People are now stacking their GLP1 as their insulin sensitivity tool their growth hormone or their GHRH And their engine modulation therapies as this Trinity stack Trinity stuff to get very fit very healthy quickly So a lot of these transformations you see in CEOs and celebrities and stuff is using a Combination of those three things you know your TRT plus turns up tied where it's right to tied whatever may be and then Using a growth hormone modulation with your if you're gonna forward growth hormone or test them on the upper moreland 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 this celebrity protocol Welcome to the Uberman lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine My guest today is Dr. Abu Bakery 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, moongjaro and redotruthide 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 Socretagogs like Tessamorellin 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 epithelin and pinealin 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 the Dr. Bakery 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. Bakery is a true masterclass on peptides by the end of today's discussion I promise you again thanks to him that you will be among the most informed doctor or otherwise about peptides from the GLPs to BPC157 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. Aboude Bakery Dr. Aboude Bakery, welcome It's me 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 she'd 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 interest did 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 Stairword hormones are another language and then peptides can be broken down further into subcategories Whether or not they have receptors or they have no receptor And that kind of changes the clinical effects we'll see like the GLP ones which have a very strong clinical effect Compared to these obscure peptides like BPC157, TB500, TB4 that don't have a clear target They have receptors but they just have many of them or they don't even have receptor Identified for BPC157 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 BPC157 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 the receptor is still elusive Or it could be that it's modifying certain proteins that already exist Or linking different proteins together in a more favorable fashion for gene transcription The Russian peptides are all epigenetic modifiers that they bind to the groove of the DNA in certain spots That either open up or close the chromatin to certain areas of genetic expression And they've modeled this out like a steroid hormone So steroid hormones bind like they bind to a like the end receptor Binds the HTR testosterone goes into the nucleus Turns on all the endogenic genes Yeah like the tuberty is a good example of that Yes exactly exactly so like Pneleon that we've talked about Shuttles Hitchhawk proteins with androgen receptors Got it. So if I just pause us for a second We should think about this word peptides in two major categories at least One is has known receptors Plural like the GLPs The other would 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 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 PPC157 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 BPC157? 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 for just plant plant derived medicines as the way to think about it You think about aspirin you think about metformin the stands. There's were all discovered in you know plant tissues Stands more so a fun guy, but you get the point now We've been looking into animal tissues to find cures medicines treatments So a group in Croatia in the 90s Looks out for this peptide called BPC that they they eventually named BPC It's a 40,000-dalt and giant peptide called BPC BPC157 is 15 amino acids from that giant peptide We don't naturally make BPC157 that's sensible 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 in tissues and liquids According to the size of different proteins like different filters will bring like just like certain filters We'll let sand through her pebbles through her 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 You try and figure out what they do why were they motivated to look for What eventually became BPC? The Pavlov the famous Scientists that would do the the experience on the dogs with the bell and and making the dogs elevate The other work he did was on gastric juices of dogs what he do is he'd put a hole in dog stomachs He would feed them food and then get the gastric juices and sell that as a medicine That's how he made his money. Yeah, that was part of his business So he got a Nobel Prize. He was also kind of like what did he have a like a Call code it was like like interpavl for for discounted checkout. Yeah, amazing So this is BPC for BPC157 exists There's probably other peptides and compounds in there But they found that gastric juices had positive effects on healing on people that had you know Gurd 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 who tried 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 Hansi Lee that's coming up with The stress adaptation theory And he notices that animals are stressed out three things happens to them Their genitals get really big so they make more cortisol Their gastric lining gets destroyed And then their thymus gland and their lymphatic shrink down And he has this published paper where you have clear adrenal from a stress animal versus a non-stress animal A thymus from an animal that's stressed versus not So this group is looking and thinking like hey Pavlov had this Gastraguse Hansi Lee 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 and you can tissue it makes grell and all these other hormones So 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? From how they injecting them? Drinking was mostly what they did And it was
supposed to be a medical elixir. - Yeah, presumably had many things in it, many peptides. And this Pepsi, like, upsets stomach, and this kind of stuff is what people are 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 1990s. - Yeah, exactly. - And then, Solia was what, 1930s? - I think so, yeah, it was about a year ago. - Someone will correct us if we'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-dolton protein BPC. And then they would be like, "Well, what's causing the actual biological effects?" They identified BPC 157, the 15 amino acid peptide that's causing all these effects. There's actually more peptides in gas uses that some other scientists may or may not have ever identified. This field of peptides is gonna be very interesting because almost every organ has a signature of peptides. Like, if you think back, Dr. Vladimir Bulovic in 1850s, 1880s finds carnasein and carnatein in muscle of cattle. So you can think about the first peptides that are found are carnasein and then carnatein 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? That's got peptides that might have got 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? - So they did all kinds of horrible things to these mice. They would sever tendons and then give them BPC through oral or injectable intrepidartinial 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 top of 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 muscle skeletal. - I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, 8-Sleep. 8-Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. One of the best ways to ensure you get a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall asleep and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. 8-Sleep automatically regulates the temperature of your bed throughout the night according to your unique needs. I've been sleeping on an 8-Sleep mattress cover for nearly five years now, and it has completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep. The latest 8-Sleep model is the Pod 5. This is what I'm now sleeping on, and I absolutely love it. It has so many incredible features. For instance, the Pod 5 has a feature called Autopilot, which is an AI engine that learns your sleep patterns and then adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment across different sleep stages. It will even elevate your head if you're snoring and it makes other shifts to optimize your sleep. If you'd like to try 8-Sleep, go to 8-Sleep.com/Huberman to get up to $350 off the new Pod 5. 8-Sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's 8-Sleep.com/Huberman to save up to $350. Today's episode is also brought to us by Lingo. Lingo is an everyday wearable that tracks your glucose 24/7. Glucose drives a lot of key processes that support energy, body composition, and long-term health. When glucose is constantly spiking and crashing, that's where we can start to see metabolic dysfunction. And over time, that can even progress to pre-diabetes. Right now, about 115 million adults in the US have pre-diabetes. Most don't know it, and a higher percentage of men have it than women do. Often, there aren't clear symptoms of pre-diabetes early on, so people don't tend to look into it. But the fact is that metabolic health is shaping how your body functions every day, whether you feel it or not. Tracking your glucose with Lingo can help you see how food, activity, and stress impact your glucose throughout the day. I personally have used Lingo, and it's been an invaluable tool for improving my metabolic health. If you would like to try Lingo, Huberman Lab listeners in the US and UK can save 10% on a four-week plan. Just visit hellolingo.com/Huberman for more information. Terms and conditions apply. Again, that's hellolingo.com/Huberman. Let me pause you here. People are probably saying, "Should I take it or should I? "I just hang in there for a sec." 'Cause 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 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. 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. 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 a fiber blast 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 endylthial layer or the epithelial layer of different tissues, you'll get more VEGF signaling. So that's the vascular endothelial growth factor. So get more blood vessels and your genesis being formed, which creates a lot of the controversy around BPC safety. You'll get cell migration, especially when coupled with TB 500 and TB 4. You'll get more access of the healing factors to the area through angiogenic pathways. On top of that, you'll get an antistress 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 corticosteroids will slow or even stop the wound healing from happening. When BPC was administered, the healing was either the same or even better. - Is BPC considered anti-inflammatory because based on what you just said, it almost seems like it helps maintain some of the pro-inflammatory response. Some people might be thinking, why would you want inflammation? What Dr. Bakker just said is if you block inflammation with corticosteroids, you aren't gonna 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? - It's more putting the gas pedal on these processes to bring in the immune system, the healing factors. For example, in one tendon model, they noticed that it increased the amount of growth hormone receptors on the tendon. So theoretically, this would allow more growth hormone to dock in and cause the outgrowth of the tendon and the regrowth of it. So there's that theory there, downstream will modulate nitric oxides synthesis. So that's a big thing when it comes to wound healing 'cause 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 BPC and they'd get less drunk when they go through mazes. - Oh boy. - Okay. - We did not just recommend you take BPC with alcohol. - No, we'll be very clear. But people are good, you know, we'll do their own interpretation. So I'm being semi facetious, but very interesting. - And then also they would give them mice drunk and then have them withdraw from alcohol. And like withdrawals deadly. If we have a patient in the hospital that withdrawals, they could die during that withdrawal from our given benzodiazepines. They got BPC and they didn't have the withdrawals symptoms. 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 ill say, and gastric effects are way more interesting when it comes to that, because it's modulating the gut brain access in an interesting way. Well, people come to us and they're like, my adorolls 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 it seems like it's a blunt thing that they're at all. So it's doing something from dopinergic signaling, on both sides, both withdrawal when it comes to the gapinergic side, but also the peak of signaling. So if you like peruse reddit, which you should never do, you'll find all these anhydonia discussions about BPC. People feel depressed and low energy. - Incredible. - So it seems to be a whole new effect. - It turns up effects in animals and anecdotal reports in humans. Because I think both you're in 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 gonna ask you some very direct questions about this. And I don't hold you responsible as being like BPC, spokesperson, but here you are. That's Pavlov's job. And he's dead. Are there any known adverse events from people who are in the same way?
people taking BPC, known and documented, 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 1000 times the dose of BPC with no relive adverse effects. So we don't even know the LD50 of BPC, which makes it hard for it to become an FDA approved. Maybe to find it. - LD50 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, you know, barbaric as it sounds to determine for any drug. What's the LD50 for caffeine? What's the LD50 for aspirin? What's the LD50? Every drug you take, folks, on or off the counter, a prescription or non-prescription, has gone through LD50 testing in animals. - To be a clinician to prescribe as 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, animals, in the early 2000s, from that same correlation group. So that's the big concern of BPC, all the data comes from one group. So people can 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, you know, miserable condition of, where they use them, attacks the lining of the gut in multiple spots. And they use animals 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. - Yeah, maybe more, but up to a million. You're talking about 80 milligrams. - Yeah, rectal animals, they did a phase one in a phase two trial during this daily, or they do it once. - They did it for a few weeks. And then they remeasured, it was placebo controlled. The data's not available, the abstracts are only available. So that's what also gives us some pause when we're gonna 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 to find that a little bit more specifically. - If you take aspirin, and then you measure blood aspirin levels, you'll notice the levels go up. When they measured BPC levels, BPC-157 levels in these individuals, they didn't find it in the blood. So either it was broken down very quickly or it stayed locally to the lining of the gastric tissues. - That raises a question for me. Let's say somebody doesn't quote unquote take any BPC-157 by NMR 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 can. - Is it circulating or is it restricted to the gut? - 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're decide to do this, they're going to take an oral or an injectable. There are they're going to inject local to the injury. - Yes, they can. - Or an insupertoneal. - 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. - God, we don't know. - Like we don't, we need to know the dynamics. We don't know where it goes, how it goes. - We don't know the results in terms of what those 80 milligram animas 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 trials, very small, like 40 patients, there was at least a positive signal on those sort of colitis. - And this was done in the United States or this is in Croatia. Okay, so to be quite direct, on the one hand you have groups who I think are mostly well-intentioned, saying, hey, 80 milligrams of BPC by way of Enema did not cause any adverse events. And that's the phase one that you described. - If we believe they're dead. - Yeah, that's true. - On the opposite side, many people, especially in the United States and Northern Europe, where the regulations tend to be similar-ish, right? It's 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 a phase one in the United States? - That's a good question. The groups seem to be very robust, and they do really good randomized, controlled, 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, you know, soviet research that might be, you know, pro-fabrication when it comes to certain compounds that makes people hesitant. 'Cause a lot of like, these soviet-era compounds that are not peptides or some of them are peptides, that are fantastically sound, they sound amazing, but when they get tested, maybe they're not as potent as the Soviet data would suggest. - I always thought that the Russian stuff was like the really potent stuff that they didn't want anyone else to know about. That is all kind of where it goes the other way, right? - You could go both ways. I mean, 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 subscription for 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? - Legal. - 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 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, this is not an approved drug, but we're okay with you compounding this and you're okay to push that forward. Category two is like do not compound. In late 2024 BPC 157 and 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-enable it as PDA, Pedadec of 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 Arginate, but the PDA is BPC 157. Because there are many, many people selling compounded Penta decapeptide. Penta decapeptide, Arginate. PDA? Did I mispronounce it? Yeah, Penta decapeptide, Arginate. It's the Arginate. Okay. I think the acetate one is the one that's on the category two list. Now, just in April of this year, they got removed from the category two list. And 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 to let it from one of the license in many states. One of these states reached out to me, it's like, you could not prescribe, not me directly, like to the general public of people in that state. It's like, you could not 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 laws. 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 it BPC, because there's effectively what it is. Or there's other thing, like, they can't 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 fact where the patient is. So if, let's say in California, it's not allowed to have BPC according to the state board of pharmacy, whatever, bands 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, our board's cracking down on this. Not really. There's a couple of states that are cracking down on people and people don't know to avoid those states, but it's going to be very dicey over the next few years. Okay. A couple of questions. Annek data. We don't want to place too much on it, but the big kind of rumor out there that pricked up my ears a few years ago was, when I heard that some athlete before the Summer Olympics, this was two Summer Olympics ago, from Eastern Europe, had a complete Achilles transaction, not just a terror or a poll, but when we think about nerves and tendons, we think of 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 it started toward the public awareness that leads to you sitting here today. - Among other things. - Yes. - We also, you have met a lot of other knowledge, but we're restricting to BPC now. So do we have verification of that story? - No. I think that story was hearsay. I don't think I 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 all the best and latest greatest treatments whether Exxonem Stemsell's other peptides. - Call you thing 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 case 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. - Yes, it's a good luck proving that BPC was injected, you know, we could go. 'Cause by the time the peptides are already gone out of your system or at least we think based on the farm pedanics that we understand now. That story was run with from the research community. They used that as a marketing tool to sell more BPC 157. 'Cause what happened in the field is the GOP ones come online, you know, late 2021, 2022. That was with Uzambic and WegoV, they get the FDA approval for weight loss. There's not enough of a supply from the traditional pharmaceutical versions of the GOP ones. So people start looking elsewhere to get their weight loss drugs. I know people that would drive down Mexico and pick up pens.
