Peptides & Bioregulators for Vibrant Longevity with Nathalie Niddam

When I first heard about peptides, I was like, "Oh my God, this is it! The Holy Grail! We found the solution! Everybody stop! We're good!" And yes, they're incredibly powerful, and you still need all the other things in place for that healing to really take place. So, yeah. So if you have a terrible diet, and you're not moving, and you're not managing your stress, and you're sleeping like garbage, and you have pollution, and environmental toxicants, and, you know, endocrine disrupting, you know, chemicals, like the peptides are going to help. But they are, you know, we want to major in the majors, right? All right.

And we're live! Natalie Nitam, welcome to The Better Show. Stephanie Esti, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. I wanted to bring your expertise on to The Better Show because you are all about peptides and bioregulators, and I think that there's a really interesting conversation to be had around some of these unique compounds, and I think that they're getting more and more attention. I was actually just out with some neighbors of mine a couple weeks ago, and one of my neighbors was like, "Have you heard about peptides?" I'm like, "Well, stay tuned," because I knew that, yeah, as a matter of fact, I'm prepping for this conversation in a couple of weeks. So I thought we might just start off by talking about what, let's actually, what define what a peptide is for the listener, and then we can start to, I would like to actually explore the peptide theory of aging, which I know is distinct from some of the other theories of aging around senescence and mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress and inflammation, etcetera. So let's talk about what a peptide is, and then let's explore the peptide theory of aging.

Sure. So a peptide is really, by definition, it's a small protein. So it's a protein. Proteins are made up of amino acids, which are, we call them the building blocks of protein. And a peptide is made up of 50 or fewer amino acids. Proteins can be hundreds, if not thousands, of amino acids long, and then, you know, folded into these intricate little origami shapes. And peptides aren't that different, except they're just smaller. Your listeners have heard of peptides before, even if they sit and don't think they have. The most popular, well-known peptide anybody's heard of is insulin. Insulin is a peptide. Now, the peptides that we're going to talk about today, for the most part, and it depends if we're talking about the longer chain peptides or if we're talking about the bioregulator peptides. So I'll just jump right in and define, distinguish those for the audience now, and then we'll get into the theory of aging.

So the longer chain peptides, which people may have heard of, are things like BPC-157, which is body, BPC stands for Body Protective Compound. So BPC-157, things like CJC-1295, Ipamorelin, GHK, which is known as the copper peptide, and I know you maybe wanted to touch on that. There's others like Thymosin Alpha 1, Thymosin Beta 4. These are all thymus peptides. So these are all fragments of naturally occurring peptides in the human body. So they're not the full peptide that occurs in the human body, but they're fragments that scientists have assessed and identified as binding to specific receptors on the surface of cells, and through messaging through the cell, are then able to either initiate cellular cascades, or they're able to influence the expression of your genes, but that's through chemical messengers.

Bioregulator peptides are almost a subset of those peptides, and they are only two to four amino acids long. So they are tiny. They are the tiniest of the tiniest proteins, and that gives them the ability to actually travel into the cell. So the bioregulator peptide doesn't, it does interact with messengers on the cell, but there are specific messengers that then allow them to pass through the cell membrane into the nucleus of the cell, where they are able to bind to DNA. And when they bind to that DNA, they then upregulate the production of very specific proteins. Imagine the DNA helix, and imagine it just unwinding just so to expose a binding site for this very specific amino acid sequence. And what we do, what happens when something binds to your DNA, it elicits a response that causes the production of very specific proteins. And in the case of bioregulator peptides, what's really happening is this kind of rejuvenation at a cellular level of whatever tissue, gland, or organ is being targeted.

So the bioregulators, if you will, target organ systems, organs, very specific tissues or glands. Whereas those longer chain biopeptides that we talked about earlier, it's more about, it's, I mean, sometimes it's targeting tissues and glands, but also, for example, like a BPC-157 is going to have receptors virtually all over the body in different places and so in different tissues. So for example, in skeletal muscle, it's going to upregulate the expression of your growth hormone receptors, so that when you're releasing growth hormone, it's going to be received and it's going to have more of an impact at that space. And what BPC-157 is noted, I mean, it's noted for doing a lot of things, but one of the things it's really good for is promoting the healing of tissues like muscles, tendons, ligaments, that kind of stuff, which we know decreases as we age, right? So like a tendon, even if we talk about in the extreme with an injury, a strain or a sprain, it takes orders of magnitude, it's much longer to heal a tendinous or ligamentous injury in your 40s, 50s, and 60s compared to your 20s or 30s. Maybe in part because we have less. Because this is a naturally occurring compound, is it not? Or it's a peptide? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, go on. Yeah.

But I mean, so BPC-157 originates in the gut. It's part of a much greater complex, and it's, it's like its main claim to fame is that it is incredible at healing any part of the GI tract from your mouth to the, to your, all the way. Right. So it can be a very powerful compound. It has been shown to be a very powerful compound, particularly in animal studies, but there's growing numbers of human studies showing that it is really powerful at stimulating the healing of that whole endothelium, that whole, if you know, for ulcers, for leaky gut, for even there's been studies on colitis and those types of conditions. Now, just to be clear, people, you know, when I first heard about peptides, I was like, "Oh my God, this is it! The Holy Grail! We found the solution! Everybody stop! We're good!" And yes, they're incredibly powerful, and you still need all the other things in place for that healing to to really take place. So, yeah. So if you have a terrible diet, and you're not moving, and you're not managing your stress, and you're sleeping like garbage, and you have pollution, and environmental toxicants, and, you know, endocrine disrupting, you know, chemicals, like the peptides are going to help. But they are, you know, we want to major in the majors, right? So we want to make sure that those are those foundational basics are in place first. And then this is, if I'm understanding you correctly, Nat, this is how we, we layer this. We layer this peptide and or these bioregulator therapies on top of a lifestyle that has already been, I don't want to use the word optimized, but maybe maximized. Maybe maximized.

And sometimes even the, and particularly the bioregulator, in a lot of the studies that they've they've published, often the bioregulators are used as an adjunct to conventional therapy, and they just make it better. So in the case of a BPC-157, when especially when you were talking about musculoskeletal issues, it really, it can accelerate healing in an incredible way. But as I will say to people, you know, in addition to the foundations of lifestyle and diet and sleep and all the things, particularly when it comes to musculoskeletal, and you will, you will get this in spades, is have you addressed the biomechanics of the issue? Right? Because if you have a misalignment of some kind that's driving an imbalance in a muscle, causing a muscle to be strained, sprained, or whatever, and you haven't addressed the, the bio, like the chem, the mechanical imbalance, right? You might help the healing a little bit, but it's just going to, like, you're kind of bailing out a leaky boat, right? So but having said that, it's like these are really powerful tools in in a toolkit.

Um, I just want to say thank you for saying musculoskeletal. Do you know how much, I don't know why this is just a total side note, but so many people, like, you mispronounce it. It's like, I do not mispronounce it. It is musculoskeletal. But I hear so many people say musculoskeletal. So like, tomato, tomato. I just want, I just want to call out that you were pronouncing it. I don't know if it's a Canadian thing, but that's how we were. It's neuromuscular skeletal. But, but, but I digress. Okay. So all right. So let's come back to bioregulators. So my understanding here, bioregulators are very small amino acid sequences or chains. So you said two to four, I think. And then just, and so, and I want to, I want to talk about the, I want to talk about BPC-157 because that to me seems like a bioregulator because it influences the muscles, influences tendons, ligaments. But it's really, and when we were talking about what we were, you know, what are some of the topics that we want to make sure that we cover, BPC-157 was, it's maybe the most famous, at least, you know, for a layman such as myself, that's the one that's most well-known. Why is that not considered a bioregulator? Is this just the history? Is it like the nomenclature? Is it who discovered it? I know that there's, I don't know if there's always, there's always drama between scientists. Is it, is it because it wasn't, I don't, I forget the Russian scientist, I forgot his name. Yes. Is it because it wasn't his discovery and it was someone else's? But we can, but we see it systemically. BPC-157 has systemic. Like a bioregulator for me is something that is going to influence the body systemically. So if I'm, yes and no. Okay. Okay. Let me, let me stop you there.

