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

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

Dr. Abud Bakri, MD, is a board-certified internal medicine physician and expert in the science and clinical use of peptides. We discuss the history, uses, sourcing and safety of BPC-157, GHK-Cu, pinealon, epithalon, GLP-1s, retatrutide, melanotan and growth hormone-promoting peptides. We discuss the gap that exists between animal and human data and meaningful differences in the sources for different peptides. For those interested in peptides, Dr. Bakri provides a grounded look at the science, risks and uncertainties shaping the field today. Read the show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Lingo: https://hellolingo.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Abud Bakri (00:03:33) What are Peptides?, Receptors (00:06:26) BPC-157, Discovery, Animal Proteins (00:11:19) BPC-157, Animal Data, Regeneration (00:12:27) Sponsors: Eight Sleep & Lingo (00:14:51) BPC-157, Regeneration & Healing, Neurological Effects (00:19:27) Adverse Events, Clinical Trials & Legality of BPC-157 (00:29:41) GLPs & Compounding Pharmacy; Peptides & Gray Market (00:35:25) Manufacturing, Compounding Pharmacies, Gray Market, Black Market (00:41:32) Peptides & Tumor Growth?; Angiogenesis (00:45:17) Sponsor: AG1 (00:47:01) Pharmaceutical Patents, Clinical Trials for BPC-157, Potential Outcomes (00:54:19) BPC-157 Healing, Patient Experiences (01:01:22) Physician Counsel, FDA Legality, Malpractice (01:07:25) Pinealon, Epithalon, Discovery; Sleep & Cognitive Performance, Risks (01:18:17) Sponsor: Function (01:19:55) Pineal Age Deterioration, Epithalon, Eye Health (01:29:38) Thymus, Age Shrinkage; Thymosin Alpha-1, Immune Function (01:38:13) TB-500; Pet Health; Thymic Peptide Doses, Thymulin, Zinc (01:49:13) Sponsor: LMNT (01:50:33) GHK-Cu (Copper GHK), Collagen (01:55:32) Illness Recovery, Thymic Score, Tool: Blood Test & Immune Cell Counts (02:04:01) Growth Hormone Secretagogues, Age Decline, Cancer Risk, Insulin (02:15:36) GHK-Cu, Topical Cream, Red Light Therapy (02:20:25) GLPs, Discovery, Physical & Cognitive Long-Term Effects, Fertility (02:33:53) Retatrutide; Drug Patents & Nomenclature (02:39:03) Peptides: Women Reproductive Disorders; TBI, Neurologic Effect; Safe Sources (02:45:34) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow, Reviews & Feedback, Sponsors, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

People are now stacking their GLP1 as their insulin sensitivity tool, their growth hormone or their GHRH, and their antigen 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 terseptide or reticutide, whatever it may be,

and then using a growth hormone modulation, if you can afford growth hormone or test hormone, Ipermoreland, 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. Abud 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, Monjarro, and Retutriutide, 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 Tessa Morellin, MK677, 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 epithalin and pinealine, 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. Bakri has truly encyclopedic knowledge

about these peptides. He is also formally 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 formally 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. Bakrari, is a true masterclass on peptides. By the end of today's discussion, I promise you, again, thanks to to him that you will be among the most informed, doctor or otherwise, about peptides from the GLP to BPC 157 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. Abud Bakri. Dr. Abud 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 interested, let's call it a peptide curious person out there? So 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 can be broken down, it's 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 GLOP1s, which have a very strong clinical effect, compared to these obscure peptides like BPC-157, TB5. 500 TB4 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 157 or TB4. Just stopping right there. There's a very interesting distinction. I don't think anyone else has described peptides this way. Let's take BPC 157 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 into 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 the enderceptor, like the enderceptor binds DHS 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 Ponellion 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. Yeah. One is has known receptors, plural, like the GLPs. Yep. 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. Yeah. Okay. 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 157. 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-157?

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-strived medicines is the way you think about it. You think about aspirin. You think about metformin. The statins, those are all discovered in, you know, plant tissues. Staten's 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 eventually named BPC. It's a 40,000 Dalton giant peptide called BPC. BPC 157 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 bring, 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? The Pavlov, the famous scientist that would do the experience on the dogs with the bell. and making the dog salivate. The other work he did was on gastric juices of dogs. What he'd do is he'd put a hole in dogs' stomachs. He would feed them food and then get the gastic 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 a, like, a call code? It was like enter pavlo for discount at checkout. Yeah. Amazing.

So this is BPC or 4BCP, BPC-15-E exist. There's probably other peptides and compounds in there, but they found that gastic juices had positive. effects on healing, on people that had, you know, GERD and these kind of... 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. Some people would try it 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, Han Sili, that's coming up with the stress adaptation theory. And he notices that animals are stressed out.

Three things happens to them. Their adrenals will 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 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, like, hey, Pavlov had this gastric juice. Han Sili said that there was damage 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 screllan, 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 things in it, many peptides.

Just Pepsi and like upset stomach and this kind of stuff is what people were thinking about. Do the reports point to the fact that it might have worked, independent of what was sold on Dr. Pavlov's non-existent website? This was in like the early 1900s. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then Celia was, what, 1930s? I think so, yeah.

It was about 100 years ago. Someone will correct us if you're wrong. And this other group in Croatia was 91. 91. Okay. Their first paper talks about this. Like, hey, there must be some kind of compound. They identified the big 40 Dalton protein BPC.

And then they were like, what's causing the actual biological effects? They identify PPC 15 amino acid peptide that's causing all these effects. There's actually more peptides in gas juices that, some other scientists may or may not have already identified. This field of peptides are going to be very interesting because almost every organ has a signature of peptides. Like if you think back, Dr. Vladimir Vulevich in 1850s, 1880s, finds carnacine and carnitine in muscle of cattle.

So you can think about the first peptides that are found are carnacine, and then carnitine is the amino acid 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? Guptopetized my have gut effects. So this Croatian group isolates this 15 amino acid kind of mini segment 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? Yep. 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 interperitoneal administrations, and they'd have faster healing times.

They would sever ACLs of the mice. They would 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 on topically for the mouse, they would have no gastric ulcers. They name it as this anti-stress compound. It's how 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 muscle injuries. But the original idea of BPC was to use it as a gastric treatment, not to use it as a musculoskeletal. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, 8Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.

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Again, that's hellolingo.com slash Huberman. 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. It's 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. 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 fiberblast 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 endothel layer or the epithel layer of different tissues, you'll get more VEGF signaling. So that's the vascular endothelial growth factor. So get more blood vessels androgenesis being formed, which creates all of the controversy around BBC safety. You'll get cell migrati,

especially when coupled with TB 500 and TB4, you'll get more access of the healing factors to the area through angiogenic 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-157 to these mice. And usually when you have a wound,

you give corticosteroids, the cortic steroids 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, 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. Bocker 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 just somehow hitting the gas pedal on all these regenerative, restorative, biological processes? 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 their regrowth of it. So there's that theory there. Downstream, it will 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 the tendons 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 BBC and they'd get less drunk when they go through mazes. Oh, boy. Okay. We did not just recommend you take BBC with alcohol. I just want to be very clear. But people are good, you know, we'll do their own interpretation. So I'm being semi-fascitious, but very interesting. And then also they would get the mice drunk and then have them withdraw from

alcohol. And that withdrawal is deadly. If we have a patient in the hospital that withdrawals, 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, and then gastric effects are way more interesting when it comes to that because it's modulating the gut brain access 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 they're

It seems like it's a blunt thing that's at all. So it's doing something from doponergic signaling on both sides, both withdrawal when it comes to like the gapenurgic side, but also the peak of signaling. So if you like peruse Reddit, which you should never do, you'll find all these anhedonia discussions about BPC. People feel like depressed and low energy. Incredible. So it seems to be homolyostatic. 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 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 contamination or something of that sort. In the literature, when it comes to

the animal data, they've injected animals with, you know, a thousand times the dose of BPC with no real adverse effects. So there isn't, we don't even know the LD 50

of BPC, which makes it hard for it to become an FDA-approved. Maybe defined as Z-Z-50. L-D-50 is the dose of which would kill 50% of the animals if it was administered to them.

So we don't even know what that is. And that's actually an important number as, as, you know, barbaric as it sounds, to determine for any drug. Yeah. What's the LD 50 for caffeine? What's the LD 50 for aspirin? What's the LD.

This is every drug you take folks on or off the counter, you know, a prescription or non-prescription has gone through LD-50 testing in animals. To be a clinician to prescribe this, we need to know what that is, which limits us. Now, there was two very small phase one and phase two trials on rectal BPC, NEMUS 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 those groups wanted to try to treat ulcerative colitis. It's a very miserable condition of where the immune system attacks the lining of the gut in multiple spots. And they use enumas of BPC up to like 80 milligrams, which is much more 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 enameas. They did a phase one in phase two trial. They're doing this daily or they do it once? They did it for a few weeks. And then they re-measureed.

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 push that forward, especially when the legal discussions are happening here in the next few months on BPC. The phase one trial showed no adverse effects. And they didn't even have BPC in the systemic system, too. 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 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-157 by NMA or otherwise. If I were to just draw your blood right now, there's BPC-157 in there in the bigger protein. The bigger BPC protein. I don't think you wouldn't find it. Is it circulating or is it- or is it

or is it restricted to the gun? We don't have that data. 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. Well, the injectable is going to go systemic. And most people are going to take, if they decide to do this, are going to take an oral or an injectable.

They're either going to inject local to the injury. Yes. They can. Or interperitoneal. So they found fragments of the 15. Like, 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 water list now.

So they could figure out if someone had taken BPC. Got it. But we don't know. So, 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 enumas 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 was very small, like 40 patients. There was at least a positive signal 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 who I think are mostly well-intested. 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 they're dating.

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 a dicey area, but I think it's important because you'll hear this. Oh, those are Chinese peptides. Those are Russian studies. Like, 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 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 control trials. I think we're very 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. Yeah. 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 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 is also like when it goes the other way. Right. It could go both ways. But 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 with the monthly drug, unfortunately. Sometimes it heals people, but. So nowadays, is BPC-157 legal in the United States? Like, if I wanted to go online and buy BPC-157, I can do it, right? Legally.

