Peptides: The Ultimate Body Hack?

Peptides are huge right now. Influencers are telling us they can work wonders for all sorts of stuff. Struggling with an annoying injury that won't heal?? Belly fat that's pissing you off? Low energy? Gut issues?? There’s a peptide out there for you. People are buying peptides off the internet and injecting themselves with them, saying it's life changing. But away from the internet hype, there is actually a potential revolution happening in medicine around peptides. So we’re finding out what scientists are excited about here, and we look deeply at the science behind two massive peptides: BPC-157 and MOTS-c. And we’ll also look at the risks: Could peptides give you cancer? On this episode we talk to Dr. Hassy Cohen, Dr. Keith Baar, Dr. Dhruv Khullar and Dr. Cory Mayfield to get to the bottom of this. Find us on Youtube! We're at https://www.youtube.com/@ScienceVsPodcast Find our transcript here:https://tinyurl.com/ScienceVsPeptides In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Peptides are everywhere right now (03:56 ) What are peptides? (04:39 ) The peptide revolution in medicine (09:56) MOTS-c: Should you take it? (15:56 ) BPC-157: Can it heal you? (26:33) What are the risks? This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, with help from, Rose Rimler, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, Meryl Horn and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Video editing and sound mix by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Thanks to the researchers we spoke to for this episode including Dr. Dana Lis, Dr. Pouya Faridi and Dr. Timothy Piatkowski, as well as the Australian Science Media Centre. A big thanks to Joseph Lavelle Wilson and the Zukerman family. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wendy Zukerman?

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and this is Science Purses, the show that pits facts against internet phenomena. Today on the show, peptides.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Here are the top five peptides I'd recommend to glow up before summer and flex on your ex respectfully.

• 0:20Speaker 02

  Well, then you know that peptides are everywhere right now.

• 0:23Speaker 03

  Peptides, you want to know more about peptides? Look at my stash, I'm really into peptides.

• 0:28Wendy Zukerman?

  Peptides are huge right now. No matter what you're struggling with, an injury that won't heal, belly fat that's pissing you off, low energy gut issues, there is a peptide for you. People are buying this stuff off the internet, injecting themselves with it, and saying that it's life-changing.

• 0:45Speaker 04

  I have never been this confident, felt this good, looked this good. You want to be on these.

• 0:52Wendy Zukerman?

  For the uninitiated, there are many different peptides out there that people are injecting. But one of the biggest and most popular is called BPC157. It's a fan favorite of Joe Rogan's. Andrew Huberman has injected it into his back. People often take it alongside another peptide in what's known as the Wolverine Stack. Not so much because it makes you hairy, I wish, but because it's supposed to help heal injuries fast.

• 1:20Speaker 05

  There's one peptide that seems to be good for everything, and that's BPC157.

• 1:25Speaker 03

  BPC157 is primarily known for healing, but it has a massive ability to heal your guts as well.

• 1:32Speaker 04

  It's so effective, I mean, I can't even begin to tell you.

• 1:37Wendy Zukerman?

  Another popular peptide out there is called MOC. Folks on it are saying they're losing weight, getting energy, and they reckon it's even gonna make them live longer.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  There is a peptide that works like a workout you never actually did, and it's called MOC. You are leaner, you are more vascular, and your muscle definition is better.

• 1:56Speaker 06

  My eyes are like open, wide, my brain is fiery. I am so clear. Guys, it's like you have on

• 2:08Wendy Zukerman?

  Limited energy.

• 2:11Wendy Zukerman?

  But not everyone is so excited about peptides. There are the peptide heretics out there that say, "You are injecting what now? This is a bad and potentially dangerous idea that could apparently even increase your risk of cancer." Those peptides are gonna kill you.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Those peptides are gonna kill you. What are you even doing? And where did this come from? And who told you this was a good idea?

• 2:39Speaker 04

  Every time I log in, there's another influencer in my feed raving about some compound they probably heard about on a podcast three weeks ago.

• 2:46Wendy Zukerman?

