can kind of stratify people into disease risk based on that score. >> Out of a hundred randomly pulled physicians who receive their license in the United States, how many of them probably know what you just described? >> Uh, zero. >> Why not? It's like rabbit holes that you kind of go down and find out. Like, I've been lobbying everyone in the hospital to look at this. >> But it's very easy, right? The data are there. >> No, I look. >> It's not like you're saying, "Oh, you got to do all this additional work. You got to build insurance." I mean, it's there. >> Like, I started to care about the thymus, uh, post-pandemic because I noticed people's lymph counts were lower. And I could notice that, you know, anecdotally or looking at, you know, small data sets like, "Hey, people had lower lymphocyte counts had worse disease or like earlier." Like, people that had cancers in their late 30s, early 40s. I'm like, "Huh, they all had like lower lymphocyte counts." So I started to dig into the literature and I'm lobbying a lot of the hematologists and infectious disease doctors in my hospital to start to look at this. Unfortunately, they're kind of textbook. It's not part of the guidelines. It's in a space that's not pathology. So it's not clear, like, "Hey, if I check your lymphocyte to monocyte count right now, is it going to change my management of you in the hospital today?" Not really. It's more of a long-term look. So that's where all these direct-to-health, direct-to-consumer companies have an opportunity to kind of modulate the way medicine is practiced in the United States. But if we have this metric that we can study, why not use it and then try different interventions and see what actually helps people? Like, we've had sometimes peptides. We've had people go from like a 4:1 lymphocyte to monocyte ratio to an 8:1 ratio. Now, is that significant? That seems to be significant. Um, but no one's really kind of discussing it, unfortunately. >> I know who I'm putting my vote in for Surgeon General, and if ever there's a turnover. I don't, I haven't explored the most recent person. So that's not a comment on her. It's, um, I know they elected to not vote Casey in. Um, but so that's not truly a mention. I haven't done. But I think your voice should be heard far and wide on these things that, I mean, like more data is good. The scientist in me just says, "You got the data. Data could be informative. Take a look."