For research purposes only. I thought now under the new regulations 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 one, two, and three.

Category one 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 two, it's like, do not compound. In late 2024, BPC 157, and like 20 other peptides, got moved to this category two list. Since about 2017 to 2024, people have been prescribing BPC in these alternative medicine, anti-aging practices. It gets removed from that list.

Of course, you know, compounding pharmacies re-dolablete as PDA, pedodeca peptide, arginate. But it's the same thing. It's the same, exactly. Really? Yes. One of them will be an acetate, one of them will be an argent, but the PDA is BPC-157.

Because there are many, many, many people selling compounded pentode. Pentadecapeptide. PTA. Did I mispronounce it? Yeah, pentadepeptide arginate. Arginate. Okay. I think the acetate one is the one that's on the category two list.

Now, just in April of this year, it got removed from the category two list. It's not yet on the category one list, which would allow physicians to prescribe it through compounding pharmacies. Now, but they can prescribe the PDA version. People are prescribed in PDA. Yes. Now state medical boards view that very differently. Like, I got a letter from one of the licenses in many states. One of these states reached out to me, it's like, you can't.

You cannot prescribe, not me directly, like to the general public of people in that state, it said, 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. State-by-state loss. What about with telehealth?

So somebody's on the East Coast in a state that allows them to write a script for, let's just call BBC 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 pharmacy, 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 would know to avoid those States, but it's going to be very dicey over the next few years. Okay, a couple of questions. AnakData. 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, from Eastern Europe, had a complete Achilles transaction, not just a terror or a pole, 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. They still got a medal. Familiar with that story. 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 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 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-157. They'd be stupid if they did. They should have, you know, all the best and latest, greatest, greatest treatments, whether exosome, stem cells, other peptides,

anything that wasn't banned. And by the way, I should say BPC-157 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 it's a common practice that athletes will forage into things that can help them that are not yet on the banned substances.

And I mean, good luck proving that BBC was injected a week ago. Because about a time the peptides already gone out of your system, or at least we think based on the pharmacodynamics that we understand now. That story was run with from the research community. They used it as a marketing tool to sell more BPC-157. Because what happened in the field is the GOPO1s come online, you know, late 2021, 2022, with Ozambic and Wegovi, they get the FDA approval for weight loss. There's not enough of 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 Ozambic 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're getting overcharged for drugs here. We definitely are. And the Trump RX has lowered a lot of these prices, by the way, for a lot of these drugs. Now, that time, there was a shortage of semi-glutide and then eventually there's epitide. So the compound 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 these people telling them to do it. Like, Brigham stocking him last week at the Enhan's games. He was like, yeah, the FDA told us to make this stuff, and then they're getting us in trouble. This is Brigham Bueller, who. who runs ways to well and he ran a pharmacy for a long time.

Compounding pharmacy. Yeah. We never actually met in person. One of the best ones, yeah. It's not an ad for pharmacies. We have no business relationship to bring it. So if there's a shortage, compounding pharmacies can jump in the game.

Yes, and they did. And they jumped in very hard. On the GLP's. Yes, and they made a lot of money off the GLP wants. This was billions of dollars being made. Were they selling them for less than standard pharma was selling them? They were less than the OZembek 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 N.P. or the PA. Who takes the difference? The clinician, which is, I don't think it's legal in most states. Wait a second. Or maybe not even federal.

Wait a second. So let's say I wanted to take a Wagovi. Yes. And there's a shortage. I can't get it from who's the big manufacturer. Novenorst. Novenorst 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, $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, I'm cloaked from the process. If you're getting the Novonordis pen, the physician's not involved in that. Sure. No, I'm talking about if I'm drifted towards a compound inversion. So the most of the times when it comes to compound pharmacies, which I don't think is a good practice, the clinician gets a price from the pharmacy.

So the pharmacist will tell you, hey, a vial of semi-glutide costs $150. This clinician can now sell that vial to the patient sell. They're charging an administrative fee, right? It's not a sale, because technically you get cell 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 because it's going to come in a vial. It 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? Yes. And I can assume the difference is going to my clinician. It's going to the clinician. All right. All right. 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 BBC and all these other peptides moving is there's going to be telehealth platforms on every one on every corner now that are going to be like, hey, BBC 199. BBC 29. And they're going to like check out and there's going to be a doctor somewhere in a room that's going to stamp the prescription. But it's just that, you know, e-commerce. It supplements with the 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 shuttered themselves. Peptide sciences, until 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 can sign that many times. And when you paid them, you would have to Venmo them. Yeah. Or you could do it through Zell. 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 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 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 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, you're right.

But the stuff that you get that's non-generic from Nova Noris, from Ui 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 anabolic and things. And I heard him online the other day saying literally that he's tested the gray market. 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 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 America-made peptides. It gets finished here. So the API... They're all from China. Everything's The raw materials? The raw materials, like the semi-glutide you're getting from a compounding pharmacy or a research peptide website, ratatutriotide included, comes from China and then gets either the raw material gets, you know, packaged here. Raw materials or synthesized compound? Because there's a big difference between getting like the raw materials for something

and getting the thing. The synthesized semi-glutide 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 thing in the arms race to make American peptides. So they're all Chinese peptides. Everything's Chinese peptides. There's no 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 on a B12 or a B6 to say, like, the patient had nausea from the traditional semi-glutide. We can compound them with B-12 or B-6 to get around the nausea. and that meets the patient rule. Because there's two ways to get compounded medications.

There's 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 a slight an end? It might help some people. Got it. Anecdotally, people will say that they respond better to the pens, like the actual farmer pens 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 guy went viral on Twitter a few weeks ago. he got red of chutide, started getting darker. He's like, I don't think I'm injecting red of two. Yes. He was injecting melanotene, too. And folks, I realized that 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. Then they're getting filtered into these different, let's just call them stringency bins. Yes. Standard pharma, quote unquote, big pharma being the most stringent. Yeah. Some of the raw materials are overseas. Like I think Lilly'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. That's right. Some are going to be excellent. Some are good. Some are going to be lousy. That's right. Fair?

Okay. The quote-un-un-quote 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 were running experiments in your home? Not on animals. What are 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. 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 reason for research. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the majority of way people are consuming peptides, unfortunately. We should just because of 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 exists. for the last 15, 20 years. Bodybuilders would have anecdotes about BPC-157. They'd inject it post-squots for different injuries. Nobody really cared about it. It was with the GOP-1s and then the banning of the peptides. Plus this, you know, anti-medicine-cicine kick

that's been happening over the last five years. Since the pandemic. 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. 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 is a term. Someone needs to come up with a better term. 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 GHK, you. you copper, and we start talking about things for collagen and skin rejuvenation, there's a big peptide market towards women. I actually think in the long run it's going to exceed, at least financially, the peptide market in men. I think it already has. Because soccer moms become like affiliates, like, you know, Amway and Herbalife was the big thing 20 years ago.

Now soccer moms just do peptide affiliate issues. Where are they getting their peptide websites? The gray market. Yeah, all gray market. We already know that they're not recommended. No. What about black market? What would be considered black market?

Black market is like if you bought it drank. from China. Like, it's very cheap. Like, a vial BPC costs five bucks to make. Like, now someone will sell it to you for $199 plus, depending on where. But at black market, it's either like, you know, your friend in China on WhatsApp sent you a vial of BPC, do not do this, or someone claims they synthesize it in their bathtub. Just like the underground gear, like all those 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 taken 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 someone's those taking estrogen replacement or testosterone. It's 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 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. Absolutely. 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, Texan 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, it's like heroin addicts or diabetics. Right. You're not going intravenience. So that changed everything. That destigmatized.

Now, to be fair, I want to touch on the question about adverse events again. Yep. We're going to spend a couple of minutes talking about some incredible things that we've seen and heard about BPC 157 in terms of its positive effects. The concern I've always had was the angiogenesis, the growth of vascular. 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 BPC 157. Unfortunately, I don't have an injury at the moment, so that would be the only condition in which I'd take it unless you tell 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 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 carterian, GW, was a drug that was very positive. very promising because it had, you know, diabetic implications for metabolism.

Now it's a bodybuilder drug that they use for more cardio. What is this? Carderine, GW. You might have seen it on the Reddit's and those forms, but people use it for... I stay out of Reddit. Yeah, good. It increases your cardio capacity. Gotcha.

And so it's banned on the water list, of course. But it had promised 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 BPC-157. for cancers. Now all that literature comes from one group. So we have to be very careful. It's that one creation group that tells you that it's the safest thing in the world.

All the animal data come from one group or all of it. Interesting. Almost all of it. Very few. There's a couple of Chinese studies on BBC 157. Now they're starting to become more interest here. I think it's a phase two trial on hamstrings happening here in the United States. Really?

Humans. Phase two. We talked to a group, an orthopedic group somewhere on the East Coast. They wanted to do a BBC trial so we consulted with them to kind of... Great. Yeah. So 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 aggregate all this anecdot into one place, ideally and report on it. So that's something we're working on in the background. Is that something you personally or all this is? Yes, yes. We're working on aggregating all this data together into an E1, N-E-1. That study to put it all together.

Because there's all the anecdot 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 hematomater. is getting worse, which makes sense with the VEGF pathway. I've heard this. So a friend and physician who is, I would say, peptide curious slash positive, told me that when he takes BPC 157 for, you know, a shoulder or knee or whatever, that angioma is on his face, the sort of spider web angiomas, not the formal term, forgive me derms, but get worse.

That's 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 mechanism, it does. makes sense. Now, BBC 157 is not a uniform and genesis up regulator. 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. We don't know. And that was 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 what it comes to humans.

Just the one animal. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. 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, BBC 157 to really help people out, especially during the critical illness, because like in ICU, people get gastric ulcers. Like if we knew that it would work, I would love to give them an infusion of VPC 157, 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.