  A podcast? Who, me? Today on the show, can peptides heal you? Will they really put a peptide in your step? And the truth is that away from the internet hype, there is actually a potential revolution happening in medicine around peptides. So today on the show, we are gonna find out what scientists are excited about here. We're gonna look deeply at the science behind these two massive peptides, BPC157 and MOTC. And I know there are a bunch of other peptides out there. So if you wanna know the science on those, just let us know in the comments. And finally, we're gonna look at what are the risks here? Are those peptides gonna kill you?

• 3:31Wendy Zukerman?

  When it comes to peptides, there's a lot of...

• 3:33Speaker 04

  It's so effective.

• 3:35Wendy Zukerman?

  But then, there's science.

• 3:41Wendy Zukerman?

  Science vs. Peptides is coming up, just after the break.

• 3:51Speaker 05

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• 4:47Speaker 05

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• 4:51Speaker 03

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• 5:26Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Today on the show, science versus peptides. And the first thing you have to know is what on earth peptides are. So peptides are short chains of amino acids strung together. And you can think of them as small proteins. In fact, some scientists even call them microproteins. There's thousands of peptides swimming in your body, and some do very important things, like insulin. That is a peptide. Another peptide?

• 5:59Wendy Zukerman?

  GLP wants the blockbuster weight loss drugs. They mimic an important peptide in our bodies that regulates blood sugar and helps make us feel full. So peptides are real things in science. But to know more about the current hype and what scientists are pumped about here, we need to meet this guy. Hey there. Hi. My name is Hassy Cohen. Hassy Cohen is a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California. And he thinks we are at the cusp of a revolution when it comes to peptides. And to understand why, we need to go back to a time when perhaps you felt like you were personally victimized by Regina George. Lose My Breath by Destiny's Child

• 6:44Wendy Zukerman?

  is playing on your MySpace page. Maroon 5 isn't quite so irritating. And the human genome has just been decoded. That's right. It's 2004. An international team of researchers announces that after 13 years, they've found all the genes hidden in our DNA. And if you need some Biology 101, genes are instructions that tell your body to make proteins, proteins like hemoglobin or collagen. And Hassy remembers finding out just how many genes there are in the human body. People said, "There are 20,000 genes. That's it.

• 7:27Wendy Zukerman?

  And they do everything." Which I always found to be a little bit mysterious. I didn't really think this could be true. Hassy figured that humans are so complicated. Some 20,000 genes to make everything in your muscles, bones, brain, eyeballs, sphincters. Even at the time, one headline said this was unexpectedly low. And back then, there were clues that there's more to us than that. So when you look at our entire DNA, you roll it out like toilet paper. Those 20,000 genes are a tiny fraction of the roll.

• 8:10Wendy Zukerman?

  They're 3% of the DNA. 97% of the DNA, until 20 years ago, they used to refer to as

• 8:18Speaker 04

  Junk DNA.

• 8:19Wendy Zukerman?

  Ah, that's where these peptides are coming from, the so-called junk DNA.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  Many of them.

• 8:25Wendy Zukerman?

  That's so cool because some of the famous peptides that people know about are thinking insulin, GLP-1, they're not coming from junk DNA.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 8:35Wendy Zukerman?

  But where we're discovering these sort of cool new peptides, this, some of those are from junk DNA.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 8:45Wendy Zukerman?

  For years, that so-called junk DNA, and more generally, the parts of our DNA that didn't code for proteins, it was like a cipher that many scientists, including Hasi, were trying to decode. And over the years, they worked out that these mysterious chunks of DNA do loads of important stuff, including, get this, coding for not big, complicated proteins, but little baby proteins, peptides.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  Nobody expected a small protein to come out of that.

• 9:20Wendy Zukerman?

  But fast forward to today, and Hasi's team has found a bunch of peptides hanging out in weird parts of our DNA. His lab likes to give them Yiddish names. Please tell me there's one called chutzpah?

• 9:33Speaker 04

  We don't have chutzpah yet, but we have mensch, we have mench. Schlep, schmooze, or mazel, like mazel dos, pots, we're just having fun.

• 9:43Wendy Zukerman?

  Hasi's lab has found these peptides in what's called our mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondria are known as the powerhouses of our cells. They kind of look like carpet beetle larvae, but what they do is pump out fuel for our body to use for energy. And in humans, different versions of Hasi's mitochondrial peptides have been linked to lowering our risk of various diseases.

• 10:09Speaker 04

  Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes.