There's a category of peptides such as growth hormone secretagogues, MK677, that we could do a deep dive on all those, but I'll just batch those and maybe parse them a little bit. And things like Melanotan. Um, these are >> to my understanding, FDA approved for certain indications. So they've gone through the randomized control trials for, like, growth hormone secretagogues for, uh, small stature in kids. They might use it for that, or for, um, postsurgical, uh, burn recovery. I think some HIV, HIV, HIV. So the idea here, the sort of framework that I'm teeing up is that these molecules have been explored >> for their known biological function in animals. It's established these molecules lead to an increase in growth hormone above what would normally be secreted. They do it indirectly by, so they're sort of the gas pedal on that system. Growth hormone secretagogues cause more growth hormone to be secreted, not actual growth hormone. They vary in terms of how much they stimulate hunger or don't stimulate hunger. Yep. >> And on, on you should take them if you're going to take them before sleep, but not having eaten in the last two or three hours. All, all that stuff. We can save ourselves some time here. >> Y. >> Most people who are taking these things, whether they get it from pharma or compounding pharmacy or gray market, research purposes only, um, >> or black market, God forbid, they're doing this because they want to lose fat, gain muscle, recover from exercise more quickly, and look more youthful. >> Yep. Can we assume that those effects are real, given that they were FDA approved for other things? >> Yeah. So when it comes to, let's parse out the effects and the different types of compounds that exist in this category. So there's the ghrelin side, the ghrelin agonists like MK67, not FDA approved, orally available pill that you make bleed out, uh, growth hormone like you make so much growth hormone in response to that, and in a non-pulsatile fashion. Growth hormone is a very circadian hormone that gets released in the first, you know, 90 minutes of slow-wave sleep. Um, and if you miss that big pulse, you're going to get small pulses throughout the day. The question is, is that big pulse better than small little, you know, mini pulses throughout the day? The secretagogues will address the broader category of something called somatopause. So, you've heard of menopause, you've heard of maybe andropause. Somatopause is this event that happens somewhere in the 30s where growth hormone production dramatically decreases. So if we kind of paint a picture, your pineal gland is aging before puberty, your thymus right after puberty, you know, in your 20s, and in your 30s, you're having somatopause. That's where your growth hormone production is decreasing. You're having, they call it adrenopause, where your adrenals stop making as much DHEA and the different ratio of cortisol. And then you're having menopause, andropause, and all the other chronic conditions. So it's like your first 50 years of your life, that's what you have to expect. The question has been, and it's a big debate in the medical community, is replacing growth hormone and addressing somatopause useful? Because you can measure, if we had your IGF-1 when you're 18 and your IGF-1 when you're 30 and 50, it's going to be a dramatic decrease in that. Should we now replenish this IGF-1? The proponents will say IGF-1 is important for skin and good quality sleep and for muscle recovery and joints and all these things, and those are true. We know growth hormone has all these beneficial effects on that. We also know growth hormone is thymic regenerative because it stimulates the regrowth of an aged, involuted thymus gland. Based on Dr. Fee's work, the question is, is there an oncogenic signal when it comes to growth hormone? >> Does it cause cancer? >> Yes. >> Can it, sorry, can it promote more rapid growth of other existing cancer? I don't think anyone thinks it causes cancer. And this is the big debate when people are like, "BPC causes cancer." There's no mutagenic effect from BPC. Is BPC like smoking a cigarette? Smoking a cigarette, you get carcinogenic damage to the lung tissue that causes a cancer later on. There's no direct mechanism that would link any of these peptides to a carcinogenic effect. But is it, you know, a growth factor that could grow a cancer potentially? There isn't good data showing that. The debate may be like, "Hey, by boosting thymic function from growth hormone, are you increasing immunity and then immune surveillance of different tumors?" Right? And therefore decreasing and then causing the scale. There's a big debate of whether growth hormone is even beneficial when it comes to aging because growth hormone does grow certain tissues. There's models where people are growth hormone deficient and they live a lot longer. >> And growth hormone is not positive when it comes to a cardiometabolic perspective. >> And in species like dogs, where there's tremendous variation in the amount of IGF-1 that's made between, say, a Chihuahua and a Great Dane, the breed that makes more IGF-1 downstream of growth hormone, of course, lives a lot shorter lives than smaller versions of the same species. So, you want a dog around for a long time, get a Chihuahua. You want a real dog, get a, excuse me, you want a dog that lives a long time, get a Great Dane or a bulldog. There's that whole discussion of what's better. And then you get into antagonistic pleiotropy. Is this something that's good in youth but detrimental for longevity, or is it pro-longevity? And that's the big debate in the longevity field, whatever that field is, of whether or not to use growth hormone. So now, growth hormone has become very difficult to acquire through clinical prescriptions after the whole anabolic steroids act and Barry Bonds and all that stuff. So people have now shifted to using secretagogues in lieu of growth hormone. >> Also, growth hormone is very expensive. >> Very expensive. Yeah. Like Pfizer's pens are in the thousands of dollars. So like, if you want, if you're rich, you can afford to have growth hormone, have it. But otherwise, a secretagogue will cost you less than 100 bucks. >> I'm told that growth hormone doesn't shut down one's own production. >> Yeah. It's not, it's not a, a strong shutdown like the testicular axis. I'm also told that when people take it, they feel awesome. >> Which is scary to say on a podcast because you're like, "Oh no, I don't want everyone running out." And, you know, young people are already making tons of it. But, I mean, >> that combination of looking younger, feeling great, cognitively feeling great. I mean, I have some friends who've taken like an IU a night or even two IUs a night, you know, five nights a week for for years. And >> you go, "Hey, like, are you worried about some of the tumor effects?" And they're like, "You just function at a whole other level." And then you go, "Oh God, that's really enticing." But, you know, even with great imaging, you don't know if you've got tumors that you're accelerating in that case. So it's kind of scary. >> Yeah. And we don't have a data set that would show that. Like, where's the body count from from growth hormone? Uh, like the bodybuilder body counts are from other compounds, not doing everything. >> Yeah. Exactly. I mean, when you go into a gym, you can tell who's doing growth hormone