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I get asked all the time by people if they were to take just one supplement, what my recommendation for that supplement B. 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 basis. 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 slash Huberman to get a special offer. For a limited time,

AG1 is giving away a weak supply of AGZ, which is their sleep supplement, and a free bottle of vitamin D3K2 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 slow wave deep sleep and my rapid eye movement sleep, and I absolutely love it. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman to get a weak supply of AGZ and a bottle of D3R2, 3K2 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 through different places. Unfortunately, the company that had the patent under the pleva got acquired by Tava. Tava is this generic pharmaceutical company and they make it, you know, Adderall. So they're making tons of money making Adderall. They don't really care about PPC 157. So they have one of the patents. The other patent expires in like 10 years.

I think Sychric still has it. Dr. Sychric is the guy behind BBC 157. He's in Croatia. He's in Croatia, yeah. Would Teva sell the patent? I'm sure they would if someone made an offer. The problem is 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 peptides. This is what Eli Lili is coming into when it comes to making Reda 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. I'm familiar with some of the ketamine and Ibegain 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. And plus millions of people have already used BPC 157 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 back. So like there's no financial incentive to run the giant study. Unless, like, we crowd fund it as, you know, peptide curious people. Within the category of interesting anecdotal data. Yeah. And in your role as a physician, I realize you're not suggesting these things, but you

have a different picture of this stuff at the level of mechanism and your 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 wards of the hospital, admitting patients from the ER to the floor to the ICU, managing very complex disease, ranging from, you know, 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 reports that you've heard directly from people you trust and for people that who are not incentivized to say these things, like, oh, you know, it made me happier, you know, their skin look better, all the things that one can find in it within.

an affiliate code attached to it. Of those, what do you think are the most interesting, potentially valid claims? And I ask 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 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 heard that you have a good feeling there's quote unquote something there? Yep. And then we'd narrow it down to maybe one or two for sake of the study. 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 proving that it has benefits for ulcer phlytis.

And I don't think we'd need to use an enema. 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 BPC-157 oral capsules versus pentoporzole.

Okay. And you're basing this on the fact that you've seen and heard that people who have GERD get better or feel better when they take it. Okay. And it could be placebo. Yes. I mean, anecdotally, when I travel, I have a bottle of BPC orally. Why is that?

I don't get, you know, travelers diarrhea or, you know, when I, you know, exotic foods in random places, my friends all get sick and I happen not to. Antigote, right? But that's interesting. There seems to be some kind of gut protective effect. And that's what they noticed in 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 gastric track from that offending agent.

Because if you think about it, the gut is the most vulnerable part of the body. It's open to the outside world. It's a tube that runs through you. You can eat something and it can completely destroy you. So you have to have some kind of mechanisms, the prostate glandins, all these different hormones that are made, potentially BPC-157, as 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 neuropsychiatric BBC studies when it comes to addictions.

There's enough anecdot about people talking about addictions and like, hey, I don't really crave insert drug here. Not recommending 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 interference with the reinforcing properties? Just like earlier you said people are getting less drunk, so people are getting less high, it becomes less reinforcing. Or is it somehow touching the craving mechanisms themselves? It's probably touching the craving mechanism through the gut brain access because I don't think it's going systemic either.

I think it's locally in the gut shutting down the neurons from – if you think about it, if BBC 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, protect your vital organs, right? So is BPC part of this giant transatlose? production pathway to protect your vital organs, your brain, your heart, your kidneys from further damage. We had Dr. Diego Borchus, 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 and the gut that signal through the no-dose ganglain, up the Vegas, no-dose gangling to either promote or suppress release of dopamine to make you either approach or avoid certain foods. Very, very interesting. Wow. I would be more than happy to encourage his lab, even get funds for his lab, to do something on this? What are some other categories of interesting effects that deserve careful study? Yep. So we need to see what BBC does on the musculoskelet system. Like that's what the hype is.

That's where everybody is going. So as I look through like what model I would look for, you just 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 trisop tendon type of post-surgical outcome. So like you get your bicep tendon torn. You get a repair. You get BPC either intraoperatively or postoperatively, and you see 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 a lot of athletes are using BPC-157 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 scanner into the muscle, goes systemically in the bloodstream

if you apply it that way. 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, tendinitis in one elbow and tendinize in the other elbow. You could inject into your left elbow

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 used BPC for one injury and I've had results on a different injury. Positive results. I'm like, oh, interesting.

Like that my shoulder feels better, even though I was doing it from elbow or whatever. 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. Yep. 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. Tor.

Yeah. Tore tricep, lifting with people I should have been lifting with. They're much stronger than I was. Purple of them here to hear. Like the pictures I post them on X. It's brutal. I'm like, oh, I'm going to have to have surgery. This sucks.

I don't have time to have surgery because you're in a brace for like three months. And I put BBC 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 PT is like, what the hell are you doing? This is healing so fast. Would I have healed that fast anyways? I don't know.

But that's typically a grade two trisep tear with purple arm from top to bottom. It wasn't grade three because I could still extend. and my elbow. That's usually a three-month recovery. And to be back in three to four weeks was fantastic for me, which is why I'm so excited. What dosage were you injected? A larger dose than people would typically.

Not micrograms. No, no. You were up in the grams. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot higher. I think personally and in some of 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 dosages that would fit in the pile through a peptide science website rather than what actually, we don't know what the human dose is for BBC 157. So there's a lot of work to do just to figure that out.

Like when we spoke 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 raise it up. Like, 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 an interesting BBC case. I've seen other injuries where BBC didn't really help. Much.

I can't match your story. That's a bigger result. I can just say that I had a bad trap neck pole where I couldn't turn my head. And I was like, oh, one of those. And you had some BPC. So it was only, I think only 200 micrograms and just pinned it right into the, that street talk for injected, right into the, you have like upper trap-ish area. Two days later, completely gone.

Of course, I don't know what would have happened had I just waited. But it seemed eerily fast. Yes. And then I stopped taking it. Yep. So there's a guy that, you know, and by the way, that was not gray market. It was obtained through a doctor's prescription from a compounding pharmacy. Yep.

Labelled BPC 157, 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 response. Could be due to bad sourcing. you know, contamination. So we don't know. But not everyone has a great result. And some have no result. Right. But many,

many people report what can only be described as pretty astonishing positive results. Right. That cannot be directly ascribed to the BPC because of the placebo effect, et cetera. 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.

Yep. Is because of stories like this. 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 BBC 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 is 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 in 20 years we find out BPC is as good as, you know, Cicric Slabs says it is,

man, man, people are pissed off. All the, you know, joint replacements and injuries that 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 gym will come up to me. It's like, I'm going to 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 paribiosis studies, these are young animals. Like, I should take your blood and tend to me. We had Tony Wise Corey on the podcast. There was, you know, young blood is rich with these things.

And no, we're not talking about harvesting blood from babies. No, no. Check out the Tony Wise 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. Hyperbole. I see a lot of. It's bad, though. 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, sludging the stuff in the place, this kind of thing. You know, I'm sure when I would. was in my 20s, you know, people in their 50s were probably like, what are these kids doing, you know, and it wasn't in 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. 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 adverse outcome was due to BPC itself to misuse of BPC or to, like, you know, like the factors that 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 menopausal or something for PCOS or whatever, that wouldn't be what to take for PCOS. But you get the idea where 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 kind of 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 out. Well, 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 concern 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 penthouse result, I'll probably get my license provoked. 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 you're going to be a place

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, the legality of them. If they get moved to the category one list and then the state's 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 a 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.

That should be what this looks like, like a frame 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 BPC-157 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 BPC-157 as an oral available supplement because it's not a medication It's never been approved as medication in the United States. So what is BBC's legal status? Is it dietary available? Therefore, because if you cut up an animal and ate its stomach,

you'd probably get some BPC in there. Well, I can buy desiccated liver tablets. I'm eating livers. There's tons of... You can go buy liver at this, like, you won Michelin Star Restaurant, not down this road, but a different road. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like Dr. Cavinson identified many peptides in livers,

like lividin and ovarin that you'd find in your desiccated liver supplement that you eat. It's like the biggest distributors of peptides have been these organ meat companies. companies because each organ has a signature peptide that comes out of it. Do they get absorbed? Yes. Are they bioavailable, active? Dr. Cavinsons' work suggests that it is.

Dr. Vladimir Cavinsinsons is this Russian Soviet scientist that gives us epitallon and thymalin and penelion and all these Russian peptides. Die and tripeptides can be orally available if they're the right shape and size. They're not very well available, but they can be available. So you won't necessarily get it from the organ isolate or from eating the organ. And like if you eat heart, probably very rich in El carnitine, can my body make good use of that? I mean, there's cardiogen, which is one of the heart peptides

that that was scantily 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 another physician has the awareness that BPC 157 might be useful to a patient of theirs that's dealing with a, you know, they had like an ACL tear. Sure.

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 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 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 Lilly charges $1,500 for a pen of some sort of GLP. The physician who prescribes that, are they getting a cut of that? that $1,500? They don't. They don't. But there are kickbacks and, you know,

pharmaceutical incentives and pharma dinners. 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 always incentives in any kind of business,

especially a business as big as pharmaceuticals. Well, physicians are already getting paid. So I'm not saying that, these are peripheral incentives. Well, the farmers also lobby a lot of the medical schools and they, you know, fungings. So there's a lot of...

So there's a relationship there, but it's not cold hard cash. It's not as direct as the compound. Right. 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. Yes. 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 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 anyone recommended it. So 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 they'll cover you for that. Let's say somebody gets hurt taking one of the prescribed pharma g-lps and they're pissed and they sue,

and they sue their doctor or they sue the pharma company. Depending on 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 have pancreatitis, they can claim the doctor is at fault. If someone has deep pockets, they can go out 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 pine nylon. Yeah. Pinelon is one that most people, probably haven't heard of. 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 you 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. finger and effects. Very cool. You're interested in Pinealon for a whole other set of reasons,

but first of all, what is Pineelon and where does it act? Does it have a known receptor? No known receptor. So Pinelion is a tripeptide EDR discovered by the mention of Dr. Vladimir Kavanaugh. He's a Soviet researcher that comes out of this Soviet era research to make soldiers, astronauts, and pilots better. There's a concern that the U.S. might be using lasers to shoot at soldiers. So the Soviet Union tasks him with identifying peptides to do defense soldiers, their eyes, and then they're 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 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 the same thing as astronauts are coming back, they're aged. So Vladimir Kavanaugh is looking at this and he's like, hey, there's got to be a solution for this. There's been literature about using extracts of other tissues, notably the Pineland and the thymis. from late 1800s until this 1970s point that were starting our story and he starts grounding up these extracts and injecting it into these people and then undoing a lot of this aging effects

through pineal extracts and thymus extracts. Because what do these soldiers have? They had very bad circadian rhythmicity so they couldn't sleep properly. They had terrible immunity. They'd get sick often. They'd have autoimmune problems, all these conditions that come with it.