• 10:12Speaker 04

  Obesity, cancer.

• 10:15Wendy Zukerman?

  In lab and animal studies, these peptides can affect muscle growth, metabolism, oxidative stress, insulin sensitivity and cognition. And we just keep finding more peptides. A study published in May this year found more than 3,000 peptides hiding in the mysterious chunks of our DNA. And we're not sure what many of them even do. Hasi is excited that there is this whole world of tiny proteins, actors in the human body, that we didn't even know existed. And he reckons it could change the way that we understand some diseases, possibly opening the door to different kinds of medicine.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  And what this microprotein revolution really embodies is the fact that instead of 20,000 genes, we probably have a million genes.

• 11:05Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  Expanding the human genome by two orders of magnitude, that is the revolution.

• 11:11Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, wow.

• 11:12Speaker 04

  That is the transformative change.

• 11:15Wendy Zukerman?

  Another researcher told me that maybe we're not going to find that many peptides. He thought it's more like 20,000, maybe 30,000. But still, that's a lot of peptides. And one of the peptides that Hasi's team has discovered completely bolted into internet fame. Motzi. That's right. The peptide from the start of the show that people are going bananas for, saying that it's helping them lose weight and get energy. It is one of the top five peptides that you should try to glow up for summer and flex on your ex, respectfully. It's Hasi's baby.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Motzi is having a moment.

• 11:54Wendy Zukerman?

  Motzi is having a big moment.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  Over the last few months, I realized this is not just kind of a curiosity. Tens of thousands of people are taking Motzi.

• 12:03Wendy Zukerman?

  Now, if you are racking your Yiddish trying to work out this one, it actually comes from a Hebrew prayer.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  There you say, "H-Motzi lechem" in the Arid.

• 12:13Wendy Zukerman?

  Get it? Motzi. So, let's get into the science and find out if maybe you should start taking it. So when Hasi's team first discovered this little peptide, just 16 amino acids all strung together.

• 12:28Speaker 04

  We had no idea what it. And the postdoc who was working on it just started putting it on things and injecting it into mice and, you know, let's see what happens kind of thing.

• 12:41Wendy Zukerman?

  And one of the things that they did is put some mice on a high fat diet, which would usually make them put on weight. Then they injected some moti into them.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  Well, behold, they did not gain any weight. Instead of gaining weight like they should on a high fat diet, they didn't get any weight. And moti completely prevented a hundred percent accumulation of fat in the liver of those mice.

• 13:04Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  And that was a big deal.

• 13:07Wendy Zukerman?

  Fat in the liver can be dangerous. It can muck up the liver itself, but it can also lead to things like stroke. So the idea that this peptide could prevent that from happening, even when the mice were eating all these calories, that was potentially big. The team kept testing it. They gave older mice moti and they lived longer than mice on a placebo.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  You give mice moti and you put them on a treadmill, they can run a lot longer.

• 13:38Wendy Zukerman?

  Hassi's team worked out that moti might protect muscle by blocking the activity of a molecule that can break down muscle. One study found that in men, having a mutated form of moti increased their risk of type two diabetes and having more visceral fat. Another study found that type two diabetics with low moti had a higher risk of having a life threatening cardiac event. Hassi thought, this moti, there really could be something here. So he started a company with a friend and they raised eighty million dollars and ran a small clinical trial of moti. They got people with a high BMI and quite a bit of fat around their liver, had them come into a lab.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  Four weeks, twenty people, you get injected. Clean your tummy subcutaneously for thirty days.

• 14:28Wendy Zukerman?

  The people were injected with either Motzi or a placebo. And Hasi basically wanted to know, would those getting Motzi lose more weight? Would they lose some of the fat around their liver? And here's what happened. When it came to weight loss and fat around the liver, the Motzi group did maybe a little better, but it wasn't statistically significant. They did see some more exciting stuff, though. There are these liver enzymes that tend to go up in people with fatty liver.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  Those went down, blood sugar went down, which is great.

• 15:06Wendy Zukerman?

  And it was pretty safe. The biggest issue is that some people had a bit of skin irritation around the side of injection.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  Which is not a complete deal breaker, but it was a little bit annoying for the people who used it.

• 15:21Wendy Zukerman?