versus not based on their skin shining. Like you see a 45-year-old dude that's through somatopause but has perfect young skin. And >> you know there's Botox and all other things involved, but you can tell there's that growth hormone look. The hair looks a little bit healthier. >> Because growth hormone favors the conversion of T4 to T3. It changes the thyroid dynamics. It can have pro-testicular effects as well from the IGF-1 perspective. So there's a lot of, you know, youthful effects to it. The question is, is that a good idea to replace it? Traditionally, like the medical field's kind of anti, um, using these secretagogues to augment somatopause. But I think there's going to be a role for it, perhaps cyclically, because I don't think anything in nature is year-round. So what if you did a cyclical cycle of, and this is not medical advice, but theoretical cyclical cycle of tesamorelin for a certain amount of time, got your IGF-1 to a certain level under clinician guidance, measured your thymus on an MRI before and after, and then you saw that the thymus grew and you had higher CD4/CD8 count? That would be pretty interesting. >> Be interesting. A few years back, and I've told this story publicly before, I tried um, semorelin. Yeah. >> It's different than obviously than tesamorelin, but similar in the sense the endpoint you're seeking is more, uh, growth hormone, IGF-1. And it dramatically increased my deep sleep and like nuked my REM sleep. It's like the opposite of pineal. Together. >> Yeah. So, well, I didn't try that. The other thing that it did, and the reason I halted it almost right away because I was really just running it as an experiment on myself, was that it spiked my PSA, my prostate-specific antigen. It had always been in range and relatively low. Boom. Spiked it, and I was like, "Whoa, that's wild." And I don't want that. Off it. >> Yeah. >> It reverted to a low level. So that was pretty striking. So obviously, you know, hyperresponsive prostate to semorelin. Maybe it wouldn't have been to tesamorelin, etc. But those are the kinds of things. The growth hormone itself, that growth hormone secretion. That's a good point. As you age, your prostate gets bigger. The bane of every man is going to be BPH. Like that's going to be the reason that you hate your life when you're in your 60s and 70s because you have to wake up at night to pee. >> And then when you're at, you know, an amusement park, you're going to have to find the nearest bathroom very frequently because your bladder size is >> it'll go it out. There's some prostate peptides we're looking at. So, >> there's a young guy, old guy, like taunting, like, you know, you got 10 more years before you're miserable. Thanks. >> There's prostate peptides that Cington looked at that we're trying to translate some of that literature. >> You'll save me. >> No, there's there's people, this guy named Brennan Henry, who's translated like thousands of these papers from Russian to English. So shout out to Amnoiliation, but he's translated a lot of this Russian literature and helped us from that. So that's great. But the prostate is growing with age under the control of DHT and estrogen, and then probably growth hormone. So the question is, do you want to be messing with that and increasing the size of that? There's concerns about, you know, cardiac growth, liver growth. So there's all these things. But also growth hormone and the secretagogues have a negative effect on insulin sensitivity. >> Right? >> So people's A1C's will usually jump. Like the joke in the bodybuilding community is you have to get lean enough and healthy enough to be able to take growth hormone. >> Oh, what's happening? >> Growth hormone or the secretagogues. >> The growth hormone more so the >> It can make you insulin insensitive. >> Yes. Uh, especially with more like tesamorelin, especially when combined with epamorlin. Semaglutide is kind of a weaker GHR. Tesamorelin, especially when combined with epamorlin. Tesamorelin is FDA approved. Epamorlin is not. The GHR versus GHRP kind of in the weeds there. Those two together can create a giant growth hormone response where your IGF-1 is in the 380s, 390s. Um, so that's that's quite high, like puberty levels of IGF-1. >> And you're hungry all the time. >> Yeah. Yeah. With MK for sure, with with tesamorelin. So tesamorelin has more fidelity, less ghrelin effects, especially, um, because you can have ghrelin effects, prolactin effects, and cortisol effects from whenever you're mucking around with the pituitary because they're all in that in that same area. Um, I think MK bleeds out the worst when it comes to having the other effects. MK is not a peptide. It's a non-peptide GHRP. >> What's happened now is people are now stacking their GLP-1 as their insulin sensitivity tool, their growth hormone or their GHR, >> and their androgen modulation therapies as this trinity stack. >> Trinity stack. >> To get very fit, very healthy quickly. So a lot of these transformations you see in CEOs and celebrities and stuff is using a combination of those three things. You know, your TRT plus maybe anavar with tirzepatide or semaglutide, whatever it may be, and then using a growth hormone modulation with your, if you can afford growth hormone, or that's more epamorlin, and you're seeing people lose a lot of fat, gain a lot of muscle in short amounts of time. Is that healthy? We'll find out. But that is like the celebrity protocol. >> Very interesting. And I'm guessing that for women, it's the combination of growth hormone secretagogue plus, um, something like, and we'll talk about these now, tirzepatide or, um, one of the other GLPs. I'm going to acknowledge because people are going to start like dart throwing darts at me about this. Yes, tirzepatide is hitting things other than the GLP pathway. It's also GIP and glucagon pathway, but most people put it under the category of GLP. So you are an encyclopedic, my friend. I really, really appreciate the clarity and the thoughtfulness of your answers on these. And as people are probably becoming aware, we could spend 50 hours talking about, like, cerebral ly. I think we will have to have you back to explore those other ones. There are a few other things I'd like to talk about if you're willing to give us the time. We should close the hatch on >> GHKCU. I misspoke, and I saw it in your eyes. You're like, "He said it wrong." Do I correct him? Yes, correct me. Everyone else does. Um, GHKCU for the collagen effects. It's available in a lot of creams. Assuming it's real, assuming people are doing this medically supervised. Um, is there any benefit to putting it directly on crow's feet or other wrinkles or face versus injecting it for it to go systemically? >> Yeah, I think if you have a well-formulated topical that's actually not broken down, because a lot of these, you know, from these research chemicals, they sell topicals now because everyone's in skincare. Uh, they're, you know, poor quality. They're not even blue. Like the GHK should be blue, but that that is blue >> from the copper. Yeah. >> Okay, that makes sense. My copper pills are blue. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Okay. >> But that doesn't mean that it's real. Could be copper that's fallen out of the G, the complex of the GHK. So, yeah, you want a well-formulated, like a good skincare brand that knows how to formulate these, uh, and deliver them into the skin, because that's another thing. So like, you know, every skincare brand has their now GHK formulation because people are demanding it, but it's been around for 30, 40 years on topical. The injectable is not FDA approved, of course. I think it's going to be on the second round of discussions when it comes to the peptides coming back to category one. The first round is going to have these seven peptides, BPC, TB, etc. I think the second round is going to look at GHK. I don't imagine that there's no good human data on that. But topically, there's great human data on like different aesthetic outcomes, especially when coupled with red light therapy, um, because it seems that the blue pigment and the red light seem to be synergistic in that effect. There's also some literature when it comes to GHKCU, um, for post-UV damage. So people that are, you know, sun-friendly, um, can use GHKCU topically to alleviate some of the photo damage. Of course, dermatologists are going to get mad at us and say, "You just use sunscreen and don't get the damage in the first place." But for people that, you know, aren't as responsible, you can use GHKCU as a, you know, post-sunscreen. Listen to the derms who are slightly more sun-positive, like especially low, low UV index sun when the sun is low in the sky. >> Yep. >> Dr. Abud Bakri is perhaps the only other person on the planet besides my friend Samra Hatar, who's been on this podcast, who's as excited about circadian biology as an organizing feature as I am. There are a couple others out there, but in terms of people who are like really grounded in what's real, that he's, um, he, I put him in that category, whether he likes it or not. So people are taking GHKCU cream, putting it on, and then doing red light therapy, and there are human data that perhaps can augment some of the collagen repairative effects, the photoaging effects, some of the effects of aging when compared to like different retinols and stuff like that. I think the consensus in the field now is to use it with the rest of your skincare routine, not in place of it. >> Um, but a lot of people, especially bros that have never been into skincare, are now into skincare because of >> Oh my goodness. >> Yeah. So, there's that, but it's promising. >> Bros are into skincare. >> Be a documentary before long, like what do you call that? The manosphere. It's like the skinosphere. >> Well, with with looksmaxing, that's it's the looksmaxing peptide now. GHK because all these guys that are into looksmaxing will use GHK. >> They're dipping their hammer in GHKCU and tapping themselves. And by the way, if you want great long-wavelength red, near-infrared, and infrared light to augment your GHKCU peptide, by the way, I'm not suggesting that. There's this thing called sunlight that provides that. You just have to be careful not to get too much UV in the process. So before people start thinking they absolutely need a red light device. >> Full spectrum, too. Full spectrum, balanced. Great article in Nature we can link to recently that describes the different spectrums coming out of different devices and that thing that we call the sun, which is the best source of all of that. >> And better blue light, too. >> And better. >> Because we're deprived of 480 nanometers in this setup that you have. Full spectrum lighting that we don't know about. >> I don't get paid to say what I'm about to say, but I'm really excited about something. For a long time, I've used Bon Charge's bulbs because they have these bulbs that switch from full spectrum in the day. Then you flip the same switch, and it goes to yellow, and then flip the switch again, and it goes to red. I find the red to be kind of difficult to navigate at night. Raw optics. >> Yep. Then you want >> made one that goes from like a morning really bright light, full spectrum with some, a lot of blue in there on purpose to wake you, you know, part of the way. >> And the right blue. The 480 cyan blue. >> Switch the same switch. Don't have to change the bulb. Goes to kind of a late morning mode to afternoon mode, and then goes to candle light mode in the evening. And here's the cool thing. Not only did they get the spectrum and the balance right, but it doesn't flicker. They got rid of the flicker that you get from LEDs, and yet it's an LED, so it's energy efficient. Infrared and >> Yeah. And I have no affiliation to them whatsoever. I pay full price for these things. And I have to say, I really, really like them. Even my bulldog puppy has a little one. I have this little monkey holding a lamp, and I say, "When the monkey goes to candlelight, you're going to sleep." And he knows he's learning. When it goes to candlelight. Now he's sorry he's a dichromat, not a trichromat, but that's a different podcast. All right, GLPs. Yep. Now we can comfortably exhale into your colleagues. You can feel completely comfortable about anything that they might think or say because the GLPs are the reason why people are comfortable injecting themselves. It's why this whole thing of peptides has really taken off. BPC kind of rode in on the GLPs, in my opinion, even though it's been around for a long time, and so have all the other peptides we've been talking about. >> So what are your thoughts? I've never taken one of these. Um, first things first, we're hearing that some people, I think Sam Altman actually talked about this publicly, um, overdose with with Kara Swisser about what he thought, yeah, where he overdosed, actually a compounding pharmacy issue, he thought was what did it. I trust him to do the right calculation. And so it does sound like that was a compounding pharmacy issue. >> Could afford it? Is the buy from pharma a great option? >> I think back then, people were just getting them where they can. I didn't ask him why that happened, but nonetheless, get the dosage right. Make sure you're getting the right stuff, clean. But he talked about the kind of lack of motivation, which many people have described anecdotally, like, okay, lowered their food drive, but lowered their drive period. >> Yep. >> Makes sense, you know, depending on which pathways are being affected. But do you think that's a real effect? Is that something that people need to be concerned about? Do you think people can microdose this stuff? Because a lot of people are microdosing it regardless of what their source is. They're taking a lot less than the kind of standard clinical trials will be. And we're leaving out tirzepatide for now because it's so new. We're going to talk about it, but I'm talking about the >> standard semaglutide. Yeah. I'll tell you that you have your semaglutide, which is Ozempic, and Wegovy is the FDA approved version for weight loss. For tirzepatide, you have Zepbound and Mounjaro. Zepbound being the FDA approved version for weight loss that allows them to keep their patents for longer. These medications are good, kind of transforming medicine, especially where I practice. Right? If we kind of zoom out our medical system, if we didn't have these interventions, it was going to collapse on itself thanks to the obesity, pre-diabetes, diabetes epidemics because we don't have enough clinicians or finances to get everybody who was pre-diabetic in the last, you know, 20 years, and they all transitioned to diabetes and ended up with, you know, diabetic medications and dialysis and eventually