And then they were able to undo this using these organ extracts. So Vladimir Kavanaugh-Kavenson takes it a step further. He looks like, hey, what's causing this effect in these tissues? Like people have been injecting pineal glands in different research models or taking out panell 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 the gland itself.

So then he sequences from the pineal gland, epithelon, and from the thymus gland, a couple different peptides, vilon, thymogen, chrystogen 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 do. Now, you're talking about epithelon, but pinealon... Is not from the pineal gland. It's not from the pineal gland.

Even though everyone... No, I think it's called that because 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 general functioning of pinealocytes. So it's having an effect on the pineal...

And culture, like you take cultured pineal glands, like little piece-eyed gland, you put in a dish, and you associate the cells or keep it, you know, as a little pea-sized thing. And then you give it pineal on and seems to improve the timing and perhaps even the amount of melatonin output from the pineal, these kinds of things. So epitalon does that. So that's a big confusion. I don't know why he named them the way he named them. If everyone knows, please let us know. But epithalon is from the pineal gland. Pinealon comes from a ground up brain extract called cortexin.

And brain has pineal in it. Yeah, but it was the cortex. specifically, not the subcortable regions. So he specifically, not the subcortable regions. That's reassure. So, Vladimir Kavanaugh identifies, he makes it a drug in Russia. It's called epithalamine, which is the pinealovine extract and had great effect on circadian rhythmicity and meltonic.

That makes sense because it's rich with melatonin. There you go. It's basically giving people melatonin. But also you operate the enzyme that creates melatonin from serotonin to an acetyl serotonin to melatonin. So like when he gave it to young monkeys, the monkeys had no effect. But he gave it to age monkeys that have decreased melatonin and, you know, from purestotin, everybody onwards, your melaton levels dramatically decrease.

He was able to restore meltonin production in these aged animals and eventually replicated it on humans. I want to talk about Fymus because it's fascinating and you're truly averse in this. But before we do that, so pinealineal, so penil, that's annoying. Yes, very annoying. Maybe we just rename it today. I'll let you do the renaming. We'll call it 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, et cetera, et cetera. 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 forward, EDR, why would that have this effect on REM sleep? Yep. And I actually searched through all of the literature from Kavanaugh from Kavanaugh. He never mentions REM sleep once in his studies. He studied Pinelon quite extensively on different neuronal tissue extracts,

animal studies, even in athletes, and never mentions the REM sleep. They didn't have whoops in the 1970s in the Soviet Union. They didn't have an eight sleep? You're kidding me. They didn't have sleep trackers in the 1970s when it came to these. So there was no reports on that. But what seems to be happening, let's see, what is this canyla on, this EDR?

It's a tripeptide that meets the groove of the DNA of different key regions and helps the promoter region be exposed, so that DNA transduction can happen, translation, transcription. So you get... So it's turning on genetic programs. Yes. It's actually 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 Pineelon in one sentence, it's leading to better brain metabolism through modulating all these different pathways. For example, GDF 11, Sod 1, Sod 2, IRISA, PPR gamma. So what seems to be happening, so he made Pinelon as an anti-stress cognitive performance compound. and was available orally in like Kazakhstan to...

So I'm an idiot. I'm taking it before sleep. I should be taking in the morning. Yes. So if you take a high enough dose, there is sedation from it. Okay. 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 then there's two groups, Pinoon and the placebo. The Pinalon 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 and when I could be actually thinking better during the daytime. Yeah. So a lot of people report less brain fog, you know, better thinking. There's a friend that has a, you know, nine-figure company,

has all of his employees on Pine Neon. They're taking it in the morning. In the morning. Or a 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 where people settle in.

The Cabinson ones that come from Russia are like 200. micrograms. Some people are injecting it. Some people are injecting it. It goes to stomach. It's orally available through these Latin pep transporters. Crosses the blood brain barrier? Most likely, yes. Okay, because it's coming from cortex, but otherwise the way you're describing it, we're putting, no one's infusing into the brain. No one's a fit. So we're assuming it's small enough. It's a tripeptide to cross the blood brain barrier. Have you tried it? I mean, it took some last night, but. Okay. At night. Yeah, so I will take larger dosages. If I want to get good sleep, I'll describe as 8K REM. Some people, it will cause them to have.

have a little bit of awakening. At first, that would be why your deep sleep was going away. I'll say this. If I take half of what was recommended, I'm great. Yes, I'm very sensitive to everything. Sure. I'm 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 and you and I'll, whoa, this is wild. And then I stop taking it 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 the caveat, it's Russian literature. It's not gold standard American research that we love here. So there's nothing that's come up as a, you know, clear sign. Because what it seems the big theory of Cavinson is that as you're, when you're younger,

you make a lot of these peptides naturally. is die tri-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 Pianelon is the brain regulator.

In GHK copper is the collagen regulator. But so far, the side effects we've noticed, we have probably the biggest anecdotal compilation of N-E-Qaeda. Every day I wake up, someone's text, be like, hey, Pinelon did this to me. Some people 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 on eye out. Some people even had their A1C's drop. So hypoglycemics and other people, blood sugar issues, take extra caution. And then very vivid dreams. For some people that could be disheartening if they have like nightmares or something like that. But very, very vivid dreams as a result of a pine neon,

especially like the color and the quality of the dreams is very different than you normally expect. What seems to be happening is just like, you know, psychedelics change the redox state of the brain. Pinealons 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. You get better performance during like high intensity interval training. And then you get more REM sleep at night 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. with no clear one receptor that's doing it through.

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What about Epitallon, which turns out comes from the pineal? Yeah. 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.

of 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. That's a good category to be in because we have like Cahall 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, etc. But he's like the neuroanatimist 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. Sure. Because when I go to the literature now, it's a little bit tough because the cadavers that you looked at in medical school, not all of them are processed on the same timeline, right? It's not, thankfully, it's not a controlled science, right?

These are people that generously donate their bodies to science, right? Does our pineal calcify, even if it does, does that somehow inhibit its ability to communicate with our other tissues? It's a big kind of debatable thing 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. No 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 you. It's not very sexy. Yeah. But I think it's a key aspect of aging and longevity. So that's what gives us, you know, our interest in it. The pineal gland, it seems from Kavanaugh's work, that the decrease in pineal gland function with aging is more of a physiologic than

an anatomic problem. Now, I will see some classification on MRIs when we have a patient come in for like a stroke or a TBI. We'll look at their MRI. I'm like, hey, there looks like a little bit of calcification there. Maybe my neurology, colleagues will disagree. But that seems to happen. But the question is, what is actually leads to?

to the deterioration of melatonin synthesis because it decreases quite dramatically and some people even think that might start puberty. Like if you have a penile cyst, you can have precocious puberty like an eight or nine years old. The rhythmician melatonin. Yes. 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. People are making themselves somewhat arithmic or phase shifted. But epithaline is somehow restoring pinealocytes. It's somehow enhancing function of the pineal and other tissues. Yep. So in Kevin'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 high. higher. Great. Which, by the way, folks, I've said this in the cortisol episode. You want your morning cortisol 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.

I don't give a shit about your cortisol levels. You got to do the hard work. And then later you get to go to bed. It's a little weird that the medical profession tortures their own by disrupting one of the primary anchors of health. Yep. And cognitive function. 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 circadian appropriate hormonal profile through, you know, HCTH, cortisol. Take and when? Anytime. Because the idea with these bioregulators, unlike, you know, a GLP1 drug that you take today and have the effect for the next week, the idea from the Kavanaugh model is that you take these and then you accrue benefits when you're off of them. Like you notice with Pineleon, you took Poneleon for a day or two or three days a month and you had effect. 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 Caventon's seminal work was his 15-year longevity study. He got people in nursing homes, two groups. One of them got epithelon in the form of epithalamine, which is the whole penial gland extract,

and then a thymus peptide called thymalin, not thymulin. There's two different peptides. All the people can confuse them. every peptide website confuses them, but they inject them for 15 years, like a 10 or 20-day course per year, just being in the year, middle of the year, and that's it.

And they had a significant lower mortality when it came to cardiovascular disease, infectious risk, and for cancers. So Russian study, caveat, but that would be the most interesting longevity study I've seen done, if accurate, if true, 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. One of the things that really got me excited about epithaline. Is it Thallon or Talon? The Russians say epitallon, is the way they say it. But it's spelled with the TH. Okay.

So I'll say epithalala. Whoever wants. You know, we're making the rules today. Okay. Epitallon is also AADG. That's the amino acid. It's four amino acids. I'll say epitalin because it's easiest for me and forgive me if anyone takes offense.

I took interest because in my former life running a lab, focused on among other things, visual pathway repair to reverse blindness or impending blindness. There's some interesting papers, and there 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 epithalin 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. 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 someone knows those papers, please put them in the comments. So I was intrigued. Yep. Like, here'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, 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 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, you know, working on any number of vague receptor-ish, maybe no receptor, things like,

and this is what gene therapy is about. Yep. So do you think of epitalin 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. When it comes to the eyes, it seems to be repairing some of the photoreceptors

that might get damaged in a red-nice pigmentosa. Melanopsin wasn't discovered when Kavanaugh was kicking it around. But my theory is that epithelon 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. I didn't feel effects.

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 redness. 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 something makes it through that filter, then they would conclude it's real.