because a pharmacy in the United States would cost $1,500 for an ozemic pen. Farms in Mexico, one hour drive, same drug, same exact drug. How much relative, going 50 versus 1,500? So 10x. And this is the thing that Trump has been very vocal about, like 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-glutite 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 to these people telling them to do it, like, "Brigam was just talking in last week at the enhanced games." He was like, "Yeah, the FDA told us to make the stuff and then they're getting us in trouble." This is Brigham Bueller, who runs ways to well and ran a pharmacy for a long time. He's the less compounding case. Yeah, we never actually met in person. One of the best ones, yeah. He's not an ad for pharmacies. I have no business relationship to bring him here. So if there's a shortage, compounding pharmacies can jump in the game. Yes. And they jumped in very hard on the GLPs. Yes. And they made a lot of money off the GLP ones. They're like, "This was billions of dollars being made." Were they selling them for less than standard pharma was selling? They were less than the ozemic pens. Unfortunately, what would happen is the provider had the discretion on the price. So all these providers also were making a lot of money. Who's the quote unquote provider? The physician, the physician, or the NP, or the PA, who takes the difference, the clinician, which is, I don't think legal in most states. Wait a second. Or maybe not in federal. Wait a second. I wanted to take a wagovie. Yes. And there's a shortage. I can't get it from who's the big manufacturer? No, of course. Novenorists 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, but it turns out the compounding pharmacy through a different doctor, a more benevolent doctor." There you go. "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'm cloaked from the process. If you're getting the Novenorist pen, the physician's non-volved. Sure. And I'm not-- No, I'm not if I'm drifted towards a compounding. A pharma. So 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 pharmacy will tell you, hey, a vial of semi-glutide costs, $150 bucks. This clinician can now sell that vial to the patient sale. They're charging an administrative fee. It's not a sale, because technically, you get sell medications like that. They will sell it to you for $200 or $100. OK. If I want to ask my physician, how much are you getting the drug for? From-- because I know which pharmacy it's going to come from. It's going to come into my-- Yes. --is like Upstate or Taylor Made. Yes, it is. 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. Sorry, clinicians. Yeah. The game is up. Patients are now going to ask, and you have every right to ask as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, because what's going to happen with the BPC and all the other peptides moving? Is there's going to be telehealth platforms on every corner now that are going to be like, hey, BPC, $199, BPC, $299, and they're going to check out. And they're going to be a doctor somewhere in a room that's going to stamp the prescription. But it's just the e-commerce. It supplements with a stamp of a doctor, which is not good medical care at all. OK. 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 four 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, till a few years ago, you could go on there, could buy pretty much any peptide. It would say four research purposes only, not for animal or human use. Yes. And you sign that many times. And when you paid them, you would have to Venmo them. Yeah. Or you could do it through Zell. Yes. You 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. 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 I think they actually got payment processors. Like this market evolved with the design. OK. There's maybe, I'd say, $5 to $10 billion on gray market peptides being spent in the United States in 2025. And that's going to grow this year. So here's my question. Standard pharma, we know goes through-- of all the things we're talking about, the most stringent process. You may hate pharma folks or whatever. That's your right. But the stuff that you get that's non-generic from-- Yes. --novenorisk from the UI-li-ly. 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 his work in crypto, who's also now very open about the fact that he's taken all these peptides and antibiotics and things. And I heard him online the other day saying, literally, that he's tested the gray market for research purposes only peptides and compared them to the compounding pharmacy versions and their identical. Now, he's not a physician, and I don't think he's lying. But many people are taking that sort of evidence and saying, oh, I'll just get it from gray market sources. As a physician, what is your stance on this? So the API for all these active pharmaceutical ingredients comes from China. There are no such things that American made peptides. It gets finished here. So the API-- They're all from China. Everything's from China. The raw materials? The raw materials. Like the semi-glued tide you're getting from a compounding pharmacy or a research peptide website, a red chart that included, come from China. And then the raw material gets packaged here. In the wild. The raw materials or synthesized compound. Because there's a big difference between getting the raw materials for something and getting the thing. The synthesized semi-glued tide 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's-- 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 test things. They're illiterate. 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 the Lada in B12 or B6 to say, like the patient had nausea from the traditional semi-glued tide. We can compound them with B12 or B6 to get around the nausea. And that's 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 was something else actually deals with the nausea or is that just a slight event? It might help some people. Got it. And it's totally-- people will say that they respond better to the pens, like the actual farm repens than to the competitive 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 was a guy on Twitter a few weeks ago. He got rid of Trutide, started getting darker. He's like, I don't think I'm injecting a rid of Trutide. He's got a-- Yes. He was injecting Melanthen 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. Yes. Then they're getting filtered into these different-- let's just call them stringency bins. Yes. Standard pharma, quote unquote, "farmah," being the most stringent. Yes. Some of the raw materials are overseas. Like I think Lily's opening some China factories. Oh, that's here. OK. 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? OK. The quote unquote, "grain market" peptides. The ones where it's quote unquote, "for research purposes only," but I made the joke on ex a few weeks ago. Like how many of you are running experiments and you're not on animals? What are you doing cell culture at home? Like, come on. Let me see. And I'm like, I know it's involved in doing cell culture. You're not-- I was doing this at home. So those presumably also come in anywhere from excellent to dreadful. Yes. But we don't know which are which. We don't know that-- And batch to batch. That's the big problem. Gotcha. OK. So it is risky for research purposes. Yeah, I mean, that's the majority of away people are consuming peptides, unfortunately, which is 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 existed for the last 15, 20 years. Bodybuilders would have anecdotes about BPC1557 and they'd inject it post-- post plots for different injuries. Nobody really cared about it. It was with the GLP1s and then the banning of the peptides. Plus this anti-medicine kick that's been happening a little over the last five years. So you're a pandemic? Yes, it's 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. I said the best job in 2025 was to be a peptide affiliate. People made my yearly salary in the 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 term. So when he's come up with a better term, my understanding and not from Reddit is that more than half of the peptide market is female. That's right. There's this perception that it's like, only guys who like to lift weights and want to be jacked and jacked in tan or whatever they say. No. Especially when we start getting into things like GHKU copper, we start talking about things for collagen and skin rejuvenation. There's a big peptide market in towards women. I actually think in the long run, it's going to exceed at least financially. It will peptide market in men. I think it already has. Because like soccer moms become like affiliates, like you know, amway and herbal life was the big thing 20 years ago. Now soccer moms just do peptide affiliates. Where are they getting their peptide? Research, research grade websites. Great market. Yeah, all great.
We already know that they're not recommended. What about black market? What would be considered black market? - Black market is like you bought it directly from China. It's very cheap. A Vial of BPC costs five bucks to make. Someone will sell it to you for $199 plus, depending on where. But a black market is either your friend in China on WhatsApp sent you a Vial of BPC, do not do this. Or someone's synthesized claims they synthesize it in their bathtub. Just like an underground la gear. 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 'cause a lot of guys are taking a lot more than that. Some are taking less. Some are most are taking more. Some are taking what they're prescribed. And then HRT has become very popular in women. So now HRT is kind of like a thing that it's not like, oh my goodness, someone's always taking estrogen placement or testosterone. It's not a big deal. Peptides is different because it came the big explosion in this came through the GLP's. And I would argue, I love your opinion on this, why so many people are now peptide curious, is because people because of the GLP's are now also very comfortable injecting themselves. - Absolutely. - Like five years ago, if you're like, you're gonna inject yourself people like, oh my God, then they realize it's like this little tiny pin, it hurts less than a Texan mesequito bite. People are doing another skin. And like, you know, somebody's, you know, your girlfriend or wife is doing it. - If it's nothing and you know, like heroin addicts or diabetics. - Right. - You're not going intravenous. So that changed. - Yes, yes. - That destigmatize it. Now, to be fair, I want to touch on the question about adverse events again. We're gonna spend a couple of minutes talking about some incredible things that we've seen and heard about BPC157 in terms of its positive effects. The concern I've always had was the endogenesis, the growth of vasculature. If somebody happens to have a little tumors, what will eventually become a tumor sitting on their liver and 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 where I say that. I want to know. I'm not currently taking BPC157. I fortunately, I don't have an injury at the moment, so that would be the only condition 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 the realistic risk based on observations in humans or animals. Have we ever seen tumors grow more quickly? No. For example, most compounds, if they're carcinogenic, we will see that signature in the animals, like with cardinine GW. Was a drug that was very promising because it had diabetic implications for metabolism. And now it's a bodybuilder drug that is used for more cardio. Is this cardinine GW? You might have seen it on the reddit's and those farms, but people use it for first. I stay out of reddit. Yeah, good. It increases your cardio capacity. So it's banned on the water list, of course. But it had promised for a treating diabetics because it changed the metabolism. In the liver, it had a signal of cancer in animal data so that whole thing was scrapped. There is no signal from the animal literature on BPC-157 for cancers. Now, 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. All of it. Interesting. There are very few, like, a couple of Chinese studies on BPC-157. Now they're starting to become more interesting. Like, I think it's a face to trial on hamstrings happening here in the United States. Really? Human. Yes, face to. Yes. We talked to a group, an orthopedic group, somewhere on the East Coast. They wanted to do a BPC trial so that we consulted with them to kind of-- Great. Yeah, so it's going to happen. Especially if it moves to this category one list, people can be prescribed it. At least we can get, like, a face for trial where it's being prescribed. And we can see what's happening to the people as they're getting it. And we can, you know, aggregate all this anecdata into one place, ideally, and report on it. So that's something we're working on in the background. Is that something you personally-- Yes, it is. --are all working on aggregating all this data together into anyone and E1. That study to put it all together. Because there's all the anecdata exists, but, like, put it together somewhere. At least we can see what the signals are. For example, on Reddit, you'll find signals of hematomas getting worse, which makes sense with the VGF pathway. I've heard this. So a friend and physician who is-- I would say peptide curious-- --to slash positive told me that when he takes BPC157 for, you know, a shoulder or any or whatever, that angiomas on his face, the sort of spider web angiomas-- not the formal term, forgive me, terms, 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 make sense. Now BPC157 is not a uniform and a synances a regulator. In some models, it decreases VGF in a melanoma model, a cell of cell line. So it might be potentially anti-cancer, but we need to test it. We don't know. And 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 this. It's the one animal. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And we'd love to know, because if it does work, I could see a million use cases in ICU that we could use BPC157 to really help people out, especially during the critical illness. Because in ICU, people get gastric ulcers. If we knew that it would work, I would love to give them an infusion of BPC157. And it's the future I could see happening, but we need data. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for nearly 15 years now. I discovered it way back in 2012, long before I had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since. AG1 is, to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market. It combines vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, probiotics, and adaptogens into a single scoop that's easy to drink and tastes great. It's designed to support things like gut health, immune health, and overall energy. And it does so by helping to fill any gaps that you might have in your daily nutrition. And of course, we should all eat high quality, whole foods, but most of us are probably not getting enough prebiotics, vitamins and minerals, and AG1 ensures that those gaps are filled. I get asked all the time by people, if they were to take just one supplement, what would my recommendation for that supplement be? And my answer is always AG1, because it's just been so critical for supporting all aspects of my physical health, mental health, and performance by covering those nutritional, what we call foundational bases. And I know from my own experience, and from everyone I've heard that I recommended it to, that they simply feel much better in a number of different ways when they take it regularly. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer. For a limited time, AG1 is giving away a 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/huberman to get a weak supply of AGZ and a bottle of D3K2 with your subscription. When is there going to be a formal, randomized control trial on VPC, and who holds the patent? There's multiple patents on VPC, 157, depending on which salt they're in. The patent has been passed around a couple of times to three 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 a, you know, adderol. So they're making tons of money, making adderol. They don't really care about VPC 157. So they have one of the patents. The other patent expires in like 10 years. I think Cycrix still has it. Dr. Cycrix is the guy behind VPC 157. He's an incroachial. He's an incroachial, yeah. Would TAVA sell the patent? I'm sure they would. 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 Lulai Lili is coming into when it comes to making a redder. 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 iBagane trials. And there's a company that took iBagane 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. - That's right. - Plus millions of people already use BPC 157 through research use only websites. So I think it's millions is fair. But now how do you realize that back? Like it's already the cat's out of the bag. So like there's no financial incentive to run the giant study. And let's like we crowdfund it as you know, peptide curious people within the category of interesting anecdotal data. 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 truly FDA approved drugs. And what 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 awards of the hospital. I have many patients from the ER to the floor, to the ICU managing very complex disease ranging from simple pneumonia to a coronary artery bypass patient. So that whole spectrum. So that lens applied to this as much as one can, would you say that like of the reports that you 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 affiliate code attached to it. Of those, what do you think are the most interesting, potentially valid claims? And I asked that because if we were going to fund a clinical trial, we'd need to pick an endpoint or a couple of endpoints. 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 gonna 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 time.