cardiovascular disease and all these things. We don't have the resources to take care of all these people. Like our medical system was going to collapse, and there wasn't enough finances to take care of it. Now, these GLP-1s are coming in and kind of transforming that phase of medicine because now we have a chance to dramatically change the rate of obesity, diabetes, pre-diabetes, and all these cardiometabolic disorders. So where do we stand? We needed something to happen. I mean, ideally, everybody would get morning sunlight and eat only healthy foods, unprocessed foods, and have low stress and sleep great at night, and maybe no one would develop to become obese. But the reality is, people become overweight, obese. They get stuck in that hole. And if you just try to step out of the hole the way you came in, sometimes that doesn't work. You need a different path out of that problem. And that's been, you know, the diet and exercise literature for the last 40 years. Millions of books have been sold on how to get people leaner. We now have interventions medically that can dramatically change people's weights for the first time. We've had drugs in the past that, you know, 5-10% of body weight. Now with the GLP-1s, we're getting 10-20, even 30% of body weight being shaved off of people, especially with the new reduced data. Is there a free lunch? That's the big question. Like, like we kind of talked about earlier, there's always been these medical mishaps that have happened. So far, the data is very promising when it comes to GLP-1s and that we are now reversing this rate of chronic disease. Is it going to stay that way? That's a good question. I'm cautiously optimistic when it comes to these medications. I've been prescribing them since I was a resident. In my VA clinic, I was putting all these vets that are, you know, 300 pounds on GLP-1s. They were losing 50, 100 pounds before it was FDA approved for weight loss. We knew that if you put diabetics on this drug, they would lose weight, thanks to a lot of the bodybuilders that kind of pioneered that. >> When did the bodybuilders first start using GLPs? >> Uh, late 2010s. Wow. >> And then the signal, I don't think Novo or Lily wanted to make these for obesity. They were focused on making diabetes drugs because, like, if we zoom out even further, this is another animal-derived compound, right? It's found in the saliva of the Gila monster. GLP-1 was discovered. It's too short-acting to have worked on its own. Then pharmaceutical companies, this is where you got to give pharma their credit, they developed these drugs into more functioning versions that had longer half-lives and could stick around in the serum for longer to have the clinical effect. So then we started noticing that diabetics, like my grandma got Byetta, which was one of these first GLP-1 drugs, like 25 years ago. It was the, out of all the drugs she was on, the reason I went into medicine, that was the drug that changed her whole trajectory because she had less insulin needs, and she was losing weight and more energetic. So we had seen the effects on diabetics, and then you get Liraglutide, Dulaglutide, and then eventually Semaglutide was the, is the blockbuster. But you get all these positive effects coming from these drugs on diabetics. It gets translated into obese people and overweight patients. The question is, what is the long-term effect of this? Do you have to stay on this drug forever? Can you titrate it off? The pharmaceutical companies have not given us good guidelines on that. They've shown us what happens if you stop the drug. You can max out on maximum dose, pull the brakes on. People tend to sometimes gain the weight. Some people don't, but some people will regain back to baseline. Because if you think about it, the better way to think about weight loss, it's a calculation your brain does every single day with all the different hormones and peptides that are made from the gut, the GIP, GLP, glucagon, insulin, testosterone, estrogen, all these things kind of modulate. And there's this thing called a set point theory or settling points, and they integrate. Should I eat or not eat, right? So the GLP-1 is a giant signal to the brain of don't eat. So we're modulating this pathway. What happens to all these young kids that are 18, 19 years old on 5 milligrams of tirzepatide that have lost 30, 40 pounds? Are they going to have to be on that for life now to maintain that weight? >> Can I ask you about that? Because when people say perhaps you have to be on a drug for the rest of your life, I think, okay, what's the availability? What's the cost? >> What's the real-world cost of taking six months off because you can't access it? Y. There's a shortage, and maybe better drugs will come along. Like, I don't necessarily have a problem with it. Although if you talk to type 1 diabetics in the old days, they weren't crazy about the idea that they had to constantly inject themselves with insulin. Now there are better, better delivery devices. I kind of feel like eventually there'll be some slow-release polymer that will just kind of give you a microdose of it. You could dial it up if you want. >> Those are all pills now. >> Personally, I don't worry so much about, like, for the rest of your life. I worry more about the much shorter life if people are obese. But what about these brain effects? I do worry about a brain that's developing in the context of, of a, you know, thousandfold or more increase in these GLPs because when we had Zach Knight on the podcast, he's not a clinician, he's a scientist up at UCSF, Howard Hughes investigator, which means he's like a superstar and deserves to be in that category. He described that the diabetic drugs would increase GLP by like, like double, quadruple, but the weight loss effects weren't really there. But the drugs that you rattled off a few minutes ago, Mounjaro, Zepbound, etc., and certainly tirzepatide, we're talking about thousandfold increases in GLPs. We don't know what the long-term effects of those are on like neuroplasticity and learning. Could be great. Yes. >> Could be positive. We shouldn't always assume those effects are bad. >> Yeah. Like the effects for, let's say, a 60-year-old pre-diabetic diabetic on Alzheimer's disease seems to be potentially positive. I think the study last year didn't show a good signal on Alzheimer's prevention, but we know diabetes and cardiometabolic disease speeds up that transition. So controlling insulin dynamics might be beneficial there, and the obesity is not great for Alzheimer's risk. The question is, what about for like these cognitive effects? Is the effect happening from the drug itself? Is it from misuse of the drug? Too high of a dose? You're not getting enough electrolytes. You're not getting enough micronutrients, macronutrients. You know, your blood sugar is low. Because a lot of these patients, the way we approach it is a training wheel effect when it comes to GLP-1s. Like, "Hey, you come to us, you're a patient, you want to use GLP-1s, we'll give you the lowest dose as possible that has an effect for you, GLP-1 in conjunction with lifestyle modification, dietary advice, exercise programs, etc., etc., and then hopefully peel away those training wheels or keep them on if you need them until we get to the endpoint that we want." Now, when people do it that way, I don't hear a lot of these effects anecdotally.