The reason why, and and there is, however, a peptide that is not a bioregulator that a lot of people think should be a bioregulator. So number one, yes, there is an issue around, you know, it's a little bit like grapes that are not grown in the Champagne region, can't be the wine that's made for them cannot be called Champagne. So there is a piece, there is a little piece of that at play. But when it comes to BPC-157, remember what we said earlier, the bioregulator, the hallmark of the bioregulator is that it can cross the cellular membrane into the nucleus of the cell and bind directly to the DNA. So it is an actual direct epigenetic switch. BPC-157 is too big. It's too many, it's like 19 amino acids or something. So it's too big to get into the cell. So what it does is it impacts the receptors on the surface of the cell, and it does its work from there. Okay? Now, it still will influence certain expression of certain genes sometimes, but that's not its only trick. It's a lot broader than that. And so BPC-157 is going to have impact. It can have impact on the brain. It protects the body from the, it actually is really interesting. They did some study where it protected from the negative effects of steroids, like steroid injections. It also, as you can imagine, because it has so many gut healing properties, it can protect from the negative impact of NSAIDs. What's really, now, ideally, we're not using NSAIDs, but every once in a while, you come across a situation medically where maybe they're required. I don't know. I know there's people that would dispute that. I'm not a doctor, so I'm not, I'm not going to wade into that. But the cool thing is that BPC-157 can go a long way to mitigating the damage. It also has anti-inflammatory effects. It has analgesic effects. It does have balancing effects on the dopaminergic, serotonergic, and GABAergic centers in the brain. It's, it's organ protective. So it's known to be protective for the heart, for the pancreas, for the liver. Like it has, it's kind of like everybody's BFF, right? It can play a role in the whole system. It, it's good for the kid. There's certain studies that have shown that it can be helpful with blood pressure regulation, again, not on its own necessarily. And it always depends. And, you know, the first question everybody always has to ask themselves when we're talking about this stuff, and frankly about anything, is why is this problem happening in the first place? Like, people will often write or say to me, not, "What's the peptide for X?" And I might, I mean, you know, the loathed answer is, it depends. And do you have an understanding of why X is happening? Right? Because if you don't know what's driving X, it's a little bit like the, the biomechanical issue a minute ago. If you don't know, like, it could be that you just, I don't know, you lifted too heavy a weight, like you were doing something crazy like CrossFit, and you were moving too fast, a too high load, and you tore something. Or it could be that you have, you have an imbalance that's putting your body in a position where a muscle or a tendon or a ligament is more, that it should be. So you need to understand those things to understand where does the peptide fit in? What is the right peptide to fit in? And how am I going to resolve the whole issue over the long term?

Okay, so the mechanism. So the distinguishing, you know, coming back to sort of the definition here, just so I can frame this up for the listener as well as myself, is that the bioregulator is going to be acting directly on the DNA because it's getting into the cell nucleus, okay? And then the peptides will be acting as on the, let's say, on the surface, on the receptor, which then can activate, you know, a series of mechanisms within the cell, within the cytoplasm, that's going to affect the, the result. Okay. Thumbs up. Got the thumbs up. All right. Nailed it.

So let's talk about the peptide theory of aging. This is different and distinct from what I have heard most commonly. Like I was mentioning before, we often hear about mitochondrial dysfunction or oxidative stress, stress, you know, inflaming, you know, the accumulation of senescent cells. And there's sort of eight, there's usually, and maybe it's my old age, I can't remember, we're up to 12 now. Okay. So 12 misfolded proteins, cell communication, like all of. Right. All of. Okay. So let's, let's contrast what we know about these 8 to 12 theories of aging, and let's explain what the peptide theory of aging is. And to be honest, the answer is probably a little bit of all of them. You know, it's never going to be like, it's just senescent cells, or it's just cell communication or miscommunication. It's probably all these things happening in tandem, which causes sort of this disregulated and, you know, entropy. Yeah. Yeah. No, 100%.

I think that the peptide theory of aging is something that was put forward by Dr. Khavinson, who is the man who ultimately did 40, his entire life to the research of bioregulator peptides. He actually passed away tragically about a month ago, right around Christmas time. Oh. And, um, and so the, what he put forward as the peptide theory of aging is that our bodies produce these bioregulator peptides in abundance in our youth, and as we age, and or under certain situations of stress, and or in illness, we don't make as many of them, right? So it's not that different than so many other things that we stop being as efficient. Our bodies are less efficient at producing. So I would say that the peptide theory of aging will coexist, if anybody ever cares to develop this whole concept further, it will coexist and overlap with or become one of the hallmarks of aging, right? Because if you look at the hallmarks of aging, a lot of them are a downstream effect of some of the ones that are more upstream. So, so yeah, so that's, that's the peptide theory of aging. It's as simple as that. I'm sure that if we dug into Khavinson's writings, there it might get even more complex, but from a, from a macro perspective, the bottom line is when we're, when we're young, we heal, we regenerate, we keep, you know, it's like you can watch, if you, if anybody's had a baby, and some, God forbid, that baby gets a scrape or a cut, you can literally watch them heal. Whereas to your point that you said earlier, the older we get, the longer it takes for healing to take place, and very often the healing is not as thorough, it's not as seamless as it is when we're younger, right?

Okay, so let's talk about Epitalon, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. This is one of the, I wouldn't call it a master bioregulator, but I hear it all the time. I've heard you talk about it as well. Let's talk a little bit about the effects that it has in the body, some of the research, and some of the potentially mechanisms of action for for why it's, I don't want to say, I've heard you, you know, there's sort of like a stack that I hear you talk about, this is usually included in that. So let's talk about what it is, how it affects the body, what are some of the, what are some of the noted outcomes from it?

Yeah, so, so one, one little sidebar note about bioregulators as well, is that they have many names. So, so the same compound will have many names. So the same compound, and also because you have a synthetic version and you have the biologic version. So maybe, what if you don't mind, I'll spend two seconds explaining what I mean by that. The way that bi, where they come from, where where they, where the supplements that we have access to originate from is ultimately from those tissues, glands, and organs from young animals, right? So they will harvest the pineal glands of young calves and process them and basically extract and and refine a compound from them that is the bioregulator compound. Now, there's, there's, I'm going to throw a few names at you and then I'll define them. We have epithalamia, and we have Epitalon. Epithalamia is the pineal gland that's been prepared into a serum, if you will, that is used as an intramuscular injection. It is probably the most powerful of all three that I've just mentioned. Only it's really the only available for the most part in Russia. You can imagine for many different reasons why people at the border would get a little bit crazy about taking these Russian language, like the alphabet on a package, the alphabet, an extract from an animal's brain, like, what, what, what? No, no, this is not going to work. Yeah, the current social climate as well, some restrictions on, I would imagine, on Russian, yeah, exports. Yeah.