Otherwise, they're trying to essentially knock down the quote-unquote positive outcome. And I think as a clinician, one of the key things for people, for people, 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 effications. For example, like in the 1910s to 1940s, we irradiated the thymuses of young kids to prevent cids. This was considered gold standard medicine. Does it have anything to do with SIDS? No, they thought that the 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, I think, at least 10,000,

died from cancers. I think the only person that's talked about it is Sapolsky. He has a video talking about this. So we've had a lot of issues as a field. We have to be very cognizant of that and know the history of where we've been. Like Verkow, of the famous Verkow's triad, he was like pro this therapy. And we all 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 things like do no harm. So while we are, you know, excited about these therapies, we have to be kind of careful and where we're taking people.

Appreciate that. I wasn't aware of that study. Perfect tee up for, no pun, for the thymus. Tell me about the thymus. Super interesting organ. Yep. We gland. Yep.

We all have one when we're born. Yep. By 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, DHA, and then it's shranky-a. and then it's shrunk at the moment you hit puberty. So until it from the day of birth, until puberty, you grow this massive thymus.

Where is it? It's right above your heart, right behind us, the collarbone. How big is it? It's a, in a baby, it could be quite large on the chest. Big as a baseball? Like maybe the size of half the heart, let's say. Maybe bigger. It depends 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 when they do surgery nowadays for like open heart. But there's, you know, good data from New England Journal of Medicine that removing the thymus tissue, residue tissue, leads to 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 thymuses removed. Now, there are thymomas where people have to have their thymus removed. But we're talking about people that, you know, the surgeons going in to do a coronary already bypass surgery. Is the thymus neurily innervated? Yes. So it's getting signals from brain. Vegas nerve, yep. So it's getting, sorry to get technical here,

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

or sleep controlling our thymic output. So there's sympathetic and parasympathetic innervation for thymus that dictates its hormonal output. Because the thymus, what is the thymus? Yeah, what's its secret? It's a gland that both secretes hormones and develops the T cells. So your lymphatic

cells are found in your bone marrow. That's what 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, et cetera, et cetera,

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 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. 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, which is a minimum level of output, you get a lot of these disorders like cancers, heart disease, autoimmunity. If you put almost any disease and look at the thymus risk associated with it, it increases as the thymus function decreases. There's a nature paper, 2006 just came out that looked at cardiovascular disease and cancer mortality and all these different metrics that they did MRIs of people and the people who 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 time you reach your, you're in your 30s, I'm in my 50s, those ages, our ages, you've got 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 you die, your thymus is slowly shrinking. That really happens in your 20s and 30s, the majority of that under the pressure of androgens, estrogens, progestin, and cortic steroids.

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 become, you know, active a lot during puberty actually cause thymic involution. Yes. So like castration will undo some of the thymic involution. 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 involute, and then we'll 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 during the feeding window. Is there any benefit to doing or taking something to either maintain or regenerate? generate thymic size. So there was a, as a, let's just say, as somebody 25 or older. Yeah, there's a interesting study, trim trial from Dr. Greg Fahey.

He's doing a study where he's giving a cocktail of growth hormone, metformin, and DHA, gave that for 12 months and had the thymic size increase on imaging. The amount of CD4 or CD8 T cells increased and the ratio of which improved. And then some of the markers that would show like immune cell exhaustion, like PD1 and all these different aspects of T-cell dynamics also improved. So 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 thymus and alpha.

Is thymus an alpha a peptide that comes from the thymus? Yes. So thankfully they named it appropriately this time. Great for that. What does thymus and alpha do indogynously when you're not injecting it or taking it? What's its normal function? So thimis and alpha one is part of this thymic family of, hormones that gets secreted. It's like these 21 amino acids. It 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. 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, peptide Wild West kind of indications. It was FDA. approved as Zadaxin for kids that were born without a thymus or a malfunctioned thymus, like DeGeorge syndrome, these different kind of genetic abnormalities, to be used for these kids to help develop the T cells that they had that weren't in the thymus.

Because they'd have like bone marrow T cells that weren't properly developed. So there was good support from thymus and a 1 for these kids. I don't think that FDA approval still exists. So the people are trying to, you know, grandfather thymis and off 1 into this peptide conversation. In other countries, it's approved for an adjuvant therapy for like, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and then different cancers. So far, the sepsis literature and the infectious literature is not that promising. It might be like if you take antibiotics with thymus and alpha 1, you might have a quicker

bounce around. Well, what I would be interested to see is like if you, you know, went to nursing homes, inject everybody with thomas and alpha 1 in November, in December, would you have less flu in January and February? That'd be the interesting thought experiment. Both thimus and alpha 1 and thymus and beta 4 come out of the Goldstein lab. That's the very famous lab that studied the thymus in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. but thymic research kind of fell out of favor

the last few decades. It's almost as sexy as the pineal. I say that sort of tongue and cheek because I mean, I think these are fascinating glands. And the reason I ask if they're neurology is that nowadays there are a lot of reasons why people choose to study one thing or the other. But these understudied glands,

if neurily innervated, then open up a lot of interesting questions about brain control, behavioral, stress control. And the experiments kind of right themselves. Doing them still takes a lot of work interpreting them as no easy task either. But I think there should certainly be more work on on the pineal and on the thymus. I want to make that clear that have you taken thymus and alpha? Oh yeah. I've used thymus and alpha one when I travel to avoid the 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, dosing thymusina off one throughout and I didn't get sick a single time. time of day or night are you injecting? Twice a week, time agnostic. We're talking about, you know, 2.5 milligrams as a prophylactic. That's not FDA approved or, yeah, or that. This is just you doing your thing. I'm curious and see if it would work. And you're trying to stay healthy so you can take care of patients. Exactly. So you're willing to be your own experiment. When we hear about thymicin alpha, we usually hear about TB 500 also. What's TB 500 and how are the two related, if at all? So while Kavinson is finding thymolin and is injecting that into people, the Goldstein Lab finds

thymocin fraction 5, which is this giant protein that has many different peptides in it, thymusina alpha 1 being one, and then thymocin beta 4 being the other one. Thymusin alpha 1, thymus and beta 4 were discovered in the thymus, but they're not exclusive to the thymusolem, they're also made in other tissues. Thymusin beta 4 seems to be

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 and other athletes have found a niche for Thimson-Beta-Ford to use it as a doping.

You say the horse community? Yeah, horse races. Thimson-Meta-4 is a very common doping agent. For the riders or for the horses? For the horses. Yes. Do they test the horses? Yeah, no, there's like a big doping scandal when it comes to horses and thimes-s-same-a-old.

I don't know they test them or are 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 melanops and ganglion cells.

They have super chisemating. Like, yes, yes and yes. Same physiology. And then recently, won't say who, wasn't me. Truly, I have a friend whose 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 human data. Talk to a couple of vets.

And vets will, they're a lot more adventurous than you might think. And I thought, well, listen, you know, now, of course, these are pets. They're just, I love my dog. You know, is not the same as a human. I am a bit of a species, but love them tremendously. And I think the pet peptide industry is going to be enormous. It's blowing up 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 uprightulate NAD. NAD is a pro longevity. NAD for, you know, one of these things that drops over the lifespan. Although the paper last week says that it doesn't drop in blood. the landmark paper. I will say, which is the debate.

The news stories on that claim that I called it a longevity drug. I've always said that NAD, I do augment NAD using NEMN. It gives me more morning energy. I will say it does make my nails really thick. 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 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. Yep. They kind of 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 certainly don't do myself. And I think that's too extreme, at least for me, to each their own. When I hear about Phimus and Alpha, TB 500, BPC, it occupies this kind of middle ground, right? Yep. And so I think this is why a lot of people are saying, hey, listen, I love my. dog. I love my cat. I don't know if NED 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 age dog and I come to you and listen, I know you're a human physician, but he's getting sick a lot. I don't know, he begins some thymocin alpha. He's kind of 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 going to. Actually, I have relatives who are vets. They are very open. Very open. The veterinary community has been very open. I injected my previous dog with testosterone later in life. And I expected the vets to come after me with pitchforks.

And I got calls that said, 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 sister was at a compounding pharmacy here locally that would give dogs their testosterone. And it made him so much healthier and happier. I have zero regrets.

I'm pro-peptides for pets, 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. As I saw that, I'm like, is he trying to get peptides back from the gastropact? Like that's the first. Maybe from a Pavlovian thought. You're being fine to dogs.

Yeah. Intuitively, instinctively, there might be something there. Like, they might be trying to get BPC out of that. Who knows? But 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 I think a lot of the positive signals are going to come out of people giving them to their pets.

Unfortunately, there's so many brands now that are popping up every day given their pets, peptides. 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 med? Like, we haven't got that answer from the FDA. RFK himself has kind of said like, oh, 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 Macquarie, I don't ever know how to pronounce his last name, recently left. So 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 a race, is one of the most important questions. Is BPC going to be taken seriously as a drug? Yep. Or is it more creatine-ish? Yep. I mean, for example, I could give you a B-12 supplement. You could buy that on Amazon, or I could prescribe that to you.

But if I was just to give you an injectable B-12 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, penelon is a supplement you can find in Kazakhstan and Russia and Ukraine, whatever, all these different countries, over-the-counter in different pharmacies. Is Pinelon available as a capsule?

It's available as a capsule. Does it work as well as a capsule? In a capsule. A higher dose is 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 bioregulators, the epitallon, pinelion, the Cabinson literature looks at like microgram dosages from 10 to 100 micrograms of the actual raw peptides. Of the peptide mixes, we're talking about 10 milligrams. So 10 milligrams of, you know, desiccated cowbrain that might give you a few hundred micrimes.

micrograms of pinea. Oh man. Descated Calbrae makes me think of Cruttsville, Yaakov, aka Mad Cow, Prion. That was the first patient I had on wards in third year of medical school. Had degenerate brain from Crutsville, Yacro. 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, please. Like these these prion things are really serious. Yeah. Yeah. It's really scary. It's really, really scary.