good feeling there's, quote unquote, something there. - Yep. - And then we 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 ulcerative colitis, do that phase three trial on proving that it has benefits for ulcerative colitis. And I don't think we'd need to use an animal. We could probably have an encapsulated version that releases deeper into the intestines. - I think so. - And fix the gut. Fix the ulcered gut. - Yes. - I'm conjunction with that. You could do a trial on like, you know, gird. That's a simple condition. The logical have it. Randomize to BPC157 oral capsules versus pantoplasal. - Okay. And you're basing this on the fact that you've seen and heard that people who have gird, get better feel better when they take it. - Yeah. - 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 tap not to. Antigone, right? But that's interesting. There seems to be some kind of gut protective effects. And that's what they notice 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, in the gastric track from that offending agent. 'Cause if you think about it, the gut is the most vulnerable part of the body. Like, it's open to the outside world. The tube that runs through you, you can eat something and it can completely destroy you. So you have to have some kind of mechanisms to cross the glands, you know, all these different hormones that are made, potentially BPC157, 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 neuroscientiatric BPC studies when it comes to add addictions. There's enough anecdata about people talking about addictions and they're like, "Hey, I don't need a 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, they become less reinforcing, or is it somehow touching the craving mechanism 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 BPC is what they claim it is, right? And that's a big if, that if you have a noctious agent going to your gut, your body has to have a mechanism to lock down, protect your vital organs, right? So it's BPC part of this giant transduction pathway to protect your vital organs, your brain, your heart, your kidneys from further damage. We had Dr. Diego Borquez, I can never pronounce his last name for Gimidio, who's out at Duke, who's really the world expert on these neuropod cells and the gut that's signaled through the notos ganglion, up the Vegas notos ganglion 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 if getting funds for his lab to do something on this. What are some other categories of interesting effects that deserve careful study? So we need to see what BPC does on the musculoskeletal system. Like that's what the hype is, that's what 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 a bicep tricep tendon type of post-surgical outcome. So if you get your bicep tendon torn, you get a repair, you get BPC either interoperatively or postoperatively, and you see if that person heals faster. Because 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 inject locally. But it seems that the challenge is that let's say you have, you know, tendonitis in one elbow and tendonitis in the other elbow, you could inject into your left elbow and not your right, but there's going to be systemic transverse. So it's hard to do that internal control experiment. Yeah, and I've had, I've used BPC for one injury, and I've had Brazol's on a different injury. Positive, right? Positive results. I'm like, oh, interesting. My shoulder feels better even though I was doing it from elbow or whatever. Maybe 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 can serve myself a skeptic on many, many things, especially things I would put into my body. I'll tell a story. What's your favorite personal BPC story involving you and your body? Yeah, I tore my tricep a few months ago. Yeah, tore tricep lifting with people. I should have been lifting with there. Much stronger than I was. Purple from here to here. Like the pictures I post them on X, it's brutal. I'm like, oh, I'm gonna have to have surgery. The socks. I have to have a lot of time have surgery. Because you're in a brace for like three months. And I put BPC in locally. I don't try this at home. I'm 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? Like this is healing so fast. Would I heal that fast anyways? I don't know. But that's typically a grade two tricep tear with purple arm from top to bottom. It wasn't grade three. Because I still extend 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 injecting? A larger dose than people would. Not typically. Not micrograms. No, no. You were up in the grams. 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 dosage is way higher. But people just go based on the dosages that would fit in the pile, through a peptide sciences website, rather than what actually, we don't know what the human dose is. Or we can see one five seven. So there's a lot of work to do to just figure that out. Like when we spoke to the orthopedic group, like, yeah, we're going to start with 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, wait, that's just because of someone's peptide websites that says to do that. There's no data there. But tricep was backed in normal. Amazing. That was an interesting BPC case. I've seen other injuries where BPC 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 pull where I couldn't turn my head. And I was like, oh, I wanted those. And you had some BPC. So there's only, I think, only 200 micrograms. And just pinned it right into the, that street talk for injected. Right into the, you know, like, upper trap ish area two days later, completely gone. Of course, I don't know what would happen had I just waited. But it seemed eerily fast. Yes. And then I stopped taking it. So this 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. Labeled BPC157, not 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, it could be due to what it was dissolved in, could be due to their own unique of, you know, response, could be due to bad sourcing, you know, contamination. So we don't know. But not everyone has a great result. And some of them 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, etc. And I'm not saying that to protect myself. I'm saying that so that people can couch this in that, like, how we got here. 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 BPC is actually either ineffective or harmful to people. And millions of people are injecting it right now by buying it through online sources. Both cases are very bad endpoints. One is worth another. You can argue with 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, Ciceroxlabs says it is, then 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 and say, comment and check BPC. Like, where do you get it from? Well, for, I'm like, 18. You have all the peptides you need in you, like the parabiosis studies. These are young animals. Like, you actually take your blood and then you get it. We had a 20-wise quarry on the podcast. It was, you know, young blood is rich with these things. And no, we're not talking about harvesting blood from babies. No, no, no. Check out the 20-wise quarry 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 a role model, or taking BPC is, you know, we could have a whole other conversation. Maybe another time we will talk about testosterone and synthetic, and things like that. I see a lot of young guys taking everyone. I don't know if it's ever. Yeah, I don't know if it's everyone. I see a lot of, I see a lot of, many, many people are taking testosterone exogenously who truly don't need it. And potentially permanently shutting down their fertility or causing other issues. Yeah. What the looks, Maxine Trent, too. What the looks, Maxine Trent, you know, they're walking around with hammers, sludge in the cell in the face, just kind of thing. You know, I'm sure when I was in my 20s, you know, people in their 50s were probably like, "What are these kids doing?" You know, and it wasn't 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. Yeah. and it goes kind of the way of the dodo or
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 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 gonna take progesterone or estrogen replacement therapy menopause 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 gonna 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 but that's in the gym community. Yeah yeah totally with you anywhere to inject and so it stays that aside. My concern is that it is kind of wild west dish. Yes it is. And I'm not so concerned I'll get in trouble for this but whatever I'm not so concerned that these actual compounds are necessarily harming people I worry that the way they're arriving to people is harming them and we're gonna 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. If you have a patient who has just their gut is a mess or they're dealing with 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? Yeah. 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 I'm like hey you should take BPC instead of your pentopresult I'll probably get my license provoked. So not a good idea don't do that. What about in addition to? In addition to like if they come see me in clinic that might be a place where we can have that discussion. We're gonna see very shortly here what the FDA is gonna tell us about BPC and all these other peptides and the legality of them. If they get moved to the category one list and then the state said hey the FDA said so we're not gonna look we're not gonna care about this you can do what you wanna do as a physician and you counsel the patient like you have a honest discussion with the patient. I think that's what 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 will monitor you will have clear end points for that? That should be what this looks like. Okay. A frame discussion between a physician and a patient. Now if that patient has an adverse effect they can go to medical board and say like hey doctor so and so it gave me BPC 157 and I had a bad effect and I would be like okay you give them a non FDA approved compound. A for injectable. B the problem is there's oral that are being sold as supplements now. Like BPC 157 as an oral available supplement 'cause it's not a medication. It's never been approved as a medication in the United States. So what is the BPC's legal status? Is it dietary available therefore? 'Cause if you cut up an animal and ate its stomach you probably get some BPC in there. Well I can buy just a kid liver to have some. There's some eating livers. There's tons of. He can go buy liver at this like you won Michelin for a restaurant not down this road but a different road. Yeah I mean like Dr. Cavanston identified many peptides in liver like liver and ovogen that you'd find in your desiccated liver supplement that your eat. It's like the biggest distributors of peptides have been these organ meat companies because each organ has a signature peptide that comes out of it. Do they get absorbed? Yes. Are they bioavailable active? Dr. Cavanston's works suggested it is. Dr. Vladimir Cavanston is this Russian Soviet scientist that gives us epitel on in Thymolin and Pneleon and all these Russian peptides. Dying tripe peptides 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 the or eating the organ. Like if you eat heart, probably very rich in alcharnatine. Yep. Can my body make good use of that? I mean there's cardiogen which is one of the heart peptides that was scantly studied in the late 2000s that may be orally bioavailable. The problem is no one's been worked for that out. You painted this picture where not you perhaps but let's just say another physician has the awareness that BPC157 might be useful to a patient of theirs that's dealing with a, they had like an ACL tear. They're not recovering very quickly. Dr. Cess, 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. Yep, there's not no contaminants. If that physician says, you know, I can write you a script for it and this compounding pharmacy will send it to you and they're making money on it. A lot of people, well the moment they hear that, they think, oh well they're totally incentivized to do this 'cause they're gonna get a cut. But if we go back to the original pharma model, it is a little bit of a different situation, right? Because let's say lily charges, $1,500 for a pen of some sort of GLP. The physician who prescribes that, are they getting a cut of that 1,500? They don't. But there are kickbacks and pharmaceutical incentives and pharmacists. 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 pharma's also lobby a lot of the medical schools and they know. Gotcha. Okay, so there's a relationship there, but it's not cold hard cash as direct as the compound. But in a compounding pharmacy, now this physician, hypothetical physician, could say, you know what, you can get it from this compounding pharmacy and it's gonna be $500. The patient we've now established 'cause 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. I don't know. Something happens to somebody suing a compounding pharmacy or they're suing their physician. They're suing all three. They're suing the physician in the compounding pharmacy and anyone recommended it. So that's pretty scary. No malpractice provider is gonna 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 GLPs and they, and they sue, they sue their doctor or they sue their 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 get pancreatitis, they can claim the doctor as that fault. If someone has deep pockets, they can go out literally 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 gonna continue to learn more. But I'm gonna now learn more thanks to you, genuinely, with a lot more understanding about how this stuff flows from website or from doctor to patient. Let's talk about pinealon. Yeah. Pinealon is one that most people probably haven't heard of. 