Then we have Endoluten. Endoluten is the, is, is a peptide that is available as an oral capsule. Okay? And in that oral capsule, you have, now, let's say that serum that they had for the intramuscular injection, it is further refined and now it's made into a powder and it's encapsulated. And so people can take it as an oral capsule. Now, a lot of people will say, "Well, wait a minute, if it's a protein, it's an amino acid chain, once it hits the stomach, isn't it just going to get digested?" And so what Khavinson speaks to when it comes to that is because these, these sequences, if you will, are native to the human body, the way that the body breaks down protein in the gut is not necessarily into only single amino acids. It breaks it down into into complexes and compounds that have specific like transporters across the gut membrane. And so he, he says that, and you know, like, I mean, his research has shown, and he says that these bioregulator peptides are sequences that are essentially have transport across the gut into the bloodstream. So they don't get broken down beyond that sequence. And it has to do also because the body will break things down based on the, if, if you have a big protein, there are specific cleavage sites at where the protein will get broken up. And so the bioregulator occurs in within those cleavage sites. So it's not broken down in the gut further than the sequence that's that already exists. Correct.

And then from Endoluten, we now go to Epitalon. So what is Epitalon? Epitalon is a synthetic. It's basically, it's basically that specific amino acid sequence that's been resynthesized in a lab synthetically. So they've basically isolated the three, the four amino acid sequence in the case of Epitalon, because it's amino acids. And they've, they've studied it and they, you know, because because when we're looking at a bioregulator, this is a 3D structure, right? So these are four amino acids that have been arranged in a very specific orientation with very specific bonds between them, like the whole, so that it does what it's supposed to do. So Epitalon is the synthetic. It's the synthetic version of that amino acid sequence that would be the most prevalent in the Endoluten or Epithalamia. You may have other amino acid sequences that are also active, but the Epitalon is the one that is the workhorse. It's the one that really delivers the, the lion's share of results, if you will. So Epitalon can be used either as a subcutaneous injection, or it's also available as a sublingual spray or drops. There's a couple of different manufacturers that that now make it in different forms.

So is this like diamonds versus lab diamonds? Is that what we're, is it sort of kind of? Yeah, I mean, are lab diamonds made of carbon, just like diamonds? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're indistinguishable between. They're just, you know, some guy in a suit, you know, punch. Nobody had to bleed for it, right? Right, right.

Okay, so I, okay, so let's talk about, so there's so many questions that are coming up for me now as we're talking about some of these different, you know, you were, you sort of described the, you know, the bio or like the one that's biologically produced, let's say, in the, in the pineal gland, that's that's extracted, and then we have Endoluten, and then we have Epitalon. What is the difference in efficacy? And then the other thing I wanted to ask you about is the mechanism of delivery. So you mentioned intramuscular, subcutaneous, sublingual. Did you mention nasal? I think you might, or oral. Some of them can be used nasally. The intranasal is more, is on the other, like BPC-157 can be used intranasally. Not all of the bigger ones can be. So anyway, let's stick to one thing. Yeah. So let's, so let's talk about the efficacy of maybe the concentration of some of the, of some of the different forms, moving from sort of, we'll call it bioidentical, maybe all the way down to more synthetic. And then also the mechanism of delivery, how does that change the efficacy of the actual product?

Yeah, I mean, these are really good questions, and I hope, you know, I'll answer to the best of my ability. So the Epithalamia, my understanding, which is the actual extract that is delivered by intramuscular injection, that is the form that Khavinson used in a couple of very impressive studies that he did on humans in Russia, and a lot of people would say it is the most powerful version of the bioregulator, right? And and probably because not only getting that four amino acid chain, but you're also getting co-factors. Like you're getting more than just the four amino acid chain. Endoluten, which is the oral, is, you know, maybe not as powerful as that, but definitely we still see people getting reasonably good results. What I should say about the bioregulators versus, let's say, the longer chain peptides we talked about earlier, is the bioregulator, if you think about what it's doing, it's going to be a slower burn. It's not going to be, you know, take a capsule and wake up the next morning a new person, right? It's going to take time. You're giving the body a signal to do something very specific. It's going to take some time for that to happen. And that is why, you know, we, I mean, I'm, I very often say that almost everything that you take has to be pulsed, right? You do, you do, you go on, you come off, you go on, you come off. With bioregulators, it's especially important because you're giving the body a signal to do something, and it, and I do think it's very important to take, stop, let the body do its thing, and then if you need to repeat, you repeat, depending on what's, what it is that you're trying to affect. But, you know, there's, there's a couple of people running around saying, "Oh, you know, just take Endoluten all the time, always." I'm like, "Why would you do that?" Like, you're disrespecting your, your own physiology. You want to give a signal to the body to do what you want it to do, step away, let it do its thing, and then maybe come back and do another round.

Is that because of the habituation? Like, there's, is there going to be downregulation? No, it's not that. I think it's just more that you just, I think that, you know, like the people that I've learned from will say, you know, there's there's value in stepping away and just letting the body do its thing. So Epitalon, which is the synthetic version of the bioregulators, it, in many ways, people will say that it's the fastest. That form is the fastest acting, and it is the one that in Russia, they will use, especially they will use it first, and they will use it especially with people who are have very sensitive immune systems or have a lot of autoimmune issues, because it's, if you will, it's a cleaner hit, right? It's just the amino acid sequence. There's no fillers, there's no, there's no other co-factors, there's nothing else. It's really just a very specific signal asking the, the pineal gland to to do perform certain things. So, you know, I think that they all have a place and they can all be used a little bit differently. I can talk a little bit about the studies that did with the old people with the Epithalamia, if you want. We can talk about that as well. But with Epitalon, what I've seen is that generally speaking, and this is the other thing with bioregulators, you will feel more from a bioregulator if you're older and if you're out of balance. If you're, let's say, so let's talk a little bit about what Epitalon does, right? So the, the, the constellation of benefits that are touted for Epitalon that people will talk about are that it helps to restore telomeres by activating telomerase, that it normalizes melatonin production, that it helps to reset circadian rhythm, and that it is a master endocrine regulator. It also has really great benefits for the immune system. And in a, a really interesting mouse study on mice that had, I think they were knockouts or I, anyway, they were predisposed to her to breast cancer, mhm, Epitalon, as well as another bioregulator called Vilon, V-I-L-O-N, which is an specific immune bioregulator, but both of them had anti-tumor effects, which means that the the tumors that the mice developed, if they developed them in the first place, were much smaller, and in many cases, they didn't develop tumors. And then they did other rat studies where they showed where they, for example, took these poor little rats and kept them in bright light 24/7 and showed that both the male rats and the female rats developed, if they developed any cancer at all, it was way, way less than they would have normally. So it definitely somehow has anti-tumor effect.

So is everybody in Russia running around taking Epitalon so that they don't get cancer? Not particularly. There, the human studies haven't kept up. And I think what's happened is, you know, 40 years ago, he had blanch, and he had all the money and all the lab rats and all the resources he needed. 30 years ago, he probably was still pretty doing pretty well. 20 years ago, the purse strings started to tighten and tighten and tighten and tighten and tighten, right? So the world has gone in such a place where now, if a, if a drug company, if a pharma company isn't doing the research, it's very hard to get research funded. Having said that, you know, if you, if you dig around, you'll notice that there's a lot of universities even in the states that are doing a lot of research on these bioregulators and on peptides. And, you know, what's, what's kind of the good news, bad news is that it's, it's getting the attention of regulating bodies. As it's gotten the attention of pharma companies, and so access to these things is starting to become much more restricted because they're getting, like, literally the FDA came out in November and issued a list of peptides, including Epitalon, which I don't even know how they made it on that list, but including Epitalon, that reclassified them as class two compounds, which basically means you're not allowed to use them.

Why do you think that is? I mean, we could go down the political, we could sort of speculate in terms of why pharmaceutical companies want to to gatekeep that. Well, they want to own them, right? They own, they they got Thymosin Alpha 1 pulled off the market. Right. And Thymosin Alpha 1 is a peptide that, it's one of the peptides that the thymus gland would produce. So this is a very interesting immune peptide that, you know, when you get people that are whose innate immune system is suppressed, it'll help to bring it up, right? So the, a lot of people are TH2 dominant, and thus, and Alpha 1 will bring up TH1, which helps people overcome viruses. And it got yanked off the market, I think, I want to say 20, at the beginning of 2021, which is really sad because.