From from Brookley patients that we hear about online where people are like, "Oh, I'm depressed. I hate my life from from these drugs." And the question is, are they just, you know, a lot of people have low blood pressure from from these drugs because they're not, you know, consuming enough electrolytes or enough food.

Cuz like some people will take a mega dose of these drugs and end up not eating like a day goes by, they've eaten one meal. That's not conducive to to good feeling good. Everyone, you know, the reason people are eating in the first place is because eating is is such a pleasurable experience for humans and a social experience, etc., etc. The other thing is if you're not eating with people on the same table, are you having less of that socialization aspect? A lot of times you meet up to eat or drink or whatever it may be.

So I'm very curious when it comes to the cognitive effects, is it from the drug directly interacting with receptors in the brain when we we've seen that the right amount of dose decreases inflammation in the brain or is it because of the social aspects of the drug changing the way you behave and therefore leading to negative out? Dare you think of confounding variables. It's like, no, it's so cool cuz you're willing to go outside the box and say, "Hey, listen, this might be due to some of the downstream consequences of reduced appetite."

Yeah. And we know the literature shows that people now are having less alcohol cravings from this. It might be changing the way the dopanergic signaling is happening in the brain, which is concerning, right? Because a lot of people will be stacking this with, you know, ADHD medications. Uh they might be using some of these peptide stimulants, um smax link, whatever it may be. So the question because what happens is people go to these websites, they they buy one more peptide and they got a great result and they'll be like, you know, let me add three more peptides on.

Yes, it's an increasing AOV problem. So the average sale value goes up from these research sites. We'll see where where GLP ones go. The the reality is it's here. There there is no pre GLP1 world for us as clinicians, as health enthusiasts. We're in a post GLP1 world and everything kind of dictates downstream from that. The people I know who've taken um these and I don't know exactly which are taking much lower dosages than were prescribed to them and they are indeed sharing them with getting the prescription than people are sharing them. People are cost sharing now people are trying to get them from other sources. Several of those people say they they feel like they can think better. But I told them, well yeah, if your insulin sensitivity is improved, if you're carrying less body fat, body fat's an endocrine organ. It's you know you need some body fat. But there could be a number of reasons for that. I don't know if these are direct effects on the brain.

Yeah. Well, I mean leptin sensitivity increases as you decrease the body fat mass. There's there's GP1 receptors on the palm neurons in the brain and no one's kind of examined what that means downstream for the leptin melano uh leptin melanocortin pathway and what that means for energy status you know thyroid hormone production reproductive status. We know a lot of people are oyic babies in that a lady will will be subfertile or infertile start a weight loss drug and then find out by accident she's pregnant.

Was she obese before? Yeah, there's these are overweight obese women that are having um their fertility improve as a result of losing the weight because we know uh your leptin status is a key driver of fertility because if if you're having low leptin levels, you're starving. You shouldn't be fertile. If you have too much leptin and you're at leptin resistant, you shouldn't be having kids either. So, both of those those things kind of get modulated by these drugs as well.

There was a science paper some years ago that leptin hitting a certain threshold is actually what signals the onset of puberty in females. Is that still considered true? I think that's that's that's part of it. Makes sense like enough body fat to signal that there are enough resources and then um animals or that was an animal study or the idea was that people perhaps also become females become reproductively competent at the point where there's enough energetic resources that.

Interesting. Have you ever taken one of these? Oh wow. Yes. I uh I uh had a family member with a GLP1 pen uh from four years ago that um said it wasn't working. So I'm like okay let's see what's going on here. I got a pen. Don't do Don't do this at home. And I was like, "Yeah, it's not working. Like, it's bunked. They got it from overseas. It was a a brand name Ozamic pen, but gotten from overseas." Got the pen. I was like, "You know what? If it's bunk, let's see what it is. Don't do this at home." Biohackers in me came out and tried it. I injected a I think it was a milligram of ombic.

What's a standard dose? You start at 0.25 and escalate to 0.5. You went straight to a milligram. Yeah. Cuz I was like, "Ah." They're like, "It doesn't work. I'm I'm eating so much." I'm like, "Okay, whatever." You got bunk bunk pen from overseas. I go to do a shift. I was on a night shift that day and I've never had Charizard like projectile vomiting.

And low blood sugar presumably. The blood sugar effect for for non-diabetics don't get that low, but it was just miserable. Like I would I would go admit a patient, go upstairs, vomit in the in the call room. You just gave a really good reason why people shouldn't just do what you just described. No, they shouldn't do that. Uh then go back to back to the ER, admit a patient, and then it was it was the most miserable night of my life. Uh so be very careful how you use these drugs. That's why titrate very slowly. Um luckily with the newer ones the effects are much less like people who report and retroide even have less of these gastrointestinal effects.