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 RAM 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 RAM 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 RAM. Sometimes wake up feeling a little groggy, but it is a whole other life to get that much RAM. If I don't do it regularly, it's not, I would say maybe three times a month, but here's the interesting thing. It improves my percentage of RAM on all the other nights in between those three injections. And I'm coming clean here at Lingern Effects. Very cool. You're interested in pinealon for a whole other set of reasons, but first of all, what is pinealon and where does it act? Does it have a known receptor? No, no, no receptor. So pinealon is a tripeptide EDR discovered by the mention of Dr. Vladimir Kavinson. He's a Soviet researcher that comes out of this Soviet air research to make soldiers, astronauts, and pilots better. There's concern that the US might be using lasers to shoot at soldiers. So the Soviet Union tasks him with identifying peptides to defend soldiers their eyes, and then they're aging. Because what would happen is they'd be in a submarine for a few months, they'd be a nuclear sub, and they'd come back to shore, and they'd be like, these submariner, let's call them, would look 10, 20 years older. Also happens to ask for them. Yes. So the same day, as astronauts are coming back, they're aged. So Vladimir Kavinson 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 pineal gland and the thymus, from, you know, late 1800s till this 1970s point that were, they were starting our story. And he starts grounding up these extracts and injecting it into these people, and then undoing a lot of these aging effects through pineal extracts and thymus extracts. Because what do these soldiers have? They had very bad circadian rhythmicity, so they can't look intensely 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 Kavinson 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 pineal glands from rats from the 1800s onwards. He finds peptides in these extracts. He's like, "How? "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, violent 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, and epithelon, is not from the pineal gland, is not from the pineal gland. Even though everyone, no, I think it's all that because there's, there's, as far as I understand, please correct me if I'm wrong. There are animal data suggesting that pinealon can help either regenerate or enhance the, the general functioning of pinealocytes. So it's having an effect on the pineal, when you take cultured pineal glands, that will piece like glanny and put in addition, you can just associate the cells or keep it, you know, as a little piece ice. The only thing you give it, pinealon, and seems to improve the timing and perhaps even the amount of melatonin output from the pineal, these kinds of effects. - So epithelon does that. So that's a big confusion. I don't know why he named them the way he named them. If anyone knows, please let us know. But epithelon 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 cortexin, specifically, not not the subcortal regions. - So he specifically, not the subcortal regions, that's reassuring. - So Flodrick Havansen identifies, he makes a drug in Russia, it's called epithelomin, which is the pineal gland extract, and had great effects on circadian rhythmicity and a lot of the functions. - And that's because it's rich with melatonin. - There you go, but all. - But basically giving people melatonin. - But also you apply the enzyme that creates melatonin from serotonin to enacetyl serotonin to melatonin. So like, when you give it to young monkeys, the monkeys had no effect. But he gave it to age monkeys that have decreased melatonin, and you know, from puberty onwards, your melatonin levels dramatically decrease. He was able to restore melatonin production in these aged animals, and eventually re-replicated it on humans. - I want to talk about fineness, because it's fascinating in your truly averse in this. But before we do that, so, Ponylon comes from the cortex, not the pineal. - Yes, that's annoying. - Yes, very annoying. - Maybe we'll just rename it today. I'll let you do the renaming. - We'll call it EDR. - EDR. - That's the three amino acid sequence. - Great. We'll call it EDR, so people don't get confused. What are some of the known effects, or am I just imagining this REM increase? Because I can't change what's happening to me during sleep. That would be an amazing placebo effect. And the reason I say amazing is there are many things that one can do to improve the amount of slow-wave deep sleep, not eating too close to bedtime, to do some exercise early in the day, and so on, 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 to pry of yourself. - Yeah, or you can smoke cannabis for 10 years then quit, and then you'll get a lot of REM, 'cause you got no REM for 10 years. Do not recommend that protocol. But for me, it was just striking. So why would EDR, try peptide with no receptor? - Right, previously called pinylon, but from here forward, EDR, why would that have this effect on REM sleep? - Yep, and I actually searched through all of literature from Cavants, and he never mentions REM sleep once in his studies. He studied pinylon quite extensively on different neuronal tissue extra-axx animal studies, even in athletes, and never mentions the REM sleep. They weren't having, they didn't have whoops in the 1970s in the Soviet Union. - They didn't have an age sleep? - Yeah, kidding me, no. - 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 canyelon, this EDR, it's a tripod type 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 turning on genetic programs? - Yes, 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 pinylon in one sentence, it's leading to better brain metabolism through modulating all these different pathways. For example, GDF11, sod1, sod2, irisin, PPR-alpha, PPR-gamma, so what seems to be happening? So he made pinylon as a anti-stress, and cognitive performance compound. And it was available early in like Kazakhstan, so all the sudden he was taken before sleep, I should be taking in the morning. - Yes, so if you take a high enough dose, there is sedation, front. 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 do the training session, go to exhaustion, and then do a test afterwards. And there's two groups, pinylon and the placebo. The pinylon group could keep their performance up, despite being maximally exhausted from their training. So 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 day to come. - So a lot of people report less brain fog, better thinking, the friend that has a nine-figure company has all of his employees on pinylon. - They're taking in the morning. - In the morning? Or a night, depending on the dose, - Do you know the dose, that we're recommending? - Orally people will take anywhere between, half a milligram up to three milligrams, is where people settle in. The caverns in ones that come from Russia are like 200 micrograms. Some people are injecting it. - It goes systemic. - It goes systemic. It's orally available through these Latin-pep transporters. - Crosses the blood brain barrier. - Most likely, yes. - Okay, 'cause it's coming from cortex, but yes, otherwise the way you're describing it, we're putting no one's infusing into the brain. - No one's if it. So we're assuming it's small enough, it's a tripod to cross the blood brain barrier. - Have you tried it? - I haven't took some last night, but okay. - At night. - So I will take larger doses, if I wanna get good sleep, I'll describe as 8KM. Some people, it will cause them to have a little bit of awakening. At first, that may be why your deep sleep is going away. - I'll say this, if I take half of what was recommended, I'm great, but I'm very sensitive to everything. - Sure. - Just sensitive. If I take what was recommended, I fall very deeply asleep. I have elaborate dreams I wake up. And I couldn't tell if that was a disruption in sleep architecture. I just found, and Grigit, I'm only doing this three times per month, maximum. And I often forget, and then I see a month and month sounds like, oh, maybe I'll take a little pinylonian out. - Yeah. - Whoa, this is wild. And then I'd stop taking it. Because I don't know enough about it. - Yeah. - No, I know it's cleanly sourced, because I trust the compounding form. - Sure. - 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 clear sign. 'Cause what it seems, the big theory of Kavinson, is that as you're, when you're younger, you make a lot of these peptides naturally. You try, die, try, 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 the GHK copper, which is another tripeptide that's technically like the collagen regulator. So pinylonian tripector. - We're gonna try to do this. - The GHK copper is the collagen regulator. That's so far the side effects we've noticed. And we have the probably the biggest anecdotal compilation of any equals one. Every day I wake up someone and say, "Hey, pinylon did this to me." Some people will have a little drop in blood sugar, 'cause it activates PPR, alpha, PPR gamma. So it'll have positive metabolic effects. So that's gonna keep on eye out. And some people even had their A1C's drop. So, not very good glycemic and other people blood sugar is used to take extra consciousness. - And then very vivid dreams. - For some people that could be disheartening if they have like, you know, nightmarriage or something like that. But very, very vivid dreams as a result of a pinylon. And especially like the color and the quality of the dreams is very different than you normally expect. What seems to be happening is like, just like, you know, psychedelics change the redox state of the brain. Pinylon's 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 'cause the neurons are in a better oxidative state. Thanks to the PPR alpha, PPR gamma. I always see all these different pathways that it's modulating with no clear one, you know, receptor that it's doing it through. - I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor function. Function provides over 160 advanced lab tests to give you a clear snapshot of your bodily health. This snapshot gives you insights into your heart health, your hormone health, autoimmune function, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added access to advanced MRI and CT scans. Function not only provides testing of over 160 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health, it also analyzes these results and provides recommendations for improving your health from top doctors. 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And if you think about the information it provides, and the health challenges it helps you avoid, and the proactive things that it can do for you to enhance your health, I truly look at it as a savings. To learn more, visit functionhealth.com/huberman and use the code "Huberman" for a $50 credit towards your membership. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman. What about EpiTown, 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 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 an, I think one of the greatest neuroanatomists of the last hundred years. And that's a good category to be in, 'cause we have like Kahal, 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, it's there, but he's like the neuroanatomist of my generation. And I asked him about this calcification thing, 'cause 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 gonna take it seriously. But even though he was absolutely right about many, many things, I think he might have missed that one. Because when I go to the literature now, it's a little bit tough, because the cadavers that you looked at in medical school, and not all of them are processed on the same timeline, it's not, thankfully, it's not a controlled science. These are people that generously donate their bodies to science. 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, 'cause it's kind of woo-woo. When you think of pineal gland, you think of someone who's gonna sell-- - No neuroscientists chooses to work on the pineal gland. - Yeah, they should, but it's not a very sexy-- - It sounds like someone's gonna sell you crystals or something like that. - It's not very sexy. - Yeah, but I think it's a pre-expect of aging and longevity, so that's what gives us, you know, our interest in it. The pineal gland, it seems from Calvin's work that the decrease in pineal gland function with aging is more of a physiologic than an anatomic problem. I will see some classification on MRIs when we have a patient come in for like a stroke or a TBI will look at the MRI, I'm like, okay, that looks like a little bit of classification there. Maybe my neurology colleagues will disagree, but that seems to happen, but the question is, what is actually leading to the deterioration of melatonin synthesis? 'Cause it decreases quite dramatically, and some people even think that might start puberty. Like if you have a pineal cyst, you can have pre-cocious puberty like eight or nine years old. - The Rhythmicity in melatonin. - 'Cause a young baby, very young baby, that their melatonin secretion is not very rhythmic, but they're in REM like a lot. - Yeah, if they have a lot of their sleepers around. That'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 face shifted. But epithelan is somehow restoring pinealocytes, is 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 lymphocytes, they'll measure in peripheral tissues. He'll notice that the clock genes actually change. So in a more rhythmic pattern, he'll notice that morning cortisol is higher. - Great. - Which by the way, folks, I've said this in the quarter, cortisol episode, you want your morning cortisol super, super high, you want your evening and nighttime cortisol low. If you're a resident in medical school, just listen to what you're superior say. - I don't give a shit about your cortisol levels. You got to do the hard work and then later you get to, later you get to go to bed. It's a little weird that the medical profession tortures their own by disrupting one of the primary anchors of health. - And cognitive. - Yep, right. - I mean, I've had 28 hour shifts and that's what got me interested in - You're really young, but you're good. - But yeah, the idea was restoring a more circadian appropriate hormonal profile through, you know, these TH cortisol taken win anytime. Because the idea with these bioregulators, unlike a GLP1 drug that you take today and have the effect for the next week, the idea from the Cavinson model is that you take these and then you accrue benefits when you're off of them. Like you noticed with Penelion, you took Penelion for a day or two or three days a month and you had effects until you took the next dose. So the idea is, can you accrue benefits from these compounds as they upregulate or downregulate certain genetic pathways in a more favorable state and then keep those effects later on. So in the Cavinson seminal work was this 15 year longevity study, you got people in nursing homes, two groups, one them got epithelon in the form of epithelamine, which is the whole penial gland extract. And then a thymus, a peptide called thymolin, not thymulin, there's two different peptides. A lot of people confuse them, every peptide website can confuse 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 accrue benefits the rest of the year. - Impressive. One of the things that really got me excited about epithelon, is it thalin or talin? - The Russians say epithelon, it's the way they say it, but it's spelled with a th. - Okay. - So I'll say epithelon, whatever it wants. - No, we're making the rules today, so okay. - Epithelon's also AEDG. - Okay. - That's the muasic, which forming us. - I'll say epithelon 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 man effect or like a woe effect. Using epithelon 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 BPC157 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. Like, here's this molecule that 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. 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 working on any number of vague receptor or isch, maybe no receptor, things like. And this is what gene therapy is about. So do you think of epitalan 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 photo receptors that might get damaged in a retinitis pigmentosa. Melanolopsin wasn't discovered when, when, when, when, when, when, when, was, was kicking around. But I would, my, my theory is that epitalan is working on melanopsy. Interesting. And that it may be upregulating melanopsy 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, like, Doc, I did morning sunlight didn't, I didn't feel a fax on like, have you had enough darkness to regenerate melanopsy levels? Because we know that in animal studies, five days of pure darkness dramatically increases the amount of melanopsy in the retinitis. 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, 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. Yeah. 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, the, the quote unquote positive outcome. Yeah. And I think as a clinician, one of the key things for people to remember is that we've screwed up a lot of times as clinicians through different grotesques abuses of our, you know, trust. We've done, you know, interventions or drugs that weren't the most efficacious. For example, like in the 19, 10s and 1940s, we irradiated the thymuses of young kids to prevent cids. This was considered gold standard medicine. Is there anything to do with cids? 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. No, 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, as a, as a field, we've very cognizant of that and know the history of where we've been. Like Vercal, the famous Vercal's triad, he was like pro this therapy. And we all know learn about it in medical school, but no one talks about this aspect. So there's a lot of grotesques abuses of medical power, let's say if you have to be very careful in which interventions we give people and the first things like do no harm. So while we are excited about these therapies, we got to be kind of careful and where we're taking people. Appreciate it. It wasn't aware of that study. Perfect. T up for no pun for the thymus. Yeah, I'm telling you about the thymus. Super interesting organ. Yep. We gland. Yep. We all have one more born. Yep. By the time we're what age is it mostly gone? So the thymus is grown under the influence of a lot of these youthful hormones, meltown in gray.