Is there any evidence for that? Just as that, just because we're on that, is there any evidence, let's say for individuals that are suffering from long COVID? And you know, and I also just say long COVID, there's any viral infection has the potential to have a long syndrome, meaning that you are for months, at least weeks, but at, you know, in some cases several months after the active infection is gone, that you are still sort of reeling from lower oxygen levels, lower oxygen profusion, respiratory changes, blood pressure changes, cardiopulmonary, you know, fitness is is attenuated. Did, was there any evidence that that might be helpful for individuals recovering from respiratory virus? Any any virus, really? Yeah. And I asked that because there was a few other compounds sort of in the height of of the pandemic where they were completely, they had been used with a very good profile for many many decades. So my my question is potentially just to poke the bear a little bit, but also did with this particular compound, the Thymosin Alpha 1, was there any evidence of helping patients recover from long haul syndrome post viral infection?

I'll one up you on that. There are actually clinical trials that were done in hospitals in other countries where they showed that 10 milligrams a day of Thymosin Alpha 1 kept people off ventilators. Mmm. So, yeah. You know, I think it's, I think these are really weird times. Thymosin Alpha 1 does have orphan drug status in the US. It is, it has, it is sitting on the shelf of of a pharma company. It's called Zadaxin, and it is, it is approved for use as an orphan drug for hepatitis B and C, and it is approved for use as a drug in about 30 different countries in the world. Um, but apparently North America hasn't quite caught up to that yet. Anyway, back to Epitalon. Our, our, back to our, our hero Epitalon, patiently waiting in the way, going, "Wait a minute, how did Thymosin Alpha 1 steal my this?" I wanted my question with Epitalon was halflife. Because you had mentioned cycling. So my question, and maybe this is true for all bioregulators that we're having a conversation about, you said, you know, I really like to cycle. So my my question, of course, is what is the halflife? Or how long does something like Epitalon or Endoluten or the other version, which is escaping right now, Epithalamia, how long do those stay in the human body? And is that one of the justifications that we have or that you're, that you're, that you lean towards or some of your mentors and professors have talked about cycling?

I don't think it's a halflife thing. I really don't. I think that they're they're broken down pretty quickly. And so I can't answer your question, to be honest. I don't know what the halflife act. I could have, I could look that up, but I haven't. So let's talk a little bit about how they get used. So if, let's say you have someone who's middle-aged, right? They're 45 years old, right? Or 50 years old. There you go. I am. And you are. Okay. So at your age, and you don't have any major, let's say you have no major issues going on, and you're like, you know, I just want to give my body some love. I just want to, you know, give my telomeres a little bit of love. I want to, you know, give signals to my system to regenerate wherever possible. I want my pineal gland to stay healthy. So what I might say to someone like you is, if you're going to use the oral bioregulator, you can use Endoluten. You're going to do a 30-day cycle, maybe once every six months. That's all you really need. You're just kind of giving a signal to the body and then you're stepping away. You may notice that when you do that, you may notice that your deep sleep gets a little bit better, or your sleep just generally improves. It doesn't always work that way. If you have good sleep to begin with, it's not like you're going to become a super sleeper.

So here's the thing about the bioregulators also, that's a very important thing to to to know is that they look to restore homeostasis. They're not over pushing, right? And that is part of why they've got a very high safety profile. Because let's say you've got a, and this is the example I almost give in every podcast, so if anybody's heard me on another podcast, forgive me if you've heard this before, but the thyroid bioregulator can be used for someone who's either hyper or hypothyroid, because it's looking, it's it's basically working towards restoring proper function of the thyroid, which means it can be used in both instances. There's no T3 in there, there's no T4 in there, there's no TSH. What it's doing is it's giving a signal at a cellular level to the thyroid gland to kind of regenerate from within. So it's not going to be a, it's not going to be a cure for the thyroid. It maybe may help the thyroid to function better. So in a case like that, if you have someone, let's say who has a thyroid issue, we're not going to say take the thyroid bioregulator and throw away your your desiccated thyroid supplement. We're going to watch and see what happens. So I've seen, what I've seen in the groups is people will say, "You know what? I took this thyroid bioregulator, and after a few months, I was able to start reducing my medication." It doesn't always happen that way, but it can happen.

So sometimes the way we use it in a situation where there is an imbalance is we might say, we're going to start with a 30-day intensive course, so that's two capsules a day for 30 days. And then what we might do is say, "Now, for the next three to four, maybe even six months, we're going to do 10 days a month. We're going to go 10 days, take 20 days off, 10 days, take 20 days off." And you'll notice, and that's when you start to see things starting to kind of come back into balance. Sometimes the next caveat is, very often, it's very rare that you will see a bioregulator being used on its own. And that's what you alluded to at the beginning of this podcast, where you said that you often hear me talk about a triad. I will often talk about the pineal gland bioregulator, the blood vessel bioregulator, and the thymus bioregulator. So I've often said the pineal gland bioregulator is my desert island bioregulator. If I get to have a second one, it's going to be the thymus. And if you're giving me a third, then I'm going to take the blood vessel. Because what am I doing? I'm addressing the major macro systems of the body, right? If we looked at what the pineal gland bioregulator did, and because I'm 60, right? So ostensibly my melatonin production may be starting to decline, my endocrine system may need a little extra support, my telomeres could probably use a little love. So for me, I'm going to use Epitalon more often than someone like you. I might use it every three months. But I want to make sure my pineal gland, because it's regulating all those really critical systems, I want to make sure it's online. I want to make sure my thymus gland is online because that's my immunity. And Lord knows that if something's going to take us out, it's going to be dysfunction in our immune system. And then third, I want to make sure that my macro and micro circulation is optimized, because that way I can get nutrients to my cells and I can remove waste products.

And I apologize if I've asked this before, so just treat me like the beginner that I am, but if we are to follow either the peptide theory of aging or any other theory of aging, as you know, we sort of see cellular function decline over the, like, you know, it's like Poisson's distribution, like the longer you're around, the more chance that there is that something is going to go wrong, right? Yeah. So why would you, let's say, as a, you know, I'm 46, so why as a 46-year-old would I only cycle it versus taking it all the time? Why wouldn't you prophylactically want to take it all the time?

Well, you don't not take it. It's just that you, it's just how frequently you cycle it, right? Okay. The people who are, and there are very few, the people who are advocating for having it on board every day of every week of every month are not none of the people that did the research in Russia. There people, the Russian protocol is cycling. Russian protocol is cycling. It's doing a 30-day. If you have someone who's really sick, you might do two months. You might do four capsules a day. But then almost always, you then taper it down to 10 days a month. So for example, I was in, like, a therapeutic intervention and then a maintenance. That's sort of what I'm. Exactly. And then you're, and then you're kind of like taking off the training wheels, going, "Okay, is it sticking? And do we need to come back?" Right? So it might, you might stop after three or four months, and then it might hold for two or three months, and then you start to see things starting to decline again. So then you might come back again. So there's a lot more art than science at this, right? So you need to be, if you're trying to address some kind of an imbalance, you want to be working with someone so that you're monitoring whatever markers and indicators you have of things improving, so that you can kind of stay on top of, "Okay, is this working? Do we need more? Should we be adding in certain supplements? Should we be adding in certain practices? Is there, are there nutrients, like micronutrients that are lacking? Like we know that if we're trying to support the thyroid, we better be paying attention to iodine and selenium and all the other things that the thyroid needs to do a good job. If the, the adrenals are dragging their butt, which they in modern day often are, do they have enough magnesium and vitamin C and vitamin B6? Like, do they have all the things that they need? And now we want, it's almost like, you know, you don't want to give the signal to an athlete to give you more if they're underfed and worn out, right? You want to make sure they have all the tools that they need, and now you give them that extra push to say, "Give me more."