But um that's a peptide gone wrong story. Peptide gone wrong. Um reatride. Yep. I put out a post on X. I thought and I do still think that it that Red True Tide is going to be a trillion dollar industry. Not because so many people are necessarily going to use it for weight loss, but because many people will use it for weight loss. Many people will use it for other things because you can be sure, absolutely sure that Lily is going to find other ways to market it. And you can protect a patent by finding additional uses for things. I mean, a lot of the the blockbuster drugs for eye diseases, um, the patents to prevent generic forms um, were continued by Here's the deal, folks. companies are really incentivized to take the hundreds of millions of dollars that they spent on clinical trials and research and development and not have to do it again. So, if you can find another valid use for a drug, you don't have to run all the safety stuff, you don't have to do a lot of stuff, you just have to show efficacy and a few other things, but that's the way that drug companies continue to play the game um to protect their their investment, right? I mean, it's you can understand why they do it. If you like or not, that's that's your business. But um so I'm guessing that Reddit True Tide is going we're going to discover that it's um useful for a number of things and from the clinical trials there's a reason to believe that's going to be the case.

And the big thing they're trying to do now is classify as a biologic. So Retroide has 39 amino acids. Uh to be a biologic you have to be above 40 amino acids. And once you get to above 40 amino acids, if you are a biologic, then the patent lasts way longer. I don't know the exact number. It's like 15 years. Yeah, much much longer. If it's a if it's 40 or below amino acids, then it's something like five five to seven years.

Someone in law will have that. So, we're talking like hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars. If it's a if you and you can tinker with this, you can amino acids and more importantly, no one can compound it if it's a biologic or if it's very difficult to compound like the right right certificates. Something similar happened with ACG where it was taken out of the compounders um recently.

Really? Yeah. Yeah. So ACG um human coriotic ginatotropin this is commonly prescribed for trying to restore fertility to uh to men but it's main mostly being given in IVF cycles to women. Yep. Yeah, there's a big controversy about ACG compounders and who can compound and who can't that's that's beyond this. But uh this is a very important thing cuz if Lily gets rea then the compounders are out of luck because the compounders all have the formula for reetta they're ready to make it like they can get the API from China and and and start compounding it as soon as it's available. It'll it will make them all billions of dollars but if Lily is able to do this they'll be able to protect themselves from what was going to happen. You see the Trump administration now is trying to get with Trump RX Lily and Novaist to drop their prices to make it more available which has happened like now I think you can get a you know $300 monthly dose of Tresepite available through these websites.

Used to be 1 1500. Yeah, 1 without insurance some insurance will cover it some some wouldn't you'd have to get you know savvy clinician that will advocate on your on your behalf to get these covered but cash pay between you know even some of the the pills I think you can pay 150 bucks a month for the oroplon which is not a peptide but still GLP1 agonist um which kind of gets to the point like it doesn't matter if it's a peptide or not. What matters is where where it touches, what receptor it touches because orupon is more similar to semiglutide. Both of them are GLP-1 drugs. One's a peptide, one's not. Then BBC is to semiglutide. So like everyone online talk about peptides are good or peptides are bad. There's no actual scientific category of peptides that gives you a functional definition that's discussable between two people because what do you mean by peptide? Do you mean carnosine or do you mean ratitude?

Excellent point. uh speaks to a lot of the confusion. Um you are a beam of clarifying information um on this. I actually am going to put in a vote um publicly right here and now, but also uh I'm going to do what I can to contact folks that are relevant. I think you should, no joke, I think you should be in charge of a nomenclature committee. I think for in in the world of genetics for a long time that people would just name genes Sonic Hedgehog or you know you know sink one or people name it after their cousin or what and it was a mess and so what ends up happening is you find similarity between genes across different laboratories and eventually you have a meeting and you come up with a you have a nomenclature committee and then you say this is you know ephrine 1 2 3 4 5 6 these are the sequences the general public doesn't think about molecules in that way no but the general public are diving right into this they are the experiment and so what I think would be very very useful would be a um clear and accessible nomenclature to divide up what we've talked about today you know BPC-157 um you know peptides with and without known receptors the regenerative peptides as you've called them like thymus and alpha TB500 which are amunogenic peptides I think the word peptides is just too general too general.

I'm putting my vote in for you not that you don't already have enough to do to um come up with some nomen clature that maybe I can help propagate and some of the other people in the podcast community. We'll even contact our our our close close friends in in um legacy media and explain to them how this works and maybe they can help propagate just for sake of clarity. Yep. Right. We're not taking the stance these are good or bad but just for sake of clarity as given that there's so many people that are peptide curious.

Okay. So before we wrap, I solicited X and Instagram for questions about peptides. I did not reveal exactly who you are, but I gave some of your credentials and got back many, many excellent questions. Most of which, thanks to you, were answered during the course of our conversation up until now. But there are a couple of them that many people asked, we didn't touch on, at least not directly. One thing that's come up several times is the question about for women who have endometriosis or fibroids or other things related to reproductive health and potential. Can things like BPC57 help and or hurt those circumstances given their potential role in angioenesis and the other things you described?

No literature exists on either animal or human data that that relates to those peptides. I'd say those are more hormonal/ metabolic issues that that a good obgine should should take care of. They're very difficult to treat conditions and very miserable to have for people and they have fertility implications. But those are more on the hormonal side. I think the hormonal lever is way stronger than a peptide level like BBC or any of those. And as far as I'm concerned, there's no case reports or studies that would suggest positive or negative.