growth hormone, DHA, and then a shrunk at the moment you hit puberty. So until from your day of birth until puberty, you grow this massive thymus. Where is it? It's right above your heart, right behind this, the collarbone. Big is it? It's a baby. It could be quite large on the chest. Big is a baseball. Like maybe the size of half the heart, let's say, maybe bigger 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 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 thymus removed. Now there are thymomas where people have to have their thymus removed. But we're talking about people that, you know, the surgeon is going in to do a coronary artery bypass surgery. Is the thymus nearly innovative? Yes. So it's getting signals from brain. Vegas nerve, yeah. 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 asensory 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, something going on in our brain, like stress level or sleep controlling our thymus. So they're sympathetic and parasympathetic innervation, trosymus that dictates its hormonal output because the thymus, what is the thymus? Yeah, what's it's a gland that both streets 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 auto-immunity, more cancers, etc. Because the immune system is not as robust. Both because the thymus makes less of the hormones that train the immune cells and makes less of these immune cells themselves. So when you're 15, you're making 10 to the eighth magnitude of these cells every single day. And when you're 15, you're getting more of a T cells that 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, we say, you know, minimum level of output, you get a lot of these disorders like cancers, heart disease, auto-immunity. Risk associated with it, it increases as the thymus function decreases. There's a nature paper, 2026, 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 that had the higher thymus 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, there, you've got just a bit of residual tissue that is 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 you really start till you die, your thymus is slowly shrinking, that really happens in your 20s and 30s, the majority of that. Under the, the pressure of antigens, estrogens, progestines and corticosteroids, those are driving a lot of the shrinkage. So the hormones that everyone seems to want to increase the rest of their life, then 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 involve your thymus, which makes sense because you don't want to be having an autoimmune attack against the baby or a sudden immune attack against the baby. Do women's thymus disappear after pregnancy? They, they involute and then will regrow during the breastfeeding period under the influences of growth hormone and prolactin. So hibernating animals will have a dramatic shrinkage of the thymus during hibernation and then a regrowth during the feeding window. Is there any benefit to doing or taking something to either maintain or regenerate thymic size? So there was, as it, as, 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. Give that for 12 months and had the thymic size increase on imaging, the amount of CD4 or CDAT cells increase 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 and also improved. So they're, they're trying to use growth hormone to regrow the thymus. Getting us directly to peptides, many people who are peptide curious start asking, about thymus and alpha. Is thymus and alpha a peptide that comes from the thymus? Yes. So thankfully they named it appropriately this time. Great. For that. What is thymus and alpha do endogenously when you're not injecting it or taking it? What's its normal function? So thymus and alpha one is part of this thymic family of hormones that gets secreted. It's at least 21 amino acids. It increases T cell development in the thymus, increases T cell preparation outside the thymus and makes it T cells more likely to properly attack a pathogen. Like, it's like a, you know, jet fuel for the, for the T cells. So it's like pro immune. Yes. I've heard of people taking it when they feel run down. If they're traveling, they're sleeping less than usual. They're a new parent. So obviously that's kind of, you know, peptide wild west kind of indications. It was FDA approved as a daxin for kids that were born without thymus or a malfunction thymus like dejorge syndrome, these different kind of genital 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 alpha one for these kids. I don't think that FDA approval still exists. So the people are trying to, you know, grandfather thymus and alpha one into these peptide conversation. In other countries, it's approved for a 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 one, you might have a quicker bounce around. Well, what I would be interested to see is like, you know, once a nursing home's injected everybody with thymus and alpha one in November and December, would you have less flu in January and February? That'd be the interesting thought experiment. Both thymus and alpha one and thymus and beta four come out of the gold scene lab. That's the very famous lab that started thymus in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Thymic research kind of fell out of favor the last few decades, but now it's the sexy as the final. I say that sort of tongue in cheek because I mean, I think these are fascinating glands. And the reason I ask if they're nearly innovative is that, you know, nowadays there's a, there are a lot of reasons why people choose to study one thing or the other. But these understudied glands, if nearly innovative, then open up a lot of interesting questions about brain control, behavioral stress control and the experiments kind of write 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. So I want to make that clear. That have you taken thymus and alpha? Oh, yeah. I've used thymus 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. Dozing thymus and alpha one throughout and I didn't get sick a single time. What 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's just you doing your thing. I'm curious and see if it would work. And you try to stay healthy so you can take care of patients. Exactly. So you're willing to be your own experiment. When we hear about thymus and alpha, we usually hear about TB 500. Yeah. Also, what's TB 500 and how are the two related? So while cavins is finding thymolin and is injecting that into people, the goldstein lab finds thymus and fraction five, which is this giant protein that has many different peptides in it. Time is not for one being one of them. And then thymus and beta four being the other one. Thymus not one thymus and beta four were discovered in the thymus, but they're not exclusive to thymus gland. They're also made in other tissues. Thymus and beta four 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. They have to reorganize their actin cytoskeleton quite quickly. So it seems to upregulate that movement, which the horse community for doping and other athletes have found a niche for thymus and beta four to use it as a doping. You should say the horse community. Yeah, the horse races. Thymus and beta four is a very common doping agent for the riders or for the horses for the horses. Yes. Do they test the horses? Yeah. There's like a big doping scandal when it comes to horses and thymus and I don't know if they test them or they're 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 literature came from animals. Not necessarily dogs and they have melanopsin ganglion cells. They have supercarsametic, like yes, yes, and yes. And physiology. And then recently, it 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 that's will, there are a lot more adventurous than you might think. And I thought, well, listen, you know, now of course these are pets. Yeah. I love my dog, you know, not the same as a human. I am a bit of a species, but love them tremendously. And I think that's what I'm saying.
the peptide industry is going to be in the North. - It's growing 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 one of these things that drops over the lifespan. - Although the paper last week says that it doesn't drop in blood. - Right, the land paper. - I will say, the new story's on that claimer that I called it a longevity drug. I've always said that NAD, I do augment NAD using NMN. 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's 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. - Yeah, right? - They've got 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 teach their own. When I hear about Fymus and Alpha, TB500, BPC, it occupies this kind of middle ground, right? - Yeah. - And so I think this is why a lot of people are saying, "Hey, I love my dog. I love my cat. I don't know if NAD is going to do anything for their longevity. It doesn't look like it may or may not." I don't know. But I think a lot of people are starting to think, "Oh, you know, like, and here we go, Pavlov and his dogs." So I do think this is another category of interest. And of course, we're the curators. They don't get a vote. They can't consent. - Right. - Right? So we have to be very thoughtful there too. If I ask you, let's say I had an aged dog and I come to you and I go, "Listen, I know you're a human physician, but he's getting sick a lot." I don't know. Maybe he's getting some Thymus and 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 vet in your board is going to sue me now." But no, they're not going to do that. Actually, I have relatives who are vets. They are very open. - Right. - Interesting. - Very open. The veterinary community's 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 reading problem. And then you let people train them not to hump. - Yep. - My company pharmacy here locally that would give dogs their testosterone. - It made him so much healthier and happier. I have zero regrets. - I'm pro peptide tropets, let's say. I think there would be beneficial effects. We know dogs when they vomit, they end up looking some of the vomit you've seen this before. - Yes. - As I saw that, I'm like, is he trying to get peptides back from the gastrochloride? Like, that's the first thing. - Maybe from a pavilion fine to dog. - Yeah. - So I'm like, I mean, in two of the instinctively, there might be something there. 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 a lot of, I think a lot of the positive signals are going to come out of people giving them to their pets. Unfortunately, there's so many brands now that are popping up every day, given their pet's peptides. Because BPC is again, to be treated as a supplement when it comes to oral capsules or is going to be treated as a 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 medications. So FIA 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, McCarrie just, Macarrie, I don't ever know how to pronounce the 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 raising is one of the most important questions. Is BPC going to be taken seriously as a drug? Or is it more creatine-ish? Yeah. I mean, for example, I could give you a B12 supplement. You could buy that on Amazon or I could prescribe that to you. But if I was to give you an injectable B12 shot, you would need a prescription for that. So is that distinction going to apply to peptides also? Is the big question that no one's answered? And is a, you know, penielon is a supplement you can find in Kazakhstan and Russia and Ukraine, over all these different countries, over the counter in different pharmacies. Is the penielon available as a capsule? It's available as a capsule. Does it work as well as a capsule? In a capsule, it's needed, but it still works. What are the doses? Doses, excuse me, that people are injecting versus taking orally. So when it comes to the bioregulators, the epitelon penilian, the cabins in literature looks at like microgram dosages. I'm 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 cow brain that might give you a few hundred micrograms of penielon. Oh man, desiccated cow brain makes me think of a crutchville yak. AK, mad cow, prion, prion, prion. That's the one I had on on wards in third year of medical school had degenerate brain from crutchville yak. Yeah, it was a bad case on your all due wards. Please folks, do not be consuming brains. I know there's some people like, oh, it's got all this stuff that can help you. Please, please, please, like these, these, these prion things are really serious. Yeah. Yeah, scary. 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 setback, all that research in the, when the, you know, the prion stuff happened in the early 2000s, that setback 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 that were like, there was about, you know, 10 different groups in Eastern Europe that came up with their own thymus peptide drug, which was polypeptide fragment with thymus, thymus, thymus, thymus, thymus, thymus, and chrystalline, 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 and macaul. 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. But American side, the Goldstein group came up with thymus infraction 5, which has thymus alpha 1 and thymus and beta 4 in it. Also, thymus and beta 10, thymus and beta 9, a bunch of different thymus sins. But studied these two dramatically, thymus and alpha 1 and thymus and beta 4, the French came up with the actual main thymus hormone, which is thymulin. Not thymulin. Thymulin is the Russian polypeptide mix. Thymulin is a 9 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 what we're calling the thymus pituitary adrenal axis. The thymus pituitary gonal axis. Thymulin is this peptide that is secreted by thymus, dramatically decreases with age, as zinc-dependent. So biology likes to use metals with different amino acid structures. Hemoglobin with iron, GHA copper with copper. Thymulin is zinc-dependent. So it's a 9 amino acid peptide with zinc inside of it to do its effects. And that will develop NK cells and T cells, stimulate their immune response, but also in the animal models, not replicated in humans yet, when they take out the pituitary and then inject, you know, ACTH or ACG. The amount of thymulin sensitizes the N organ to production of the targeted hormone, for example, if you were to give ACG alone to the animal, H-C-G. Yeah, ACG. Synthetic luteinizing. Yes, yes, yes, yes, ACG. Essentially. It's binding to the, it's called the ACG LH receptor. So they would get more testosterone-produced when they got ACG with thymulin versus ACG alone. So what you're saying is that thymus and alpha, potentially, or TB500 or other thymic hormones, thymulin specifically. Okay, thymulin specifically. Yeah, okay. The other one, the different effects on the pituitary axis. So thymulin specifically can augment the effects of endogenous and perhaps also exogenous hormones. Yep. And it depends because if you're not robust when it comes to immune status, because you can think of your thymulin as high-un-youth, low-in-enaged, you have no business investing in reproduction. You have no business in creating a lot of corticosteroids, because that gives you that, you know, a useful energy in the morning. But if you're making a lot of corticosteroids, you're shrinking your thymus. So it creates kind of a feedback loop, negative feedback loop, to prevent you from overrunning your system. A lot of young guys will be like, "How am I immune system sucks?" And I just lost my low. Like, is there a thymus link there as the question? Interesting. I'm sure that you're the first person in the last 20 years to be talking about this publicly. And I really appreciate the art, because of course, I 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 away over time. People taking thymus and alpha, TB500 and thymulin, is this something that people would cocktail or is taking thymulin, something that generally could be a good idea in your certain circumstances? Thymulin itself has a very short half-life. The goal would be to increase endogenous production of the thymulin itself. How would you do that? So sufficient zinc status is necessary to make thymulin. The first sign of zinc depletion, before RBC zinc or serum zinc decrease, is your thymulin levels tank. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Sugar hydration is critical for brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. 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When I first wake up in the morning, I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an element packet dissolved in it. I also drink element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors. In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So if you'd like to try element, you can go to drinkelement.com/huberman to claim a free element sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's drinkelement.