Did we talk about dosage of Epitalon? Have we got, have we spoken about that yet? Yet? Not yet. No. Okay. So, so this is another one. So for the longest time, when I first came into the space, for the longest time, people were like, "Okay, it's 100 milligrams over 10 days or over 20 days is going to be your loading, is going to be your your protocol per day?" Per day? No, over those days. 10 milligrams a day. Okay. So it turns out that that is the right dosage for Endoluten, for the oral bioregulator. For, for Epitalon, which is the synthetic bioregulator, remember that Epitalon, we said is only the amino acid chain, the workhorse. Yeah, the workhorse. So it turns out that for that, the actual dosage is 100 micrograms. And what happened was that way back when, people were like looking, peeling through the Russian literature, somebody missed a zero, or somebody misplaced a decimal point, or didn't translate something properly, and they said, "Oh, you need 10 milligrams." Actually, it's 0.1 of a milligram is the actual dose. Now, having said that, very often we will, especially when we have people with sleep issues and we're trying to re, readdress the reset things, we'll use up to a milligram a day or 500 micrograms a day. Like, the cool thing is that as far as we know, all the people that did the 10 milligram a day protocols are fine. Nobody, there's been no ill effects. I will tell you that the first time I did a 10 milligram a day protocol, I fell asleep like I never fall asleep during the day. Like I am notorious for, I'm just, I'm just go, go, go until I don't, right? Until at night, and then days go, I'm done. And I wake up in the morning and start again. Wash, rinse, repeat. I'd be sitting at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, kind of like nodding.

Wow. Why do you think that is? I don't know. I mean, it was definitely, it was too much, right? Too much of a good thing for me. It didn't hurt me per se, and maybe it gave a nice boost to my telomeres. But so I don't think anybody really suffered from ill effects as far as we know. But right now, the, the agreed upon protocol for most people, except for a few very stubborn individuals, is 100 micrograms a day would be your kind of standard dose for someone who really doesn't have much any issues going on, who's just really looking to tend their garden, if you will. And that's a loading dose for 10 days. That would be 20 days. With the synthetic? 20 days. Okay. Yes. But very often, what I'll, you know, I'll recommend to sometimes I'll recommend to people like 200 or 500 micrograms. It just depends what's what's happening with the individual. But again, it's really important to help people to understand, look, if we're trying to reset your circadian rhythm and we're trying to restore proper melatonin production, then let's make sure we do all the things right. Let's make sure we see light at the right time of day, like the right light at the right time of day, that you're not fighting to stay awake till one o'clock every morning because for any good or bad reason. Let's do everything we can to support that return to a better circadian cycle.

And, you know, when it comes to the anti-tumor effects of Epitalon, quite apart from whatever actions it may directly have on immunity, it kind of makes sense if you're restoring melatonin production. Melatonin plays a major role in cancer, and if you're not sleeping, we know that's going to increase your chances of cancer. So if it gets you sleeping again, that's a pretty good thing too. So it's, it's, I think that it's, it's got this really nice halo effect on the whole system. But, you know, other ways that I've seen it used that's really interesting and might be really interesting to your audience is, for example, women who still have a cycle, who've lost their cycle for whatever reason. Sometimes if we, if they use the pineal gland bioregulator with the ovarian bioregulator, just those two can help to get their cycle back. It might also be really helpful through perimenopause, just to kind of smooth the bumps in the road.

Well, the sleep, the sleep is the really big, that's the number one issue that my women. Yeah. And supporting the ovaries, right?

As they're moving through their transition, and I would say it would also make really good sense to add the adrenals in there because the adrenals are now, it's a transition period, right? Where the ovaries are kind of giving up the ghost a little bit, the adrenals are being asked to pick up extra load. So, you know, why would we support one and not the other? It just, I think that as a, as a, as a practitioner, as a clinician, the people that I see having the best results are, are people who kind of sit and think about, okay, what are the systems that are involved here? Where are we needing to add, bring support? What do we need to lean into? And so they design, they design their protocols with that whole piece in mind.

And did you mention the name of the ovarian bioregulator? Is there a specific name? Same with the adrenal bio? Yeah, so adrenal is Glandokort. They, they each have three names. I don't always remember all three. I actually have a document that's made that has all three names on it.

Okay, so you said the, uh, Drina Court is the GLT? Pardon me, Gland Court is the adrenal regulator. What is the ovarian bioregulator? I forget the name because one of the brands that I use just says ovarian bioregulator on the box. I really like that. All right, we can cut that out or leave it in. It's up to you. We do, I have no problem letting people know that every once in a while I forget a name. It happens. Yeah, yeah. Okay, that's awesome.

Okay, the other question I had, for example, for a woman in perimenopause, I'm thinking of my Betty, um, thinking of my listeners. Are there any contraindications to either taking any one of these peptides or bioregulators? Subset of peptides, if we were to take Epitalon and the adrenal regulator and the ovarian regulator, are there any contraindications? Is like a history of breast cancer or ovarian cancer or endometriosis or Addison's? You know, is there, are there any, uh, primary reason or any reasons for concern for not taking?

Yeah, so I mean, look, in the, in the, in the case of cancer, the, it's a very hard question to answer, right? Because there's not a laundry list of clinical trials where they've studied the effects of this on people who have cancer today. So, out of an abundance of caution, in the presence of cancer, I probably wouldn't do any of it. Even though there's studies that show that it's helpful, there are a couple. Just don't know. We just don't know right now.

There's, there's a specific immune bioregulator, a synthetic one called Christen, I believe, that they've shown that after radiation and chemotherapy and certain really severe infections, it can help to restore the immune system. And that is really interesting, right? Because I'm not here to tell people not to go for conventional therapy. Sometimes you need it. Sometimes you need that tumor to get removed out of your body. Sometimes you need those cancer cells to be eradicated. Like, and everybody's got to pick their pa, their journey to healing, and there's many different roads to healing. But one thing we know for sure is that some of the, the more aggressive treatments for cancer are extremely damaging to healthy cells in the body. So if we have a tool at our disposal that could, could possibly help to restore some of that function to those systems that may have been damaged along the way of killing the cancer, then that would be something that would be interesting to consider.

So I, and again, I will, we'll put it in the show notes. I'm pretty sure it's Christen, but I was studying Christen. So Ian, it, I may, there's a lot of these have very similar names. There's Christen, there's Kegen, there's. It's the nomenclature is miserable, just to be clear. The person who was the in charge of marketing for these biopeptides needs to be, yeah, needs fired. Is, yeah, maybe we'll say fired, not, not sh, yeah, fired because the names are very confusing.

So I'd like to talk about CJC 1295. I want to talk about semaglutide, which is all the rage with all the cool cats now, and then some. And then I would, I, is GHK? We're G, CU? Is that a bioregulator or? So that's one of the ones that people will say should have been a bio. Only Kevon didn't discover it himself. Okay, let's talk about, let's start there and then we'll go to semaglutide and then CJC 1295. Let's talk about. So let's, so this is, tell me what GHK CU, what does that stand for? What is it about? What is, and what does this bioregulator or peptide, pseudo bio, what does, what does this do in the body?

Yeah, so GHK is super interesting. It's a three amino acid peptide. So right away, we're like, qualifies. Two to four, it qualifies. And it acts directly on DNA. It flips genes. Like it flips like over a thousand genes back to their youthful settings. It's crazy. It's one of the peptides that actually has been studied at, I think it was Stanford University that did a huge study on GHK, and they came back and went, holy jumping, like this thing is crazy town. CU is the, it's the chemical, what's the word I'm looking for? Whatever for copper, right? And so GHK requires copper as a cofactor to do its thing. So very often, it will, when, when people, for example, there's a lot of skincare that has copper GHK copper in it because it's, it's, you know, if BPC157's claim to fame is healing the gut, GHK copper's claim to fame is for skin, for skin benefits.