  So things were going okay, and Hasi thought that maybe this really would be a drug. In fact, he was starting to dream of larger trials with more people. But soon, a rival peptide entered the field.

• 15:36Speaker 04

  Ozempic became the most successful drug in history. It was a weekly drug, and our version of Motzi at the time was a daily injection.

• 15:46Wendy Zukerman?

  Investors told Hasi.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  This is not going to make money.

• 15:50Wendy Zukerman?

  And ultimately, the company folded. But since then, Motzi has taken on a life of its own. You can buy it online, supposedly just for research purposes, and inject yourself with it. And people are going bonkers. Just off the back of a bunch of mouse studies, one small clinical trial,

• 16:15Wendy Zukerman?

  and a whole lot of hype.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  That created this crazy black market use of Motzi. And I've spoken to some people who.

• 16:24Wendy Zukerman?

  Swear that they see their athletic performance improve on moti. Is that surreal for you? Is it so strange that? It is. It is surreal. It is surreal. And like I mentioned, now people are saying that they're losing fat and building muscle and amping up their energy on moti. And Hasi says, you know, if you look at his mouse studies, maybe you could make a case for some of these claims. I mean, after all, the mice did run longer on a treadmill. But up against the hype, the research cupboard is pretty bare. After the break, we go further down the peptide rabbit hole

• 17:05Wendy Zukerman?

  as we dive into the science on BPC 157. Plus, could peptides really give you cancer? Coming up.

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• 19:19Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Now let's get into one of the most popular peptides on the market, BPC157. This is the so-called Wolverine peptide, but people say it can help you recover from injuries fast. So where does it come from? And should you try it? BPC157 stands for Body Protective Compound 157. So you know immediately that it was not discovered by Hasi's team. It was isolated from gastric juice in the early 1990s by a Croatian lab. And what's curious is that humans don't actually make BPC157. You can't find it in our DNA.

• 20:02Wendy Zukerman?

  So the going theory is that maybe a gut bug makes it. We don't know. But the big question is, can it heal you? For this, I called up Keith Barr, a professor of molecular exercise physiology at University of California Davis. And he told me that recently.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  So I started getting a lot of emails from people asking me, so I, you know, I inject BPC157 into my tendons and they're feeling better. You know, this is a magical thing. And like, oh.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  That's really cool. So let's go test it.

• 20:37Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, he wanted to see if BPC 157 can really heal tendons and ligaments, which can be very difficult injuries to treat. So it would be great if all you needed was one cheeky injection and off you go. And here's how Keith tested it. His first step is basically building a little tendon in a dish.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  We take cells from people who basically rupture their Achilles. They come to our medical center to get their Achilles tendon replanned. And what we do is we take the little broken piece.

• 21:09Wendy Zukerman?

  Keith's team takes the roughed up cells of the human tendon, embeds them in a gel, puts it all on a tiny bone-like scaffolding. And then yada, yada, yada, the cells will start to replicate.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  They make more cells. And so from that one ACL, that one ruptured ACL, I can make about a thousand little engineered human ligaments.

• 21:31Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow, that's so cool. The model will grow to about the size of a toothpick. And then he's ready to test it. So the team exposes the tendon to, say, different peptides and basically sees what happens. And he told me that often it's pretty obvious if it's doing something.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  If you wiggle it normally, you'll see it move a little bit. If it's stronger, it'll stay nice and stiff. If it's really weak, it'll flop around. So you can see that these things, these drugs or these treatments are really either having an effect on the tissue or they're not.

• 22:07Wendy Zukerman?

  And they've seen this with another peptide called insulin-like growth factor one. Some people, in particular bodybuilders, use IGF-1 to get stronger. And in high doses, it's not safe. It can increase your risk of heart disease and cancer. But it's been studied for a long time and it can help you build a bit of muscle and make you bigger. In fact, not just you.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  So IGF-1, that's the difference between, say, a Great Dane and a chihuahua.

• 22:35Wendy Zukerman?

  Wait, so if you gave a chihuahua insulin growth factor one? At a critical point in development.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  When it's very, very young and developing still, it will get bigger and it will become a big chihuahua. Yeah.

• 22:48Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay, but away from the chihuahua, what happened when Keith put these peptides on his lab grown tendons?