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack. GHKU copper. Most of the questions I get about it are from women. I sent out a little informal poll to the. I'd be careful, I'd say this, the women in my life, including siblings and things like that. And almost all the women said, "What about GHKU copper? I hear it can be good for my skin. Should I use it?" Topically, take it earlier and inject it. If I inject it, shine, inject it locally. I'm like, "Please don't inject in your face." Because as much as I'm comfortable with people giving themselves a little sterile injection and belly or something like, I get worried about non-experts injecting themselves 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 that have Alzheimer's, maybe women should take it too for all those reasons and more. And it kind of revered it back to like a muscle thing. GHKU is a tripe peptide with a copper ion in the middle. It's glycine histidine and lysine. It's actually found in type one collagen fibers. So only where type one collagen fibers are. All over your skin, hair and connect it to you. So just like Vladimir Cavitzen discovers these 40 different peptides and liver peptides, brain peptides, pineal peptides, whatever it may be. There's a American researcher, Lauren Picard, Dr. Lauren Picard, who's passed now. He discovers GHKU in the collagen tissue. And it's like, hey, this might be the factor that controls collagen synthesis and also collagen breakdown. So he does a bunch of studies. His work is all about this. So almost all the literature comes from this one lab, a common theme in peptides, unfortunately. He discovers it in maybe the mid 70s. It's found to be very high in youth in serum levels. You'll find this in the blood of anyone that we test, up to like 200 nanograms, whatever the unit was. And then it gets down to like 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 youth 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 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 BPC157, T500, Wolverine stack, which is someone online is made up. That's the Wolverine stack. Is those two? Tb500 and BPC157. No, no, 200 and BPC157. And BPC157. Yes. Okay. So people will add on GHK copper and call it the glow stack. The glow stack. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Someone has made it up in a research chemical. No, I like it. Like a glow Wolverine. Yeah. There's a big debate about whether or not if mixing those together causes, you know, denaturing of different peptides that's beyond this discussion. Point is GHK copper. It both up regulates the synthesis side of collagen and the breakdown side of collagen. So because when you're remodeling tissue, if you're just rebuilding it, you're going to get like very pathogenic 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 pork pick arts, you know, compared it to retinal and vitamin C creams and all these things with positive effects and people who anecdotally talk about like, no, they're crows 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 GHA copper as a regenerative from that side. How many people are trying to regenerate their lungs is for like COPD and smokers. It's a big, big industry. Maybe lung COVID from what I hear is a real thing, lung damage from COVID. Yep. I know some people will debate it, but it seems like there are enough people walking around who are vaccinating and non-vaccinating who claim that they have symptoms post COVID that have lasted a long time, AK, lung COVID. So that might be an interesting place for them to remain peptide curious. Yeah. And the time at atrophies is a big part of the aspect post COVID. Yeah. Because any infection actually leads to, we talk about the thymacinvolution that happens with age. There's thymac atrophy that happens after every infection. The thymacinv is kind of streaks down. And then the idea is that you recover, you convalescent. You just have convalescent homes for sick patients and then you regenerate your thymacinv in the state of health. And 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 thymacinvolution. 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 thymacinv function been better in youth? Raise your hand. Professor Brockery. 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 infection? That's a good question. Because I think this would tell us, just like with sort of how long maternity leave type things, 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. I think it's an interesting and important question because our biology hasn't changed that much. In the last couple thousand years, at least. After one has a cold, typically people go back as soon as they deem themselves non-infectious, it was really worries me. Do you think people are getting back to work too quickly? I understand the reasons why, but do you think that adding a stage of really getting back to full functioning without getting back to the gym, back to work, back to everything could be beneficial for these longevity effects? Right. If you think about it, nothing that they do once they come back is additive to healing. Their circadian rhythms are thrown off. They're under malnuminated lights all day. They're not getting sunlight. They're vitamin D levels are atrocious. Their blood exposure at night is as high. Their stress levels are very high. Their guts are inflamed from eating hyper-processed, hyper-palvel foods. They have obesity or their prediabetic. All these things now lead to this inflammatory state and they just got sick and they're thymus and it bounced back. Post-pandemic, a lot of my colleagues were like, "I get sick three, four times a winter now before I get sick, once a winter." 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. Thymus alpha-1, thymus beta-4, thymulin. There's purified thymic extracts. There's the two different research committees that exist when it comes to thymus, which one will be more advantageous. Vladimir Kavinsen came up with the thymulin injectable and oral versions of that. He had positive immune markers in each of the CD4 cells, come up in CD8 cells, improve and all those immune markers become a more useful state, let's say. But unfortunately what's happening here is we don't have thymologists. We don't have a branch of medicine that's dedicated to this aspect of immunity. There's allergy and immunologists, but they focus more on 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. I think post-pandemic, a lot of people start to ask, "Hey, how can I have better immunity for myself?" Now finally, people are starting to talk about thymus. Unfortunately, it's been too little too late. So during great during the pandemic, because we could have used these thymic focused interventions or be zinc or thymic peptides or your pre-phytomic extracts to augment immunity of the population as a whole. Especially because Dr. Kavinsen was doing this in the 70s in Russia. Even in Russia, they don't really look kindly to this survey area research has been kind of pushed aside and it's more a big farmer's style because it's more profitable. How many thymuses are going to inject into people and how many thymuses exist on the planet to make these different peptides from? You could inject a lot of synthetic thymus and alpha TB500 and maybe BPC. So, Wolverine Stack Plus. Yeah, so if you'd be very interesting, if we can get that. Now that everyone's getting these pomegranate scans and different, full-butt 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 a whole body imaging? I've done a whole body imaging. This is somewhat costly and that's a pretty good barrier for people. But if people can afford it, I actually think it can be useful. I have a number of friends, including a neurosurgeon friend who said that some people are still alive now because they got that scan. A lot of people get scared about what they see. Once you'd 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, car accident, young 45-year-old car accident comes in, has a pancreatic mass. They would have never known about how 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 had stage 4 pinkers.
to cancer and passed away. So that's the theory. There is the 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 in their physicians. But I've been trying to lobby them to give the a thymix score to everybody who gets one of these scans because they could see like, hey, can you see where the thymix 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, whatever it may be. And we could see that that improve thymix status or make it worse or different infections, different interventions. That'd 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 thymix score. The most commercially available is going to be a lymphocyte count, which is like a CD4 or a CD8. There's an ideal CD4 or a CD8 ratio that's more youthful. You don't want to have more CD8 cells in 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, input lymphocyte to monocyte 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, 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. 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, let's suggest you have a more, let's say, ready and robust immune state. So $3 lab tests that everybody gets, almost every lab testing company now checks it and no one will be doing reports on it. But you can kind of stratify people into a disease risk based on that score. Out of 100 randomly pulled 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. I've been lobbying everyone in the hospital to look at this. But it's very easy, right? The data are there. No, it's not like you're saying, "Oh, you got to do all this additional work. You got to build insurance." No, no, it's there. Like I started to care about the thymus post-pandemic because I noticed people's lymphocyte counts were lower. And I could notice that, you know, anecdotally, or looking at small data sets, like, hey, people had lower lymphocyte counts, had worse disease or like earlier, like people that had cancers in their late 30s or early 40s, and they all had lower lymphocyte counts. So I started to dig into the literature. And I'm lobbying a lot of the hematologists and infectious disease doctors in my hospital to start to look at this. Unfortunately, they 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 lymphocyte to monocyte count right now, is it going to change my management of you in the hospital today? Not really. It's more of a long-term look. So that's where all these direct to health, direct to consumer companies have an opportunity to kind of modulate the way medicines practice 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. We've got people go from like a four to one lymphocyte to monocyte ratio to a late 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 don't have an explorer that wants to recent person. So I'm not comment on her. I know they elected to not vote KC in. So that's not truly not a mention. I haven't done. But I think your voice should be heard foreign-wide on these things. I mean, like more data is good. The scientist and me just says you got the data. Data could be informative. Take a look. There's a category of peptides such as growth hormone secretic acid. Testimuralin, Ipermuralin, MK677 that we could do the deep dive on all those. But I'll just batch those. And maybe we parched them a little bit. And things like melanotans. These are, to my understanding, FDA approved for certain indications. So they've gone through the randomized control trials for growth hormone secretic ox for small stature. And kids, they might use it for that or for post-surgical burn recovery. I think that's the only thing. That's the only thing. Some are HIV. HIV-Lyndyv. So the idea here that sort of framework that I'm teeing up is that these molecules have been explored for their known biological function in animals. It's established. These molecules lead to an increase in growth hormone above what would normally be secreted. They do it indirectly by, so they're sort of the gas pedal on that system. Growth hormone secreted dog. Cause more growth hormone to be secreted. Not actual growth hormone. They vary in terms of how much they stimulate hunger. Don't stimulate hunger. And on and 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. 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. 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 Grella inside, the Grella Nagonist, 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 non-pulsatile fashion, growth hormone is a very circadian hormone that gets released in the first 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 secretedogs 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 pinial glands aging before puberty, your thymus right after puberty, you know, in your 20s, and then your 30s, you're having somatopause. That's where your growth hormone production is decreasing. You're having a, they call it adrenal pause, where your adrenal stop making as much DHA and the different ratio of cortisol. And then you're having menopause, andropause, and all other current conditions. So that's like your first 50 years of your life, that's what you have to expect. The question has been, and it's a big debate in the medical community, is replacing growth hormone and addressing somatopause useful. Because you can measure if we had your IGF-1 when you're 18 and your IGF-1 when you're 30 and 50, that's going to be a dramatic decrease in that. Should we now replenish this IGF-1? The proponents will say IGF-1 is important for skin and and good quality sleep and for muscle recovery and joints and all these things. And those are true. We know that growth hormone has all these beneficial effects on that. We also know that growth hormone is thymor regenerative because it stimulates the regrowth of an aged, involuted thymus gland based on Dr. Fahes' work. The question is, is there an oncogenic signal when it comes to growth hormone? Does it cause cancer? Yes. Can it promote more rapid growth of existing cancer? Yes. I don't think anyone thinks it causes cancer. It's not ketogenic. This is the big debate when people are like BPC causes cancer. There's no ketogenic effect from BPC. Like BPC like smoking a cigarette, smoking a cigarette, you get carcinogenic damage to the lung tissue, the causes of cancer later on. There's no direct mechanism that will link any of these peptides to a carcinogenic effect, but is it a growth factor that could grow cancer? Potentially, there isn't good data showing that. Maybe by boosting thymic function from growth hormone, are you increasing immunity and then immune surveillance of different tumors? And therefore decreasing and then causing the scale. There's a big debate of whether growth hormone is even beneficial when it comes to aging because growth hormone does grow certain tissues. There's models where people are growth hormone deficient and live a lot longer. And growth hormone is not positive when it comes to cardiometabolic 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 dainn, the breed that makes more IGF1 downstream of growth hormone, of course, lives a lot shorter lives than smaller versions of the same species. So you want a dog around for a long time, get a chihuahua, you want a real dog, get a, excuse me, you want a dog that lives a long time, get a great dainn or a bulldog. There's a whole that whole discussion of what's better. And then you get into antagonistic cleotropy. Is this something that's good in youth, but detrimental for longevity or is it pro longevity? And that's the big debate in the longevity field. What are that, you know, 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 aloevox steroids act and very bonds and all that stuff. So people have now shifted to using secretive dogs in the lieu of growth hormone. Also growth hormone is very expensive. Very expensive. Yeah, like Pfizer's pens are in the thousands of dollars. So like if you want, if you're rich, you can afford to have that growth hormone habit. But otherwise, a secretive dog costs, you know, less than 100 bucks. I'm told that growth hormone doesn't shut down one's own production. It's not a strong shutdown like the testicular axis. I'm also told that when people take it, they feel awesome, which is scary to say on a podcast because you're like, oh no, I don't want everyone running out 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, have some friends who've taken like an IU and I or even two IU's tonight, you know, five nights a week for years. And you go, hey, like, are you worried about some of the tumor facts and they're like, you just function at a whole other level.