So is elasticity? What, what does it do? All the things. Things. And it even, it even has been shown to help with healing scar tissue so that it realigns. It actually, it's, and the thing with, with GHK is every time you turn around, there's this new study that came out that says it does something else. It seems to have benefits for the brain, for, it seems to be angiolytic for some people. It seems to, like I said, it helps with scar tissue, it helps to heal wounds. Like it's incredible for wound healing, it's incredible for, for, for skin. So it will be used topically. Now, now the only thing I'll say about topical use of GHK copper, and there's a couple of really good skincare lines that use GHK copper. What I personally have found is that I will get really good results when I, I get, have these little microneedle stamp things, and I'll pump some of my GHK copper serum into the, the mic, the stamp, the little bottle, and I'll stamp, like, I'll do microneedling with the GHK copper.

Oh, Tony was talking about that. Friend Tony came on the show. Tony Yun. I think he was, was it Kor or? I have to look up the name. Q. Is it Q R? Q E? Yes. Qskin.com. And then you, so you're putting, and you're putting that the GHK in that a unit like that where you're standing? I just add it because they send you serums. They send you a growth factor serum and a hyaluronic acid or something. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. And so I take my CH, like, let me peptide this. Yes. Yeah. Never mind. Let's just hack that. So pump in some GHK and off I go.

Okay, so topical. So you like it as a, I guess that would be considered more of like a microneedling. Yeah, that's a microneedling. The other thing with GHK copper is it can be used systemically. So you can, that people will use it as a subcutaneous injection now. And, and I would say that, and I, you know, I just like, I haven't gotten around to it, but I have a vial in my freezer and I'm planning to do a run of subcutaneous. I'm using it topically as well because now you're getting at it from both sides, right? The, the thing about GHK copper is GHK copper as an injection can be very painful for some people. The copper is really stingy. So this is an intramuscular injection that you're referring to? Subcutaneous. Oh, subcutaneous. Okay. Okay. So it's, little insulin needle right under the skin. Now, I do believe that it landed on the FDA's H hit list. I think they didn't miss it trick on that one. I think they wiped everything out. But you're still, all you're still allowed to use it topically. But it, so because it can be really stingy with the copper, as long as you know, you're not deficient in copper, you can use just GHK on its own, and it will find copper, you know, it'll bind to copper in your body as a cofactor. There's some people will mix the GHK copper with, I think some people will, well, first of all, they'll dilute it more, and that seems to help with the stinginess. And it really seems to vary person to person. Some people are like, holy jumping, like that hurt for an hour, and other people are like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I was fine. So it, it seems to depend on the individual. And nobody, I, I don't know that anybody has really identified why some people feel it more than others. Is it because they react to the copper? Like, I, anyway, I don't know. I can tell you that I use JHK copper and BPC 157, and I think I also used a fragment of thymus and beta 4 when I had a cyst removed off my chest, and I was told by every plastic surgeon who I saw that, you know, this is going to scar, you're going to have a major scar, like there's no two ways around it. That part of the body scars dramatically. And I don't have a scar. And that's because it upregulates collagen synthesis of collagen, elastin, and exactly. And the BPC plus I used a fragment of another peptide called TH beta 4, that is antifibrotic. That's so it'll also help with this, reduce the scarring. And then I was using them systemically, and then I was also using a couple of supplements.

Okay, so we have Dr. Is it Picard or Picart? Dr. Lauren Picart is the guy that discovered the, the copper peptide. There's, he's got a, he's got a very extensive line of products for sure. There's another company called RestoraCell, who I would say, you know, took the, got rid of a lot of the stuff you might not want in your, in your product, in your skincare products. They took those out. So they have their, theirs is the, I use their medical grade serum. They've got an eye cream. If, and they have a very streamlined line. One of the name again, just so I can make sure we get this in the show notes. What was the name? RestoraCell. RestoraCell. Okay. And so this is just pure GHK copper with copper? Yeah, so it's a 3% solution. So the thing with the serums is you can't get 100% copper serum for, I don't know what the reason is, but I think it, you know, nobody goes beyond 3%. So that seems to be the concentration that is appropriate for topical use. It also actually, yeah, I was just reading up on it. It, there was another study that showed that it had, it helps with healing all tissues. So it also has gut healing benefits because it, you know, when you, when you introduce something into the body that heals tissues, it's not going to necessarily distinguish. So anything that seems to be damaged will should benefit. And I was reading, just in preparation for our conversation, knowing that I wanted to bring up this particular compound for our discussion, was that it, and I, it also seems to have anti-tumor and anti-cancer action as well, especially for skin cancer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so that's really cool. They're pleiotropic. I think the word pleiotropic was probably invented for peptides, for peptides, because you'll find very few peptides that do one thing. They all do a bunch of stuff. It's just a question of how, how deeply they do any one thing.

So if you want to do, you want to go to CJC 1295 and then finish off with a big bang with the semaglutide? Sure. Let's go there. Yeah, so CJC 1295. Yeah, let's talk about, let's talk about that and what it does. Yeah, so CJC-1295 is basically a chunk of growth hormone, of the growth hormone protein. And growth hormone is a big molecule. And so this is just a chunk of it. And what it does is it, and it's very often used in conjunction with another peptide called Ipamorelin. So we have growth hormone releasing hormone, which is the CJC-1295, and growth hormone releasing peptide, which is Ipamorelin. And they basically, between the two of them, they signal the brain to produce, to upregulate the production of your own growth hormone and to release it. So the, the reason why people will use this combination or just the CJC-1295 is because as we age, we make less growth hormone. We know that that production starts to go down. And so very often people who are like athletes are looking for faster recovery. And so it helps you obviously to heal. And remember we talked about BPC157 upregulating the expression of those growth hormone receptors? So very often, you know, your typical healing stack will have BPC157, that Thymosin beta 4 that I kind of alluded to a minute ago, and then CJC-1295 and Ipamorelin because between the three of them, you've got like this superhero kind of increase in satellite cells, like muscle. If we're talking about muscle cells, it's like increase in the satellite cells around the myocyte, then you can increase your muscle mass and your bone density. Let's say through, yeah, and mostly I think you, you're improving your ability to recover from your workouts and repair, right? Right. And so, and so the CJC-1295 also, in some people, and I would say that it's, I see it more in men than in women typically, but it's very often for some people, it helps them to lean out. So it promotes lean muscle and it does help to some degree with lipolysis. And it, of course, it's harder for women. What everything's hard. We're just more complex. We're not one trick ponies. We're like, yeah, and you know, like you got one trick up your sleeve. Figure the way the female body will figure out a way to resist it. No problem. Now, I will say for some women, it does work, but for many women, it doesn't. And then, but one, one thing that it does do, and it's very often used at bedtime, one thing that it does seem to do very well for a lot of people, it seems to help with sleep. And of course, you want it to help put you to sleep.