And not just from wild game, but it's really scary. By the way, I think this set back all that research when the, you know, the preon stuff happened in the early 2000s, that set back a lot of these animal-derived peptide research dramatically because people are 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,

thimephtyth one, thombeda-4, vylon, phymogin, like all these different peptides that you'd get together. 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. They'd grind that up and inject that into humans with positive effects, like, you know, hundreds of papers on that. The American side, the Goldstein group came up with thymocin fraction 5, which has thymusin alpha 1 and thymusin beta 4 in it. Also thimpsi beta 10, thymusin beta 9, a bunch of different thymocin's. but studied these two dramatically, a thimine alpha-1 and thymus in beta-4.

The French came up with the actual main thymus hormone, which is thymulin, not thymalin. Thymalin 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 find interesting because it modulates the,

what we're calling the thymus pituitary adrenal axis, the thymus pituitary gonadal axis. Thymulin is this, peptide that's secreted by thymus dramatically decreases with age, 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 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, ATTH or ACG, the amount of. The fymulin sensitizes the end organ to production of the targeted hormone, for example. If you would just give ACG alone to the animal.

HCG. Yeah, ACG. Synthetic glutenizing hormone. Yes, yes, yes. Essentially. It's binding to the, it's called the HCG-LH receptor. So they would get more testosterone produced when they got ACG with fymulin versus ACG alone. So what you're saying is that thymus and alpha potentially or TB 500 or other fymic hormone.

Thymine-specific. Okay, thymulin specifically. Okay, thank you. Do different effects on the particular axis. So thymulin specifically can augment 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 and youth, low and aged, you have no business investing in reproduction. You have no business in creating a lot of cortical steroids because that gives you that, you know, youthful energy in the morning, but if you're making a lot of corpus steroids, 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'm sure that you're the first person in the last 20 years to be talking about this publicly. 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 opened people's eyes to what it is that it goes. And it goes away over time. People taking thymocin alpha TB 500 in thymulin, 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.

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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 a lot.

Electrolites. 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 slash Huberman to claim a free element sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's drink element.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. G.HKU Copper. Yeah. Most of the questions I get about it are from women. Yep. I sent out a little informal poll to the be careful how I say this, the women in my life, 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 injecting your face because I don't, as much as I'm comfortable with people giving themselves like a little, you know, sterile injection and, you know, the belly or something. Like, I get worried about non-experts injecting the cells in the face and other tissues. So a lot of interest in this. what is it, why is it made it into this kind of 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. GHKCU is a tripeptide with a copper ion in the middle it's glycine histidine and lysine.

it's actually found in type 1 collagen fibers. Tell me where type 1 collagen fibers are all over your skin, hair, and interconnected tissue. So just like Vladimir Kavanaugh discovers these 40 different peptides, liver peptides, brain peptides, penile peptides, whatever it may be. There's a American researcher Lauren Pickhart, Dr. Lauren Pickhart was passed now. He discovered GHKCU in the collagen tissue. And it's like, hey, this might be the factor that controls collagen synthesis and also collagen bids. break down. So he does a bunch of studies. His work is all about this. Almost all the literature comes from this one lab, a common theme in peptides, unfortunately. He discovers it in maybe the

mid-70s. It's found to be very high in youth in serum levels. So you'll find this in the blood of anyone that we test 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. There's now injectable work being done. So similar to the BPC, they would, you know, cut rats open, inject GHK copper in a different site, and they'd get faster wound repair of the skin tissue from injecting this.

So that's, you know, it's become synonymous with BPC-457, TV-500, Wolverine stack, which is someone online is made up. That's the Wolverine stack. Is those two? Yes. TB 500 and Nogamistan alpha. No, TvG-R-100 and BPC-157. And BBC-157.

Yes. Okay. Now people will add on GHK Copper and call it the glow stack. The glow stack? Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Someone has made it up and a research chemical.

No, I like it. I like it. Glow, Wolverine. Yeah. There's a big debate about whether or not 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, of collagen and the breakdown side of collagen. So because when you're, you're remodeling tissue, if you're just rebuilding it, you're going to get like very pathogenic 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 Picharts, you know, compared it to retinol and vitamin C creams and all these things with positive effects. And people anecdotally talk about like, no, 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 monocidal? 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 hair loss agents. And now there's a Chinese group studying it for lung regeneration because there's a lot of connective tissue in the lungs

between the different alveoli. And there's some hype there of using GHK copper as a regenerative from that side. How many people are trying to regenerate their lungs is for like COPD? COPD and smokers. It's a big, big industry. Maybe long COVID from what I hear is a real thing, lung damage from COVID. I know some people will 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 atrophies 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 convalesst, 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 Bockery. I'm only half-key. I really feel like I'm in school.

This is so cool for me. I'm truly in heaven right now. If you look back at the literature on convalescing, how long were people 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 sort of how long maternity leave type things.

Like, you know, the idea now is people are being forced to go back to 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 in the last, you know, a couple thousand years at least. Like after one has a cold, typically people go back as soon as they deem themselves non-infectious, was really worries me. But do you think people are getting back to work too quickly?

Yes. 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, you know, back to the gym, back to work, back to everything, 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 circadior rhythms are thrown off. They're under malnuminated lights all day. They're not getting sunlight. Their vitamin D levels are atrocious. Their blue light exposure at night is as high. Their stress levels are very high. Their guts are inflamed from eating process, hyper-processed, hyper-palival 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 illusive.

We have to figure out if the STPs or the PTEs are the more interesting ones. There's synthetic thymic peptides, thymic lymph-1, thymeter phymulin, and 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 Cavendon came up with the thymullen 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 those immune markers becoming 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, you know, 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? 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 because we could have used the,

these thymic, you know, focused interventions, whether it would be zinc or, you know, thymic peptides or your purified thymic extracts to augment immunity of the population as a whole, especially because Dr. Gavinson was doing this in the 70s in Russia. Even in Russia, they don't really look kindly to this research. The Soviet era research has been kind of pushed aside

and it's like more big farmer's 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, a lot of synthetic, thymus and alpha TB 500, and maybe BPC. So, Wolverine stack plus, you know.

Yeah, so it would be very interesting if we can get that. Because now that everyone's getting like these Pernugo scans and different full-bedo MRIs, we can see the thymus size? I was going to ask you, 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 positive barrier for people. But if people can afford it, I actually think it can be useful.

I have a number of friends, including a neurodial. 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, then 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. 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 the theory. There is a concern about false positives and false negatives when it comes to these screening modalities. Like any screening modality is 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'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

ophthalmic status or make it worse or different infections, different interventions? That would be very interesting to kind of tease out. On blood tests, we've been trying to work with a couple different labs to figure out a thymic score. The most commercially available is going to be a lymphocyte count, which is like 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 and 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 lymphocytes to monosite ratio, there's a study that we'll talk about how 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 lymphomas, but somewhere, they're hazard. When you look at the charts, around 1,000 total lymphocytes is where the hazard of different

cancer starts to increase. A young healthy person will be between 1,500 and 33,000 total lymphocytes. And you want the ratio to the monocytes. The monocytes are different types of immune cells that are more inflammatory. So if you have a robust amount of lymphocytes with low amount of monocytes, that suggests you have a more, let's say, ready and robust immune state. So $3 lab test that everybody gets, almost every lab testing company now checks it, and no one media reports on it.

But you can kind of stratify people into disease risk based on that score. Out of a hundred randomly polled physicians who receive their license in the United States, how many of them probably know what you just described? 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 at this. It's not like you're saying, oh, you've got to do all this additional work. You got to build insurance. No, no. It's all there. Like, I started to care about the thymus post-pendemic because I noticed people's lymphocyte counts were lower.

And I could notice that, you know, anecdotally or looking at, you know, small data sets. Like, hey, people that had lower lymphocy counts had worse disease or, like, earlier, like, people that had had had cancer in their late 30s, early 40s. And like, huh, they all had, like, lower lymphocyte counts. So I started to, like, 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 kind of are 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 lymph side 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 gotten sometimes peptides and we've had people go from like a four to one

lymphocytes to monocytes ratio to an eight to one ratio. Now is that significant? That seems to be significant. But no one's really kind of discussing it, unfortunately. I know who I'm putting my vote in for Surgeon General. If ever there's a turnover. I haven't explored the most recent person. So that's not a comment on her.

I know they elected to not vote Casey in. but so that's not a truly not a mention I haven't done but I think uh your voice should be heard uh 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 secretagops test marillin ipomerellin mk677 that we could we could do the deep dive sure on all those but I'll just batch those and maybe we parse them a little bit and things like melanotan sure 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 small stature. And kids, they might use it for that or for post-surgical burn recovery. I think that's wrong. For HIV. HIV. HIV. So the idea here, the sort of framework that I'm teeing up is that these molecules are

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 there's sort of the gas pedal on that system. Growth hormone secrete aog 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 that stuff. We can save ourselves some time here. Yep. Most people who are taking these things, whether they get it from,

pharma or compounding pharmacy or gray market research purposes only 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 yeah 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 grell inside the grell and agonist like MK677, not FDA-approved, orally available pill that makes you bleed out 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. 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?

These 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 glands aging before puberty, your thymus right after puberty, you know, in your 20s, and then 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 adrenal stop making as much

DHA in 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 IGF1 when you're 18 and your IGF1 when you're 30 and 50, that's going to be a dramatic decrease in that. Should we now replenish this IGF1? The proponents will say IGF1 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

hormone is thymor regenerative because it stimulates the regrowth of an aged, involuted, thineous gland based on Dr. Fahy'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, of existing cancer? Yes, because I don't think anyone thinks it causes cancer. It's not mutagenic. This is the big debate when people, like, BPC causes cancer.

There's no mutagenic effect from BPA. Is BPC like smoking a cigarette? Smoking a cigarette. You get carcinogenic damage to the cancer. long tissue that causes a cancer later on. There's no direct mechanism that would link any of these peptides to a carcinogen, a carcinogenic effect. But is it, you know, a growth factor that could grow 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.

a growth hormone deficient and live a lot longer. And growth hormone is not positive when it comes to a cardiomebolic perspective. And in species like dogs where there's tremendous variation in the amount of IGF1 that's made between, say, a Chihuahua and a Great Dane, the breed that makes more IGF1, downstream growth hormone, of course, lives a lot shorter lives than smaller versions of the same species. Yep. So you want a dog around for a long time, get a chihuahua. You want a real dog, excuse me, you want a daughter 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-la 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 hormones become very difficult to acquire through clinical prescriptions after the whole, in anabolic steroids act, and very 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, you know, have a growth hormone habit. But otherwise, a circuit dog costs, you know, less than 100 bucks.