And then you go, "Oh, God, that's really enticing." But even with great imaging, you don't know if you've got too much that you're accelerating in that case. So it's kind of scary. - Yeah, and we don't have a dataset that would show that. Like, where's the body count from growth hormone? Like the bodybuilder's body counts are from other compounds, not doing everything. - What's that? - 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. - You see a 45-year-old dude that's through some out of pod, but has perfect, young skin, and there's both talks and all the other things involved. But you can tell 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 protusticular effects as well from the IGF1 perspective. So there's a lot of useful effects to it. The question is, is that been a good idea to replace it? Traditionally, like the medical field's kind of anti-using these scrated dogs to augment some out of pods. But I think there's going to be a role for it, perhaps cyclically. Because I don't think anything in nature is around. So what if you did a cyclical cycle of, and this is not medical advice, but just theoretical, cyclical cycle of Tessamorland for a certain amount of time, got your IGF1 to a certain level on your clinician guidance, measured your thymus on MRI performed after, and then you saw that the thymus grew, and you had higher CD4, CD8 count. That would be pretty interesting. - Well, you're interesting. A few years back, and I've told this story publicly before, I tried somorollen. Yeah, there's different than obviously the Tessamorollen, but similar in the sense, sure, the endpoint you're seeking is more growth hormone IGF1, and it dramatically increased my deep sleep, and like nuked my REM sleep. It's like the opposite of pinealum. - Yep, they're together. - Yeah, so, well, didn't try that. The other thing that it did, and the reason I halted it almost right away, 'cause 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. Gimm off it, it reverted to a low level. So, that was pretty striking. So obviously, you know, hyper-responsive prostate to somorollen, maybe it wouldn't have been to Tessamorollen, et cetera, but those are the kinds of things that you could - But might just be the growth hormone itself. - Like musicalthomas creation, that's a good point. - As you age your prostate gets bigger, the bane of every man is gonna be BPH. That's gonna be the reason that you hate your life from your 60s and 70s, 'cause you're out of the way. - Bane wake up at night to pee. And then when you're at it, you know, an amusement park you're gonna have to find the nearest bathroom very frequently, 'cause your bladder size is broken out. - Go over it. - There's some prostate peptide I'm looking at. - Thanks. - There's like a young guy, old guy, like, tall, tall, tall, like, you know, you got 10 more years before you're miserable. Thanks. - There's prostate peptides that Kavantin looked at that were trying to translate some of that literature. You'll save me. - No, there's people, this guy named Brennan Henry, who's translated like thousands of these papers from Russian to English. So shout out to Amnoffiliation, 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 wanna be messing with that and increasing the size of that? There's concerns about cardiac growth, liver growth, so there's all these things. But also growth hormone and the secretogs have a negative effect on insulin sensitivity. So people's A1 season 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. - Oh, it's happening. - Growth hormone or the secretogs? The growth hormone or so, this is-- - It can make you insulin insensitive. - Yes, especially with more like testimony, especially when combined with April Marlin. Ceremony is kind of a weaker GHRH. Tessamorlin, especially when combined with April Marlin. Tessamorlin is FDA approved, April Marlin is not the GHRH versus GHRP kind of in the weeds there, but those two together can create giant growth hormone response where your IGF1 is in the three 80s, three 90s. So that's quite high, like puberty levels of IGF1 and you're hungry all the time. Yeah, yeah. With MK for sure, with Tessamorlin. So Tessamorlin has more fidelity, less growth hormone effects, especially because you can have growth hormone effects, prolactine 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. They're growth hormone or their GHRH and their engine 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 Antivar with terms up tied where it's right to true tied, whoever it may be, and then using a growth hormone modulation if you're gonna afford growth hormone or Tessamorlin, Ipe Morlin. And you've seen 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, this is a library protocol. - Very interesting. And I'm guessing that for women, the, it's the combination of growth hormone, secretogog plus something like, and we'll talk about these now, reddit true tied or one of the other GLPs. I'm going to acknowledge, 'cause people are gonna start throwing guards at me about this. Yes, reddit true tied is hitting things other than the GLP pathways, also GIP and glucawe on pathway. But most people put it under the category of GLPs. 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 saline, to 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 our time. We should close the hatch on GHKCU. I just spoke. 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 systemically? Yeah, I think if you have a well formulated topical, that's actually not broken down, 'cause all these, you know, from these research chem sites, they're cell topicals now, 'cause everyone's in skincare. They're, you know, poor quality, they're not even blue. Like if the GHK should be blue, but that is a blue from the copria. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, my copper pills are blue. Yeah, I got it. Makes sense, yeah. But that doesn't mean that it's real. Could be copper just fallen 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, 'cause that's another thing. So like, you know, every skincare brand has their now GHK formulation, 'cause people are demanding it, but it's been around for 34 years on top of it. The injectable is not FDA approved, of course. I think it's gonna be on the second round of discussions when it comes to the peptides coming back to category one, the first round is gonna have these seven peptides, BPC, Tb, et cetera. I think the second round is gonna 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 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 GHK, CU for post UV damage. So people that are, you know, sun friendly, can use GHK CU topically to alleviate some of the photo damage. Of course, dermatologists are gonna 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 CU as a main post sunscreen. Listen to the germs who are slightly more sun positive. Like, especially low UV index sun when the sun is low in the sky. - Yep. - Dr. Abu Bakr is perhaps the only other person on the planet besides my friend, Samar Hatari who's been on this podcast, who's as excited about circadian biology as an organizing feature as I am. There are a couple others out there, but in terms of people who are like really grounded in what's real that he's, I put him in that category whether he likes it or not. So people are taking GHK CU cream, putting it on and then doing red light therapy. And there are human data that perhaps can augment some of the collagen reparative effects. - Yes, some of the photoaging effects, some of the effects of aging, when compared to like different retinols and stuff like that. - I think the consensus in the field now is to use it with the rest of your skin care routine, not in place of it. But a lot of people, especially bros that have never been in the skin care now in the skin care 'cause of skin care. - Oh my goodness. - Yeah, so there's that. But it's promising. - Brows are in the skin care. - Yeah, but it'll be a documentary before long. What do you call that? The manosphere, it's like the skinosphere. - Well, with looks maxing. It's the looks maxing peptide now, GHK because all these guys that are into looks maxing will use GHK. - They're dipping their hammer and GHK. - Let's see you and tap in themselves. By the way, if you want great long wavelength red, near infrared and infrared light to augment your GHK, see you peptide by the way, I'm not suggesting that. There's this thing called sunlight that provides that. You just have to be careful not to get too much UV in the process. So before people start thinking they absolutely need a red light device. Full spectrum too, free. Full spectrum balanced, great article nature. We can link to recently that describes the different spectrums coming out of different devices and that thing that we call the sun, which is the best source of all of that. - And better blue light too. - And better because we're deprived of 480 nanometers in this setup. I mean, that's 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 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. - And then we made one that goes from like a morning, really bright light full spectrum with some, a lot of blue in there on purpose to wake you, you know, part of the way. - And the bright blue. - The 480 cyan, bright blue. - Switch, 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 candle light mode in the evening and here's the cool thing. Not only did they get the spectrum in 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, that'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, and this little monkey holding a lamp, and I say when the monkey goes to candle, like 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, GOP. - Yep. - Now we can comfortably exhale into your colleagues, you can feel completely comfortable about anything that they might think or say, because the GLPs are the reason why people are comfortable injecting themselves. It's why this whole thing of peptides is 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 Karris Swisher about what? 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. - Good affordance. Is the by the farmer a great option? - I think back then people were just getting them where they could. - Where they get the A.A. - I didn't ask him why that happened. But nonetheless, get the dosage right. Make sure you're getting the right stuff clean. But he talked about the kind of lack of motivation. Which many people have described anecdotally, like okay, lowered their food drive, but lowered their drive period. Makes sense, 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 at your tide for now. It's so new, we're gonna talk about it. But I'm talking about the standard. - Yeah, some of good times. - In terms of appetite. - Yeah. - So you have your, you know, some of good times, which is ozembek and wegovee. The wegovee is the FDA approved version for the way lost. For test-epsi, you have set bound. And mongeral set bound being the FDA approved version for way lost. It allows them to keep their patents for longer. These medications are trying to transform that essentially where I brag this, right? If we kind of zoom out our medical system, if we didn't have these interventions, was gonna collapse on itself, thanks to the obesity, prediabetes, diabetes epidemics. Because we don't have enough clinicians or finances to get everybody who was prediabetic in the last 20 years and 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 gonna collapse. And there wasn't enough finances to take care of it. Now these G-oppy 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 cardiovascular disorders. So where do we stand? We needed something to happen. I mean, ideally everybody would get morning sunlight and eat only healthy foods on processed 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 that, you know, 5, 10% of body weight. Now with the G-oppy ones we're getting 10, 20, even 30% of body weight being shaved off of people, especially with the new red and true tide data. Is there a free lunch? Like we've 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 G-oppy ones and that we are now reversing this rate of chronic disease. Is it gonna stay that way? 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 G-oppy ones. They were losing 50, 100 pounds before it was an FDA approved for weight loss. We knew that if you put diabetics on the drug, they would lose weight. Thanks a lot of the bodybuilders. That kind of pioneered that. When did the bodybuilders first start using CHILP? Late 2010s. - Wow. - Early and then the signal, I don't think Norvo or Lily wanted to make these for obesity. They were focused on making diabetes drugs. 'Cause like if we zoom out even further, this is another animal derived compound, right? It's found in the saliva of the Helomonsters. G-oppy one was discovered. It's too short-acting to have worked on its own, then pharmaceutical companies, this is where you gotta give far more of their credit. They developed these drugs into more functioning versions that had longer half-lives and could stick around in the serum for longer to have the clinical effect. So then we started noticing that diabetics, like my grandma got Bayeta, which was one of these first G-oppy one drugs, 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 lyrical, dilulucid, and then eventually some agglutide was the blockbuster. But you get all these positive effects coming from these drugs on diabetics. It gets translated into obese people and overweight in patients. The question is, what is the long-term effects of this? Do you have a stamus drug forever? Can you try to get off? The farmers who have companies have not given us good guidelines on that. They've shown us what happens if you stop a drug that you max out on maximum dose of zephytide, 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, Google Gond insulin, testosterone estrogen, all these things are going to modulate and there's this, you call it set point theory or settling points. And they integrate, should I eat or not eat? So the GIP one 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 five milligrams of red or droid side that have lost 30, 40 pounds? Are they gonna 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? If 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 one diabetics, and 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 they'll be some slow release, polymer that will just kind of give you a microdose of it, you could dial it up if you want, there's all pills now. Personally, I don't worry so much about 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 thousand fold or more increase in these GLPs, because when we had Zach Knight on the podcast, he's not a clinician, he's a scientist 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, like Mungaro, Zempick, et cetera, and certainly red and 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 and low-- - No, it could be great. - Yes. - It 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 that's the study last year, didn't show a good signal on Alzheimer's prevention, but we know diabetes and cardiovascular 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 this cognitive effects? Is the effect happening from the drug itself? Is it from misuse of the drug to high of a dose? You're not getting enough electrolytes, you're not getting enough micronutrients, macronutrients, you're not your blood sugar is low? 'Cause a lot of these patients, the way we approach it is training wheel effect when it comes to GLP ones. Okay, you come to us, your patient, you wanna use GLP ones, we'll give you a lowest dose possible that it has an effect for you GLP one. 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 broccoli 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 'cause they're not consuming enough electrolytes or enough food period. 'Cause 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. Everyone, you know, the reason people are recent, the first place is 'cause eating is such a pleasurable experience for humans and it's your full 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 the time you meet up to eat or drink or whatever it may be? So, I'm very curious when it comes to the cognitive effects is it from the drug directly interacting with receptors in the brain? When we'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-top? I'm very curious. I'm very curious. I'm very curious. I was like, no, it's so cool 'cause you're willing to go outside the box and say, hey, listen, this might be due to some of the downstream consequences of reduced appetite.