• 22:56Speaker 04

  And so when we treat with IGF-1, they get stronger. But when we did the exact same thing with BPC-157, it had absolutely no effect.

• 23:06Wendy Zukerman?

  No effect.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  It wasn't better, but it wasn't worse.

• 23:11Wendy Zukerman?

  Keith's team tested BPC-157 a different way, bathing some human cells in it to see if they replicated faster. And again, it didn't really do anything. Now, this doesn't totally put the kibosh on BPC-157. Keith has just started studying this. He hasn't even published the data yet. He wants to keep running tests. And he says that just because BPC-157 might not do anything to his tendon in a dish.

• 23:40Speaker 04

  Doesn't mean that it doesn't do something when you put it into a body.

• 23:44Wendy Zukerman?

  So for example, other researchers have found evidence in rats and basically petri dish studies that BPC-157 might promote something called angiogenesis.

• 23:56Speaker 04

  Or the production or the making of new blood vessels, supposed to increase the ability to get blood flow to whatever tissue that you're trying to regenerate.

• 24:07Wendy Zukerman?

  And Keith says you wouldn't see new blood vessels popping up on what's basically a disembodied tendon in a dish. So to find out if this peptide really does increase angiogenesis and more broadly helps you heal from injuries, we really need to test it in a human body, right? Not just human flesh. So what studies do we have here? Let me tell you. So in 2015, a placebo-controlled safety trial for BPC157 was registered on the US government's website for clinical trials. But the results were never published. Another study from 20 years ago of 46 people with ulcerative colitis either got a BPC157

• 24:52Wendy Zukerman?

  enema or a placebo each day for two weeks. And it looked like maybe the BPC157 group did better overall. But the thing is, most of the findings weren't significant. And then there's a doctor, who, by the way, wrote a book called The Fountain of Youth with Peptides. And he has a clinic in Florida where he injects people with peptides. And he gathered up 12 of his patients who he'd injected with BPC157 because they had knee pain. And asked them, basically, do you remember how bad your pain was? Is it better now?

• 25:31Wendy Zukerman?

  Nine out of the 12, so 75%, said that three months to a year later, yeah, the pain was better. Now, we have no idea if the peptide was the thing that improved their knees, or the passing of time, which, you know, is supposed to heal all wounds. Or perhaps it was the placebo effect. I talked about this with Dr. Drav Kula, a physician and health policy researcher at Wild Cornell Medicine in New York. And he told me that the placebo effect can be huge, particularly when it comes to knee pain. We know placebo effects are very powerful. People who have a fake knee surgery, they have better outcomes.

• 26:14Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, there are literally studies where doctors give someone an anesthetic, slice them open, basically stare at the ceiling for a bit, and then sew them back up. And those patients felt better, to the same degree as if they'd gotten real surgery. There are studies that suggest that, you know, the more expensive you think a drug is, even if it's a placebo, the more effective it is.

• 26:38Speaker 04

  It seems to be for you. And that's true for things like Parkinson's, which you wouldn't expect. In this case, you're going through the trouble of ordering something online. There's a bunch of syringes, it's kind of scary, you inject yourself. It's expensive, it's painful, you really want this to work.

• 26:53Wendy Zukerman?

  So if all we've got are some uninspiring studies in people, why are folks online going through all this trouble for BPC157? Where are all these exciting claims coming from? That it'll heal your tendons and ligaments, that you'll become Wolverine?

• 27:12Wendy Zukerman?

  Well, BPC157 has been used by folks in certain online spaces for a while now. So there is a lot of lived experience or anecdote, whatever you want to call it.

• 27:26Wendy Zukerman?

  But if you're looking for science for all those claims about BPC157, what we have are studies in rats. And the vast majority of those studies actually come from one particular lab. It's the lab that first discovered the peptide in Croatia. It's the same lab that's linked to that study in people, the clinical trial from 2015, that never published those results. But for three decades, what this lab has published are scores of studies where they'll get a rat, cut its quadricep or ligament, slice its cornea, damage its nerve, you get the picture. And then they give one group of rats a placebo while the other gets BPC157.

• 28:12Wendy Zukerman?

  And over and over and over again, the team finds that the rats injected with BPC157 do better. I called up the professor that heads up that lab.

• 28:25Wendy Zukerman?