I'm told that growth hormone, uh, doesn't shut down one's own production. Yeah. It's not, it's not a, a, uh,

strong shutdown down like the, uh, testicular axis. I'm also told that when people take it, they feel awesome. Mm-hmm. Which is scary to say on a podcast because you're like, oh, no,

I don't want everyone running out in it. 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 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 growth hormone? like the bodybuilder body counts are from other compounds. Oh, they're 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. I see a 45-year-old dude that's through somatopause, but has perfect young skin and, you know,

there's Botox and 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, so it changes the thyroid dynamics. It can have pro-tosticular effects as well from the IGF1 perspective. So there's a lot of, you know, youthful effects to, you know, it. The question is, is that been a good idea to replace it? Traditionally, like, the medical field is kind of anti-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 re-around. So what if you did a cyclical cycle of, and this is not medical advice, but theoretical, cyclical cycle of Tessimorlin for a certain amount of time, got your IGF1 to a certain level under clinician guidance, measured your thymus on an MRI before and after, and then and saw that the thymus grew and you had, you know, higher CD4CDA count. That would be pretty interesting. It would be interesting a few years back, and I've told this story publicly before, I tried Sir Marellin.

Yeah. It was different than, obviously, than Tessimorellon, but similar in the sense. Sure. The endpoint you're seeking is more growth hormone on IGF1. And it dramatically increased my deep sleep and, like, nuked my REM sleep. It was like the opposite of Pineal. Yep. And together.

Yeah. So, well, 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. Came off it? Yeah. It reverted to a low level. So that was pretty striking. So obviously, you know, hyper responsive prostate to somerone, maybe it wouldn't have been to testomerulin, et cetera. But those are the kinds of things that you worry about.

It might just be the growth hormone itself. Like, like, critical formiscretion. 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 in your 60s and 70s because you have to wake up, wake up a night to pee. And then when you're at, you know, an amusement park, you're going to find

the nearest bathroom very frequently because your bladder size is pressed. They'll work it out. There's some prostate peptides we're looking at. Thanks. There's like young guy, old guy, like taunting. Like, you know, you got 10 more years before you're miserable. Thanks. There's prostate peptides that Calvinton looked at that we're trying to translate some of that

literature. You'll save me. No, there's people. this guy named Brendan Henry, who's translated like thousands of these papers from Russian to English. So shout out to Amno affiliation, 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 increase in 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 is will usually jump. Like the joke in the bottom of the community is you have to get lean enough and healthy enough to be able to take growth hormone. All it's happening is growth hormone or the secretagogues. Growth hormone or so.

It can make you insulin insensitive. Yes, especially with more like Tessimorlin, especially when combined with Ipermoralin. Sermorin's kind of a weaker GHRH. Tessimorland, especially when combined with Ipermoralin, Tessimorland is FDA approved. Epimorlin is not. The GHRH versus GHRP kind of in the weeds there. But those two together can create a giant growth hormone response where your IGF1 is in the 380s, 390s. so that's that's quite high

like puberty levels of IGF1 and you're hungry all the time yeah yeah with MK for sure with with Tesamorlin so Tesomorland has more fidelity less Grellin effects especially because you can have grelin effects prolactin effects

and cortisol effects from whenever you're mucking around with the pituitary because they're all in that same area 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 gLP1 as their insulin sensitivity tool, their growth hormone or their GHRH, and their antigen 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 ANVAR with terseptide or reticide, whatever it may be. and then using a growth hormone modulation,

if you can afford growth hormone or test a more than epimoraline, 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 secretagog plus something like, and we'll talk about these now, Reda True Tide, or one of the other GLP's. I'm going to acknowledge because people are going to start, like throwing darts in me about this. Yes, Red and True Tide is hitting things other than the JLP pathway. It's also GIP and glucagon pathway, but most people put it under the category of GLP.

So you are in Cyclopedic, 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 salient, about cerebral lice, and 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 just spoke. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I saw it in your eyes. You're like, he said it wrong. Do I correct him? Yes, correct me. Everyone else does.

GHKCU for the collagen effects. It's available in a lot of creams. Assuming it's real, assuming people are doing this medically supervised, is there any benefit to putting it directly on crow's feet or other wrinkles or face versus injecting it for it to go systematically? 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 chem sites, they're cell topicals now because everyone's in skincare. They're, you know, poor quality. They're not even blue. Like the GHK should be blue, but that is... Should be blue from the copper, yeah. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, my copper pills are blue.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, okay. But that doesn't mean that it's real. Could be copper is falling out of the complex of the GHK. So, yeah, you want a well-formulated, like a good skincare brand that knows how to formulate these 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, et cetera. And the second round is going to look at GHK. I don't imagine that makes it.

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 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 GHACU for post-UV damage. So people that are sun-friendly can use GH-C-C-U topically to alleviate some of the photo damage.

Of course, dermatologists are going to get mad at us and say, like, you just use sunscreen and don't get the damage in the first place. But for people that aren't as responsible, you can use GHK-C-U as a post-sunscreen. Or listen to the derms who are slightly more sun-positive. Especially low UV-index sun, sun, when they're. the sun is low in the sky. Yep. Dr. Abu Bakri is perhaps the only other person on the planet besides my friend Samra Hatar

has 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, 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. Yes.

Some of the photo aging effects, some of the effects of aging when compared to like different retinoles 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. But a lot of people, especially bros that have never been in the skincare now in the skincare because of, yeah. So there's that, but it's promising. The bros are in the skin care.

Yeah. There'll be a documentary before long. What do you call that the manosphere? It's like the skinnosphere. Well, with looks maxing, it's the looks maxing. It's the looks maxing peptide now, GHK, because all these guys that are into looks maxing, we'll use GHK talking about.

They're dipping their hammer and GHK COC and tapping themselves. By the way, if you want great long wavelength, red near infrared and infrared light to augment your GHG-C-C-U peptide, by the way, I'm not suggesting that. There's a 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 blue light. Because we're deprived of 480 nanometers in this setup.

I mean, that unless 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 bond charges, bulbs because they have these bulbs that switch from full spectrum in the day. Then you just 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. They made the new one. Made one that goes from like a morning, really bright light, full spectrum with a lot of blue and they're on purpose to make you know, part of the week. And the right

blue, the right blue, the same switch, don't have to change the bulb. It goes to kind of a late morning mode to afternoon mode and then goes to candlelight 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. Yep. It's a lot of infrared. 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'm 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 a dichromat, not a trichromat, but that's a different podcast. All right. GOPs. Yep.

Now we can comfortably exhale into, you. your colleagues can, you can feel completely comfortable about anything that, uh, 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 of all the other peptides we've been talking about.

So what are your thoughts? I've never taken one of these. First things first, we're hearing that some people, I think Sam Altman actually talked about this publicly. Overdose. With Kara Swisher about what he thought, yeah, where he overdosed. Actually, a compound pharmacy issue he thought was what did it. I trust him to do the right calculation.

So it does sound like that was a compounding pharmacy issue. Could afford it. Does it buy the farmer a great option? I think back then people were just getting them where they could. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't ask them 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, yeah, 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 Red of True Tide for now. Yep. Because it's so new. We're going to talk about it. But I'm talking about the standard. Yeah, semi-gluton. Epitide, yeah. So you have your, you know, semaglutide, which is Ozembic and Weigovie.

The Wegovi is the FDA-approved version for the weight loss. For Chazepatide, you have Zepound and Mongerald, Zepound being the FDA-approved version for weight loss that allows them to keep their patents for longer. These medications are good, trying to transforming medicine, especially where I practice, right? If we kind of zoom out, our medical system, if we didn't have these interventions, 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 20 years

and had they all transitioned to diabetes and ended up with 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 ones 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, prediabetes, and all these cardiomyelibolic 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. 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, you know, 5, 10% of body weight. Now with the GLP ones, we're getting 10, 20, even 30% of body weight being shaved off of people, especially with the new Reddit Trichita data. Is there a free lunch? That's the big question. 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 ones. 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, you know, 300 pounds on GLB-1s. They were losing 50, 100 pounds. Before it was in 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 CHILBOR? late 2010s. And then the signal, I don't think Norvo or Lily wanted to make these for obesity. They were focused on making diabetes drugs. Because if we zoom out even further, this is another animal-derived compound, right? It's found in the saliva of the GILA-1 was discovered. It's too short-acting to have worked on its own. Then pharmaceutical companies, this is where you've got to give pharma their credit.

They develop these drugs into more functioning versions that had, you know, longer half, life 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 Bayetta, which was one of these first GLP won drugs, like 25 years ago. It was 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 lyrgylutide, dilutide, and then

eventually semi-glutide 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 a stay on this drug forever? Can you tighter 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 for appetite, 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 the 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 can 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 GEP1 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 retutide 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. There's a shortage and maybe better drugs will come on. 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 they're better delivery. devices. I kind of feel like eventually there'll be some slow release polymer that will just kind of give you a micro dose of it. You could dial it up if you want. There's all pills now. Personally, I don't worry so much about like, oh, 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 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 is 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 double, quadruple, but the weight loss effects weren't really there. But the drugs that you rattled off a few minutes ago,

Monjaro, Zempec, etc., and certainly read a true tide, we're talking about thousand-fold increases in GLPs. We don't know what the long-term effects of those are on like neural plasticity. It could be great. Yes. Could be positive. We shouldn't always assume those effects are bad.