Now, a couple of caveats around this particular combo. Number one, it's, of, of all the peptides, I would say this is the one that I see the most people having histamine reactions to. So it is possible that your body will put up a red flag and go, no, no, no, no, there would be none of that. And sometimes you tolerate it for a month. These are the funniest emails and notes in the groups is people are so upset because they're like, I don't understand. I was using it fine, it was fine for a month, and now all of a sudden, you know, I'm, I'm reacting to it. And it's like, they're so, this is not fair. Somebody call someone and make it stop. And it's like, actually, are there lesser, are there lesser forms of it? In the same way that Ipamorelin has sort of three different forms? Is it? Yeah, no, I would say that for me, I don't touch any of the, there's a few peptides in this, in this family. I don't touch any of them. Now, there is a possibility that I might be able to use something called Tesamorelin, but I would say that the CJC, the Ipamorelin, even Tesamorelin, which is very similar. Tesamorelin was developed, is very similar to CJC-1295. It was developed specifically as a drug for men who were on HIV medications that was causing them to develop visceral fat. And Tesamorelin is used at a much higher dose, but it targets specifically visceral fat, although it seems to also be helpful just for belly fat in general. But it ends up being a lot more expensive because you're using it at almost 10 times the dose that you would the CJC and the Ipamorelin. So, so, so know that it can cause a histamine response. Also, people very often will get a, very often will get a bit of a flush when they do their injection at first, and a little bit of racing heart. If somebody has high blood pressure to begin with, I would say be very cautious because it can increase blood pressure. So, you know, so there's a bit more caveats here, right? Because now we're kind of, we're pushing, we're pushing the envelope on growth hormone, which we know very much lives in a, in a Cinderella place. Like, you want just enough, not too much. You don't want to, you don't want to poke the bear when it comes to growth hormone necessarily. It's never going to be as strong a stimulus as exogenous GR growth hormone would be. Like, you will never get to those numbers using these peptides. Nevertheless, again, in the presence of active cancer, you never want to touch this stuff, right? You don't want to be using a growth promoting agent when your body is already harboring cells that are growing more than they should be.

I wonder, I wonder what the, you know, yourself included, in some of the individuals that you mentioned where it's fine for a month and then they're starting to have this sort of disregulated immune response to it. Is that like TH2 dominant? Is that when, is that people who might need to support more of their immune, like what is causing that disregulation or do we not? Yeah, I don't, I don't really know. Like, I remember doing a TA, like what I did at the time is I, I used Thymosin Alpha 1 for a couple of months, and then I went back and then I did like a baby dose of Ipamorelin and Stephanie, it felt like my head was filled with ants. Like I was just like, okay, this is a sign to step away. Just step away. Figure out other ways to increase your growth hormone. Go lift some heavy weights. Hang out in a sauna. Do something else, right? You know, like do the other things. So one of an important thing with peptides, I think, is keep a journal. Don't get attached to an outcome. Be open to the the possibility that your body may or may not agree with your course of action. And get educated. Like, you know, don't, don't be the person that shows up pops up in a Facebook group and says, so I just went shopping and I bought all these things, now what do I do? Right? You know, like, and what is the dosage recommendation here?

So we were talking about dosage of, of some of the other. So, so on these, I would say like a good starting dose, and dosage is a real, it's a total moving target. But a starting dose on the CJC, Ipamorelin might be 150 micrograms of the CJC. And then I like, I was taught, and I know a lot of people still do, a one to 1.5 ratio of CJC to Ipamorelin. So I think it's 150 of CJC and 225 of the Ipamorelin. Very often when you buy them, when you buy those two, you'll get 3 milligrams of CJC and 4.5 milligrams of Ipamorelin in the same vial. So your ratios just work out. But you can also use them one to one. And then some people will use higher doses. I just think, you know, you got to start low, increase slowly, and see where you land. But again, like always, it's especially with peptides, always look for your minimum effective dose, right? If you're getting results at 150 or 125 micrograms, why are you going to 300? It's not necessary. And this is a intramuscular? Subcutaneous? Subcutaneous. Subcutaneous. And all, like from what I've heard you talk about, subcutaneous is sort of like the ideal mechanism of delivery, if possible. It seems like. And then there's other efficient. It's most efficient. Okay. But you can still, you can still find them in capsule form? No. Oral? Yes. CJC? No. No. Okay. BPC57? Yes. Thymosin Alpha 1? No, not until somebody does something to make it stable in the gut. GHK? I have seen capsules. I haven't heard too many people talk about what their experience has been. It's relatively new. But you know, a lot of these are not particularly bioavailable orally because they would get broken down and digested in the gut.

So moving on to your, to our final contestants, semaglutide and tirzepatide. Now, you only brought up semaglutide. I'm going to bring up tirzepatide because let's talk about GLP1 agonists in general. GLP1 agonists in general. So these are these are pharmaceutical drugs. So this is where pharma stepped in and said, hey, there's this stuff called GLP1. Check out what it does in the human body. This is super cool. Imagine if we could make it stick around longer than a few seconds or a minute. What would the benefits be? And they hacked away at it. And they deserve credit. Like they spent the millions of dollars on R&D and figured out a way to extend the half-life of these compounds so that they stick around for days, not minutes or hours, and exert a constellation of effects metabolically on the body that has really done wonders for people who were very stuck in their fat loss journeys. And I will put postmenopausal women in that category because, you know, when we, we both know, like you'll meet women who went through menopause and they're doing it all right. You know, they've got it all dialed in. And there's 10, 15, sometimes 20, sometimes more pounds that they just can't drop. And these compounds are incredible at convincing, in 90% of the time, at convincing the body to just release weight. And the reason for that, I think, is because they act on through so many different pathways. It's not just that you're not as hungry. It's not just that it's basically, it's not just an appetite suppressant, but it is an appetite suppressant because it acts on the food reward system of the brain, which actually turns out it may have some side benefits on people who are trying to stop drinking or smoking or drugs or whatever. It seems to have some applications there. But it also bumps up your resting metabolic rate. It also slows down your gastric emptying, which can cause problems in some people, but definitely you stay fuller longer and you can't eat as much. So we've got, we're going at it both sides. And then it also improves your insulin sensitivity. So once you have glucose in the bloodstream, it can get into the cells more easily, and in particular, in skeletal muscle, which should, if you have the right coaching and the right person, make it easier for people to now start exercising again, which is critical when you're using these compounds, right? It has benefits for the brain because it improves insulin sensitivity. And so if somebody's becoming slowly insulin resistant in their brain, and so they've got the brain fog, they're not functioning as well, there's going to be some benefits there. And it's also, GLP1s are also being studied for treating Alzheimer's in the case where you have an Alzheimer's person who has that type three diabetes, if it will, if you will, insulin resistance in the brain.

Well, I think semaglutide and G, they're interesting in so far as yes, they do help with like obesity is a very complex disease. So this is where I've actually also changed and evolved my opinion where I used to sort of have this sort of nose up in the air like, it's just a willpower thing, just stop eating. And of course, that's completely oversimplifying the problem. So it can really help, as you were saying, with the app, with the reward systems. It does seem to, like with individuals who are obese, they do seem to have an overactive serotonergic and dopaminergic, like a reward system as it relates to food and other behaviors. So often when you see food addiction, you'll see other addictive behaviors sort of in tandem with it. The other thing that's interesting, I was reading a paper the other day on cardiovascular risk, and it does seem to also augment or, we'll say, improve cardiovascular risk, which is also another thing. And I will hammer this home for my women, it's not breast cancer that's going to get you, it's cardiovascular disease. This is the number one killer. Not to say that breast cancer doesn't happen, of course it does, it runs in my family, but cardiovascular disease is the thing that's going to get most women. It is the number one killer. It's like cerebrovascular and cardiovascular disease. So it's, you know, to your point earlier at the top of our conversation with like the, you know, with the nutrient delivery and the bio for the blood, this is also very important. The problem with semaglutide and other GLP1 agonists is that like the weight loss, it does seem to be, you're losing fat, but you're also losing a lot of muscle mass. So to your point around getting back into the gym and establishing some of these habits of exercise and that mechanical stimulus to the muscle is going to be very important. The other, the other issue, the other thing I would say to that, I would add to that is nutrition, because you're not going to be able to eat as much. You're not going to, it's, you know, as it is, I'm sure you know this better than me, as it is, people are not getting enough protein in their diet to begin with, right? And so now you have less appetite, and so now you really aren't getting enough protein. So essential amino acids and, and even sometimes BCAAs post-workout is becomes critical to the equation. You've got to feed that muscle. You've got to eat protein first and eat it like it's your job. And make sure you stay hydrated because guess what? As your appetite diminishes, you just don't care as much about putting things in your mouth. House, basically you don't want to drink, you don't want to eat that much.