CNS effects central nervous system, excuse me, of BPC57 or other peptides that we've talked about that are don't fall under the, you know, typical um umbrella that people, you know, go to when they think about BPC57. Now, you talked about some of the uh stuff related to alcohol and perhaps other things like aderall, but anything known about, you know, people feeling better or worse on different peptides just psychologically, neurologically? TBI, I'll throw TBI in there for myself. I I don't have TBI fortunately, but I know many people that do. They reach out to me. Could it be beneficial in those cases?

Yeah, there were studies in Russia on TBI when it comes to cortexin and cerebralin, which would probably never be available in the United States. So, we'll we'll we'll skip those. Uh there's no good data on BBC TBI. They theoretically could be useful from a from anti-stress perspective. That would be interesting to explore that. BBC's neurological effects are very homeostatic in nature. They don't let you get too high in the in the mice data at least. the mice can't get too drunk and they can't withdraw from malcol. They can't get too high on on the mice methamphetamines and they can't get too high on the methamphetamines and they don't withdraw either. So there's a homeostatic mechanism that might explain some of these anhidonia uh side effects that people are reporting where BBC modulates the gut brain access in a way which we do not understand. It's kind of woowoo that makes it so that your brain can't go too far in one direction. Maybe in putting if we think of a just just so story it's putting you into a rest and digest state to heal whatever problem you have. If that's why BBC exists as a big parent compound that might be part of the fact that if you secrete BBC your body goes into like a convolescent mode because it will it will take away stimulants it will take away sedatives um don't try this of course but there seems to be a homeostatic mechanism in BPC that needs to be explored further with good data.

Very interesting. Thank you. The major question was what should people do if they are actually interested in obtaining peptides? Let's just set the GLPs aside because it's kind of a separate category and they want to explore their use and they want to be as safe as possible. Where shouldn't they look?

Yeah. Is how I'll phrase the question. Um where should they look? Who should they talk to? At what point do they can they be confident that what they're taking is what you know the bottle claims and and that it's you know free of contaminants um and so on. I many many questions but I think this is like kind of the question.

Yep. It's it's the most difficult question to answer because uh the majority of people are getting their peptides from research only websites. Uh unfortunately those are not reliable. We don't know what's in them. They they could be good, could be bad, could be as good as a compound pharmacy, could be much worse, could be the wrong peptide in in the vial. So we don't know what's in there. What should happen over the next 6 12 24 months is there will be a lot of physicianled options for patients to get peptides. Number one, you should encourage your physician if you don't have one. Uh, get one and get a good relationship with one because having a good relationship with your physician is a key aspect of driving good health. But having a physician that's educated on peptides to my doctor friends, all of you guys are now live in a peptide era. You have no choice but to get educated. So get educated. We should create resources for that. There will be a lot of telemet options opening up soon uh through various companies that will offer these peptides and it will be good for the consumer because it'll be a race down in price and then we'll know which which compoundingies are better which ones are worse so you can get a better source peptides but you should get them from clinicians. The question that's going to happen is there's going to be a lot of these orally available peptides and they're going to be all over supplement websites like you you'll find them with your magnesium and your creatine and then your pinealon or your BPC157. The question is what is that going to look like? So we'd like, you know, our FDA overlords to give give us some guidance there on what can and cannot be sold and bought. But it should be physician le. You should be doing this under the guidance of a physician that's monitoring you. You know, you shouldn't be taking testes in without checking IGF-1 levels. Uh a GLP1 even should be monitored with the physicians that can counsel you on on too much weight loss. Like some of these some of these celebrities should have had better clinicians monitoring their GLP1 journeys cuz they lost way too much weight. That doesn't look healthy at all. Unless someone's first of all someone's not having the basics in place there's no I point in putting all these peptides in like morning sunlight sleep darkness at night yes good diet minimally processed food yes the next phase of peptide curious and peptide driven discussions is going to be like how do you incorporate it into a giant health system like you do morning sunlight blue light blockers and epitalon you do you know BPC and you work out in the gym or whatever it may be there's going to be you know protocols that that develop but I think within six months there'll be very good physician options for everybody.

Abud, amazing. Thank you so much for coming here today and again shedding so much light on what all of these things are. You have an clearly a virtuoso level um understanding and ability to communicate about the history of these things, what they are, what they aren't, what we know, what we still don't know, um the potential upsides, the potential hazards, the uh the regulation, and on and on. Um there are 50 other topics that you and I must talk about at some point. your knowledge of hormones in men and women, pregnancy and women's hormones affecting the fetus, how progesterone impacts DHT and male offspring. Incredible. Absolutely want to have you back to have that discussion, but we'll let people digest this in the meantime. We'll put links to where people can find you. And I just want to say thank you for doing what you do. And if you don't mind me sharing, you're you're 33 years old.

That's right. I love that you're a clinician and you're practicing medicine, but please please please keep wherever you can keep up your efforts as a public educator. come back and talk to us again. Uh you're a gift to us all and um thank you so much.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here and thank you for the kind words.

Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Abud Bachri. To learn more about his work and to find links to the various things we discussed, please see the show note captions. I should also mention that Dr. Bachri has just released a new app which is focused on circadian biology which we didn't talk about today, but he's a true expert there as well. You can also find a link to that app in the show notes caption. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zerocost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a fivestar review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols, an operating manual for the human body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than 5 years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre-sale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Hubberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Hubberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already, subscribe to our Neural Network newsletter. The neural network newsletter is a zerocost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Abud Bakri. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.