Yeah, like the effects for like, 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 cardiomalbolic disease speeds up that transition. So controlling insulin dynamics might be beneficial there. And 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 a 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 training wheel effect when it comes to GLP-1s. Okay, you come to us, you're a patient, you want to use GLP-1, will give you a lowest dose as possible that has an effect for you, GLP-1 in conjunction with lifestyle modification,

dietary advice, exercise programs, et cetera, et cetera, and then hopefully peel away those training wheels or keep them on if you need them until we get to the end point that we want. Now, when people do it that way, I don't hear a lot of these effects anecdotally from, from Berkeley patients that we hear about online where people are like, oh, I'm depressed. I hate my life from these drugs. And the question is, are they just, you know, a lot of people have low blood pressure from these drugs because they're not consuming enough electrolytes or enough food, period. Because 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 feeling good. The reason people are released in the first place is because eating is such a pleasurable experience. experience for humans and a social experience, et cetera, et cetera. The other thing is, if you're not eating with people on the same table, are you having less of that socialization aspect? All 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 the receptors in the brain? When 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 by the risk. How dare you think of confounding variables? No, it's like, no, it's so cool because you're willing to, 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 dopaminergic signaling is happening in the brain, which is concerning, right? Because a lot of people will be stacking this with, you know, ADHD medications. They might be using some of these peptide stimulants, some max length, whatever it may be. So the question, because what happens is people go to these websites, they buy one peptide, and they got a great result.

And they'll be like, you know, let me add three more peptides on. Are you peptide? Yes. It's an increasing AOV problem. So the average sale value goes up from these research sites. We'll see where GLP-1s go. The reality is it's here. There is no pre-GLP1 world for us as clinicians, as health enthusiasts.

We're in a post-GLP-1 world, and everything kind of dictates downstream from that. The people I know have taken these, and I don't know exactly which, are taking much lower dosages than we're prescribed to them. And they are indeed sharing them with getting the prescription. then people are sharing them, people are cost sharing. Now people are trying to get them from other sources. Several of those people say 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,

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, let's be left sensitivity increases as you decrease the body fat mass. There's, there's GP1 receptors on the pompsi neurons in the brain, and no one's kind of examined what that means downstream for the lepsomone. Leptin melanocortin pathway. And what that means for energy status,

thyroid hormone production, reproductive status, we know a lot of people are ozambic babies in that a lady will be subfertile or infertile, start a weight loss drug, and then find out by accident she's pregnant. Was she obese before? Yeah, they're overweight obese woman

that are having their fertility improve as a result of lose the weight. Because we know your leptin status is a key driver of fertility because if you're having low leptin levels, you're starving, fertile. If you have too much leptin and you're at leptin resistant, you shouldn't be having kids either. So both of 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 and females. Is that still considered true? I think that's that's part of it. Makes sense. Like enough body fat to signal that there are enough resources and then 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 had a family member with a GLP1 pen from four years ago that 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 this at home. And I was like, yeah, it's not working. It's bunk.

They got him from overseas. It was a brand name Ozambic pen, but gone 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 Ozambic.

What's a standard dose? You start at 0.25 and escalate to 0.5. You went straight to a milligram? Yeah, because I was like, ah, they're like, it doesn't work. I'm eating so much. I'm okay, whatever. You got bunk pen from overseas. I go to do a shift.

I was on a night shift that day. And I've never had Charzar-like projectile vomiting. Oof. And low blood sugar, presumably? The blood sugar effects for non-diabetics don't get that low, but it was just miserable. Like I would go admit a patient, go upstairs, vomit 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. Then go back to the ER, admit a patient. And it was the most miserable night of my life. So it would be very careful how you use these drugs. That's why titrate very slowly. Luckily, with the newer ones, the effects are much less.

Like, people who report transatatide and retritinide, even have less of these gastrointestinal effects. but that's a peptide gone wrong story. Peptide gone wrong. Reda Trutide. I put out a post on X, I thought, and I still think that Red Trudeide's 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 Lilly is going to find other ways to market it. market it and you can protect a patent by finding additional uses for things. I mean, a lot of the blockbuster drugs for eye diseases, the patents to prevent generic forms 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 to protect their investment, right? I mean, you can understand why they do it. If you're not, that's your business. So I'm guessing that Red of Trutide is we're going to discover that it's 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 Redurzitis 39 amino acids, to be a biologic, it would be above 40 amino acids. And once you get to above 40 amino acids, if you are a biologic, then the patent last way longer. I don't know the exact numbers. It's like 15 years. Yeah, much, much longer. Whereas if it's, if it's 40 or below amino acids,

then it's something like five to seven years. Yeah, yeah. And someone in Bound Law will have to. 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 add amino acids. And more importantly,

no one can compound it if it's a biologic or it's very difficult to compound. Like I guess that was the right certificate. Something similar happened with ACG where it was taken out of the compounders recently. Really? Yeah, so ACG. human choreionic can atrobin. This is commonly prescribed for trying to restore fertility to men, but it's mainly, mostly being given in IVF cycles to women.

There's a big controversy about HCG and compounders and who can compound it and who can't. That's beyond this. But this is a very important thing because if Lilly gets Reda Trutide as a biologic, then the compounders are out of luck because the confounders all have the formula for Reda. They're ready to make it.

They can get the API from China and start compounding. it as soon as it's available, it will make them all billions of dollars. But if Lilly is able to do this, they'll be able to protect themselves from what's going to happen. You see, the Trump administration now is trying to get with Trump RX, Lily and Novenardis 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 Churzepotide available

through these websites. Used to be $1,500. Yeah, $1,500 without insurance. Some insurance will cover it. Some wouldn't. You'd have to get, you know, savvy clinician that will advocate on your side on your behalf to get these covered. but cash pay between, you know,

even some of the pills, I think you can pay 150 bucks a month for the Orpheragopon, which is not a peptide, but still GLP1 agonist. We're trying to get to the point. Like, it doesn't matter if it's a peptide or not. What matters is where it touches,

what receptor touches. Because Orphoroglopon is more similar to semaglutide, both them are GLUtide, one's a peptide, one's not, then BPC is to semi-glutide. So, like, everyone online talks 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 carnacine? Do you mean ratitude side? Excellent point. It speaks to a lot of the confusion. You are a beam of clarifying information on this.

Actually, I'm going to put in a vote publicly right here and now, but also 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 in the world of genetics for a long time people would just name gene Sonic Hedgehog or you know, you know, Sink 1 or people name it after their cousin or right, and it was a mess.

And so what ends up happening is you find similarity between genes across different laboratories. Eventually, you have a meeting and you come up with a, you have a nomenclature committee. And then you say, this is, you know, Ephron 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 60.

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 clear and accessible nomenclature to divide up what we've talked about today. You know, BPC 157, you know, peptides with and without known receptors.

The regenerative peptides, as you've called them, Xythymus and alpha TB 500, which are immunogenic peptides. I think the word peptides is just too general. It's too general. I'm putting my vote in for you, not that you don't already have enough to do, to come up with some hominclature that maybe I can help propagate in some of the other people in the podcast community. We'll even contact our close, close friends in legacy media and explain to them how this works. And maybe they can help propagate just for sake of clarity.

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 BPC-157 help and or hurt those circumstances is given their potential role in angiogenesis

and the other things you described? No literature exists on either animal or human data that relates to those peptides. I'd say those are more hormonal slash metabolic issues that a good obigine should take care of. They're very difficult to treat conditions and very miserable to have for people and have fertility implications,

but those are more on the hormonal side. I think the hormonal lever is way stronger than a peptide lever like BPC or any of those. And as far as I'm concerned, there's no case reports or studies that which suggest positive or negative. CNS effects, central nervous system, excuse me, of BPC-157 or other peptides that we've talked about that are, don't fall under the, you know, typical umbrella that people, you know, go to when they think about BPC-157. Now you talked about some of the stuff related to alcohol and perhaps other things like Adderall, 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. So 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 TBIs when it comes to cortexin and cerebralicin, which would probably never be available in the United States. So we'll skip those. There's no good data on BPC and TBIs.

They theoretically could be useful from an anti-stress perspective. That would be interesting to explore that. BPC's neurological effects are very homeostatic in nature. They don't let you get too high, in the mice data at least. The mice can't get too drunk and they can't withdraw alcohol. They can't get too high 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 anhedonia 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 woo-woo, that makes it so that your brain can't go too far in one direction. Maybe in putting, if we think of a 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 scream BPC, your body goes into like a convalescent mode because it will take away stimulants. It will take away sedatives. 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 GLP's 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. 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 that it's, you know, free of contaminants and so on. Many, many questions, but I think this is what kind of the question. Yep, yep. It's the most difficult question to answer because the majority of people are getting their peptides

from research-only websites. Unfortunately, those are not reliable. We don't know what's in them. 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 the vial. So we don't know what's in there.

What should happen over the next six, 12, 24 months is there will be a lot of physician-led options for patients to get peptides. Number one, you should encourage your physician, if you don't have one, 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 and 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 telemed options opening up soon through various companies

that will offer these peptides. And it will be good for the consumer because it will be a race down in price. And then we'll know which compounding pharmacies 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'll find them with your magnesium and your creatine and then your Pinelion or your BPC-157.

The question is, what does that going to look like? So we'd like, you know, our FDA overlords to give us some guidance there on what can and cannot be sold and bought. But it should be physician led. You should be doing this under the guidance of a physician that's monitoring you. You know, you shouldn't be taking test immoral in without checking IDF1 levels. A GLP1 even should be monitored with the physicians that can counsel you on too much weight loss. Like some of these celebrities should have had better clinicians monitoring their GLP1 journeys because 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 right point in putting all these peptides in. 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, blood blockers and epitallon.

You do, you know, BPC and you work out in the gym, or whatever it may be. There's going to be protocols that develop. But I think within six months, it will be very good physician options for everybody. Abud. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming here today. again, shedding so much light on what all of these things are.

You have clearly a virtuoso level 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, the potential upsides, the potential hazards, the regulation, and on and on. There are 50 other topics that you and I must talk about at some point. Your knowledge of hormones, men and women, pregnancy and women's hormones affecting the fetus, how progesterone impacts, D.HT. 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. I just want to say thank you for doing what you do. And if you don't mind me sharing, you're 33 years old. That's right. I love that you're a clinician and you're practicing medicine, but please, please, please, wherever you can, keep up your efforts as a public educator. Come back and talk to us again.

You're a gift to us all. And thank you so much. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. And thank you for the kind of words. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Abud Bakri. 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. Bachery 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 note caption. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking

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