So sorry, I just wanted to interject. No, that's a great point, and I'm glad that you did. And I, I think the other thing to keep in mind is when you go on a drug that is going to promote weight loss in the way that semaglutide and some of these other ones do, um, what it also seems to be the case is once you stop these drugs, that some of those, you know, we'll say suppressive effects also disappear, and your body, most people will gain the weight back. And in some cases, we're seeing more so. So your body will overcompensate. So your hunger becomes, because it's been suppressed, will overcompensate for that. So you have to make a decision like, is this something I'm going to be on for the rest of my life? Or am I going to be putting in some, again, like majoring in the majors, am I going to be making sure that I'm mechanically stimulating the muscle, that I'm prioritizing protein to your point? So that, yeah, it's the way I position it to people is this is an invitation to reconsider your nutrition and lifestyle habits. Sure. I would say that for most people, well, not most, for many people, if they, they kind of rebalance the nutrition, if they adopt better lifestyle habits, get back into exercise. So now the gym becomes a, I get to, as opposed to I have to. So it becomes a thing that they do and they look forward to it. Because let's face it, if you're carrying 50, 60 extra pounds around, nobody feels like going to the gym. You feel like you're tired, you're exhausted, you can't move, your mobility, you're inflamed, all those things. So what we do see happening is as people start to lose weight, it's like, you know, it's like a load's come off and they feel, oh my God, look at what I get to do. And so I think that for, for a number of people, for a percentage of people, if they've really fixed their diet, if they've really addressed the lifestyle issues that need to be addressed, they can come off of these things and stay off. But sometimes, or sometimes after six months, they'll need a little tune-up or something. They'll go back on for like a month or two, just to, at, at a very low dose. But there is definitely a portion of the population that seems to need even a prophylactic, like small dose ongoingly. There's, there are some doctors out there who believe that the metabolic benefits are good enough that it actually could be a good thing from a healthy aging perspective to stay on a very low dose long term. You know, I think it's going to come down to the individual. I think we have to be cognizant of the fact that this is a tool, and ideally, the ultimate goal should be to use it for good and try to develop habits and maybe use other tools when you come off. Like, there's some really good supplements out there that might be helpful in weaning off the GLP1s. Like I've seen people be really successful with some of the supplements that have a peptide in them called GDF1, which is nowhere near as powerful as the GLP1 agonist, but might be just enough. Plus they're combined with like bitter melon and dihydroberberine. Like there's a lot of other good ingredients in there. And so maybe they come off the GLP1 agonist and now they move on to a supplement like that that helps to keep things more even. But there's no doubt that depending on the individual, if the, if the cravings come raging back, it, there may be a, there probably is a percentage of the population that may need to be on these long term. Right? I'm not, it's, it's like what you said earlier, you know, anybody who's done any work in this field understands that for there are some people that moving less and like moving more and eating less ain't going to cut it. Right? I think every menopausal woman is like, hey, I'm doing the same thing that I did when I was 30, and it is not the same. It's not the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I have seen menopausal women drop the weight and in some cases, I've seen them keep it off and come off of them. So I mean, I used it for about a year and I, I never gone back to where I was before I started. Nice.

So, so we've talked about a lot. We've really, truth, we just, we've just in my, like, just in preparing for our conversation, we've only talked about a few of sort of the bigger players, let's say. There are so many others that I was reading about and I was like, God, there's no way we're going to have time to talk about all of these. But if people are looking to source them, so we mentioned that, you know, there are ones that have already been pulled off the market. Are there places that you would recommend sourcing them? And then my other comment, I'm sure that you would agree with this, is probably not the best idea to go it alone. Like, you probably want to be working with a practitioner, maybe someone such as yourself who has some toolage, some instruction, some formal instruction in peptides and their management. So is there a resource? I don't know if you see clients, or is there, is there sort of a directory of, of, of practitioners who work with peptides? If so, drop the link, tell us where people can find you. And then where can people find these peptides themselves? Because it doesn't seem like you can just walk into, you know, your local drugstore, your local Walgreens, or whatever, and be like, hey, I would like some CJC 12.95. Like, no one's going to know. You're not going to fly. Yeah, not gonna fly.

So, so a couple of things. Number one is at this stage of the game, for the most part, the, even in like, especially in the states where compounding pharmacies were a major source of peptides, most comp, a lot of the compounding pharmacies have stopped since selling them because of the FDA regulations. So a lot of, a lot of people are now, and were before even, are getting their peptides as research chemicals from com, from research labs. And those research labs are popping up like mushrooms all over the place. Like, it's, I'm blown away by the number of people who've decided to hang up a shingle. So I'm pretty picky about where I get my peptides and where, if I, if people decide they want to go down that road, I have a page on my website on netnm.com that is the peptide and bioregulator page. So all the links and are there. And those are the, those are the places that I go and I trust. In Canada, if you have a lot of Canadian listeners, things are a little bit complicated here because Canada Customs is pretty, can be pretty sticky about letting some of this stuff in. There are a couple of vendors in Canada, and there is one vendor in the states that will ship to Canada. So until, until you know, let's see, I think the, like the, we have, we have listeners all over the world, but they're primarily American. So is there American resources, especially? It seems like when it's more difficult for Americans to be coming across it. For sure, for sure. So all, all on that page. So my, you, it's all on your page. Okay. It's all on my page. For practitioners, if you, if you, I would say that if you have a medical condition that you're trying to manage and looking to see if peptides can be helpful for you, then what you want to do is go to the A4M website and find a doctor on their. I believe they have a directory there. And there are medical doctors who are, are very familiar with peptides. Where now you want to bring those two worlds together, right? I've also on my podcast, I've hosted a lot of those doctors. I'm always looking for medical doctors who are functional and who who delve into the world of peptides. And there's some really good ones. And most of them practice telemedicine to some degree. In Canada, it's a little trickier. We don't, I don't, I haven't come across too many docs that are working with peptides yet. There's people, I mean, I do, I don't do as much as I used to, but I do have a couple of coaches that I will guide people to depending on what their issues are for, for guidance. And a lot of them will do like a one session deep dive if somebody's just saying, look, I just want an hour of your time to understand, get my footing in this, in this business, and what to do. But do your due diligence, guys. There's, like I said, I've got a lot of podcast episodes on the topics. There's a couple of books around that. There's one by Dr. William C. It's called Peptide Protocols Volume One, that is kind of like, it's a little bit geared to the practitioner, but I think for, for an, a fairly educated layperson, who I think you probably have a lot of those people in your audience, it would be a good starting, getting your foot in the door. There's a new one coming out in March by Dr. Suzanne Fet Turner, and she's, so she's pushing out a peptide book, and her book is great. Like, I just finished them, you know, I'm just going through the manuscript now. And yeah, I mean, for the bioregulators and stuff like that, there aren't as many resources around. I have, um, private membership community on on Mighty Networks where we talk about them a lot and we do a lot of different things in there. So if anybody's interested in learning a bit more about that, if they go to my website, Natnitm.com, everything's there, like the Nat recommends pages and the BSP community. Beautiful.

All right, well, make sure those are all clickable links in the show notes. This was such a delight. It was such a delight. It was so wonderful talking to you. And I think that I have, I mean, I have more questions about even just going further down the rabbit hole, as they say, on other compounds and practices. So I think that there's certainly like room for another episode here for sure. For sure. I'd love to. It would be great. This was super fun. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you, Stephanie, for.