And we know the literature shows that people now are having less alcohol cravings from this. It might be changing the way the dopinergic 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 accident, whatever it may be. So the question, because what happens is people go to these websites, they buy one peptide and they've got a great result. And they'll be like, you know, I mean, add three more peptides. It's a sensory peptide. Yes. It's an increasing AOV problem. So the average sale value goes up from these research sites. We'll see where the GLP ones go. The reality is it's here. There is no pre GLP one world for us as clinicians, as health enthusiasts. We're in a post GLP one world and everything kind of dictates downstream from that. The people I know have taken these, I don't know exactly which are taking much lower dosages than we've 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 is an endocrine organ, it's, 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, that'd be the left and the left increases as you decrease the body fat mass. There's, there's GLP one receptors on the palm senior ons in the brain. And no one's kind of examined what that means downstream for the left and Melana cord, left and Melana quartz in pathway. And what that means for energy status, thyroid hormone production, reproductive status. We know a lot of people are ozemic babies and that a lady will be subfertil or infertile. Start a weight loss drug and then find out by accident she's pregnant. Was she obese before? Yeah. There is there is 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 fertility because if you're having low leptin levels, you're starting. You shouldn't be fertile. If you have too much leptin and you're at leptin resistant, you shouldn't be having kids either. So both of those 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, 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, I had a family member with a G. L. P. one 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, don't do this at home. And I was like, yeah, it's not working. It's, it's bunked. They got him overseas. It was a brand name. O's, M. B. P. N. 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 O's M. B. What's a standard dose? You start at 0.25 and ask it to 0.5. You went straight to a milligram? Yeah. I was like, I, they're like, it doesn't work. I'm eating so much. I'm okay. Whatever. You got bunk, bunk pen from overseas. I go to do a shift. I was on a nice shift that day. And I've never had charge art like projectile vomiting. And low blood sugar presumably. The blood sugar effects for non-diabetic don't get that low, but it was just miserable. I would go and meet a patient, go upstairs, vomit in the, in the call room. You just gave a really good reason why people shouldn't just do what you just. No, they shouldn't do that. Then go back to the art, meet a patient. And then it was the most miserable night of my life. So to be very careful how you use these drugs. That's why I tight-treat very slowly. Luckily with the newer ones that effects are much less, like people who report to type of type and red to type even have less of these gastro-testinal effects. But that's a peptide gone wrong story. Peptide gone wrong. Red and true tide. I put out a post on X. I thought, and I just still think that it that red true tide is going to be a trillion dollar industry, not because so many people are necessarily going to use it for weight loss. But because many people will use it for weight loss, many people will use it for other things because you can be sure, absolutely sure, that Lily is going to find other ways to market it. And you can protect a patent by finding additional uses for things. I mean, a lot of the 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. They got to roll their knob. That's your business. But so I'm guessing that red and true tide is going to discover that it's useful for a number of things and from the clinical trials. There's a reason, believe that's going to be the case. And the big thing they're trying to do now is classify as a biologic. So a redriot side has 39 amino acids to be a biologic, if you have above 40 amino acids. And once you get to above 40 amino acids, if you are a biologic, then the patent lasts way longer. I don't know the exact numbers. Like 15 years. Yeah, much, much easier. If it's 40 below amino acids, then it's something like five. Yeah, yeah, just seven years. Someone patent law will have that. So we're talking like hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars. If it's, so if you and you can tinker with this, you can have a amino acid. And more importantly, no looking compounded if it's a biologic. Or if it's very difficult to compound, like I said, that was the right certificate. Something similar happened with ACG, where it was taken out of the compounders recently. Really? Yeah, so ACG, human corionic and adromate. This is commonly prescribed for trying to restore fertility to men. But it's mainly mostly being given in IVF cycles to women. Yeah, yeah. There's a big controversy about ACG and compounders. And who can compound it and who can't that's beyond this. But this is a very important thing. Because if Lily gets red, uh, red and true tide as a biologic, then the compounders are out of luck. Because the compounders all have the formula for red, uh, they're ready to make it. Like they can get the API from China and start compounding it as soon as it's available. It will, it will make them all billions of dollars. But if Lily is able to do this, they'll be able to protect themselves from what's going to happen. You see the Trump administration now is trying to get with Trump Rx, Lily, and no in order to drop their prices to make him more available. Which has happened. Like now I think you can get a, you know, $300 monthly dose of TREZ Epitide available through these websites. Used to be 1500. Yeah, 1500 without insurance. Some insurance will cover it. Some, some wouldn't. You'd have to get, you know, savvy commission that will advocate on your, on your behalf to get these covered. But cash pay between, you know, even some of the, the pills, I think you can pay 150 bucks a month for the or for a full gun plan, which is not a peptide, but still a G.O.P. one agonist. Um, which I'm trying to get to the point, like it doesn't matter if it's a peptide or not. What matters is where, where it touches, what receptor it touches. Because our foreground is more similar to semi-glutide, both them are G.O.P. one drugs. One's a peptide, one's not. Then BPC is the semi-glutide. So like everyone online talk about peptides or good or peptides are bad. There is 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 carnation? Or do you mean, right or two? That excellent point speaks to a lot of the confusion. You are a beam of clarifying information on this. I actually am 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, that people would just name Gene Sonic Hedgehog or, you know, you know, Sink 1 or the people name it after, they're cousin or, and it was a mess. And so what ends up happening is you find similarity between genes across different laboratories and events. You're eventually, you have a meeting and you come up with a nomenclature committee. And then you say, this is, you know, F1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, these are the sequences. The general public doesn't think about molecules in that way. No. But the general public are diving right into this. They are the experiment. And so what I think would be very, very useful would be a clear and accessible nomenclature to divide up what we've talked about today. You know, BPC157, you know, peptides with and without known receptors. The regenerative peptides, as you've called them, things like thymus and alpha TB500, 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. And I think you don't already have enough to do to come up with some nomenclature 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 it just for sake of clarity. Yep. Right? We're not taking the stance. These are good or bad. But just for sake of clarity has 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 BPC157 help and or hurt those circumstances given their potential role in angiogenesis and the other things you described? Know that our chart exists on either animal or human data that relates to those peptides? I'd say those are more hormonal/metabolic issues that a good olbygain should take care of. They're very difficult to treat conditions and very miserable to have for people and for total implications, but those are more
on the hormonal side, I think the hormonal level is way stronger than peptide level, like BPC or any of those. And as far as I'm concerned, there's no case reports or studies that would suggest positive or negative. CNS effects, central nervous system, excuse me, of BPC157 or other peptides that we've talked about that don't fall under the typical umbrella that people go to when they think about BPC157. And we talked about some of the stuff related alcohol and perhaps other things like add or all. But anything known about people feeling better or worse on different peptides, just psychologically, neurologically. GDI, I'll throw TBI in there for some reason. I don't have TBI, fortunately, but I know many people that do. They reach out to me. Could it be beneficial in those cases? Yeah, there were studies in Russia on TBI when it comes to cortex and cerebralisone, which would probably never be available in the United States. So we'll skip those. There's no good data on BPC and TBI. 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 my state, at least the mice can't get too drunk and they can't withdraw from alcohol. They can't get too high on the mice methamphetamines and they can't get too high in the methamphetamines and they don't withdraw either. So there's a homeostatic mechanism that might explain some of these anhydonia side effects that people are reporting, where BPC 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 resident digest state to heal whatever problem you have. That's why BPC exists as a big parent compound. That might be part of the fact that if you screen BPC, your body goes into like a convalescent mode. 'Cause 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 GLPs aside, 'cause 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 can they be confident that what they're taking is what, the bottle claims and that it's free of contaminants, and so on. Many, many questions, but I think this is what kind of the question is. - 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 combat 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 'cause 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 have now lived in a peptide era. You have no choice but to get educated, so get educated, be sure to 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 'cause it will be a race down in price. And then we'll know which combat pharmacies are better, which ones are worse. You can get better source peptides, but you should get them from clinicians. The question that's gonna happen is there's gonna be a lot of these orally available peptides and there're gonna be all over supplement websites. You'll find them with your magnesium and your creatine and then you're opinionally on or your BPC157. The question is what does that guy look like? So we'd like 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 should be taking testimonial in without checking IDF1 levels. The 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 'cause they lost way too much weight. That doesn't look healthy at all. Unless someone's, first of all, if someone's not having the basics in place, there's no point in putting all these peptides in. - Morning sunlight, sleep. - Yeah, there's a night, good diet, minimally processed food. - Yes. - The next phase of peptide, curious and peptide driven discussions is gonna be like, how do you incorporate it into a giant health system? Like, you do morning sunlight, the light blockers and epitaphs on you do, you know, BPC and you work out in the gym, or whatever it may be, there's gonna be particles that develop. But I think within six months, there'll be very good physician options for everybody. - A bud. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming here today and 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. You're knowledge of hormones, and men and women, pregnancy and women's hormones affecting the fetus, how progesterone impacts DHT and male offspring, that incredible, absolutely wanna have you back to have that discussion, but we'll let people digest this in the meantime. We'll put links to where people can find you. And I just wanna 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 keep, 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 pleasure to be here and thank you for the kind words. - Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Abude Bakery. 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. Bakery 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 Endor and enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. 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