  But he wouldn't go on the record to talk.

• 28:29Wendy Zukerman?

  And once I started asking, why didn't he publish that clinical trial from 2015? He ghosted me completely.

• 28:40Wendy Zukerman?

  So that's BBC 157. And like I mentioned, there are other peptides out there that are supposed to help you Hulk up and recover faster. But a review paper looking into some of the most popular ones basically concluded, there's pretty much no evidence in humans for this. I spoke to one of the authors of that paper, Dr Cory Mayfield, a resident at Keck School of Medicine, USC.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  It was more shocking on that front than to learn that how little research there had actually been.

• 29:14Wendy Zukerman?

  Going in, what did you think you were gonna find?

• 29:16Speaker 04

  We had thought there would probably be more, at least, evidence supporting the use of these. I don't think there's really any other therapy that we see that has less evidence that's more used.

• 29:28Wendy Zukerman?

  So here's where we're at. Online, you are gonna read and see these amazing stories of people juicing up with peptides and feeling so great and healing so quickly and popping with muscles. But if you are looking for scientific evidence that peptides are doing that magic and not the placebo or something else, you are gonna be bitterly disappointed, as I kinda was.

• 29:56Wendy Zukerman?

  But this takes us to the last question of the episode. What are the risks? If you've got a knee injury that just won't heal, or you wanna build extra muscle fast, and you wanna give this stuff a go, are there any downsides? Well, if you try this, you will be injecting yourself, so you need to be careful because you could get a nasty infection. And there is the odd case report of bodybuilders using unclean needles to inject steroids and then getting infected with hepatitis C or HIV. And on Reddit, you will see people injecting themselves with peptides and then some body parts swelling up like mad and needing antibiotics.

• 30:37Wendy Zukerman?

  Also, if you're giving yourself repeated injections, you need to worry about lipohypertrophy, which is a buildup of fatty rubbery lumps under the skin. Away from the needles, another issue is, how do you know what's in the vial? Right now, in the US, you can't buy a lot of these peptides at a pharmacy, you get them online, right? And Dr Dravkula, the physician at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, recently bought some peptides to find out exactly what was in them. It was for an article that he wrote for The New Yorker. Oddly, just as an aside, on one of the websites, they gave him a little bonus.

• 31:15Speaker 04

  And when I was checking out, they just added thirty capsules of this synthetic hormone called demoxytosin for no reason, which, you know, doctors usually use for inducing labor or treating postpartum bleeding.

• 31:27Wendy Zukerman?

  What?

• 31:27Speaker 04

  Just like, hey, are you, is there some other drugs you might like, I guess?

• 31:31Wendy Zukerman?

  No matter, within a week, the peptides started arriving. What did it look like when it arrived?

• 31:37Speaker 04

  Oh, it was just, it's usually just a white powder, you know? It looks maybe like some flour or cocaine.

• 31:43Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  You know, depending on what you're most familiar with.

• 31:46Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah. Drav, I didn't know you'd make that joke. I was ready to make it, but you got in there out in front of me.

• 31:51Speaker 04

  All right.

• 31:52Wendy Zukerman?

  He took these peptides into a lab that tested what was inside. And the results found that one of the vials had the right peptide at the right dose. Another vial contained endotoxins, which are bits of bacteria, possibly from contaminated water in the manufacturing process. Another vial had less than half the advertised dose. And?

• 32:17Speaker 04

  I got one vial that had lead in it. I prefer my medications without lead.

• 32:24Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes, lead. And then people would be injecting it into themselves. Not great. Now, this is, of course, just Drav's experience. Maybe he got unlucky. We don't have studies analyzing what's contained in the peptides that people are buying online. Researchers are on the case, though. But what we do have are studies on a similar illicit market, anabolic steroids. One Australian study of more than a hundred samples found that 22%, so one in five, were mislabeled. And they could also be contaminated with heavy metals, from lead to arsenic. I asked Drav what the lab he tested his peptides at was seeing. Broadly, what did they tell you about how many

• 33:08Wendy Zukerman?

  of the peptide samples that they test have issues with them?

• 33:11Speaker 04

  They estimated somewhere between 10 and 20% of the samples that they receive have significant issues, whether of dosing or purity. When you're ordering these unapproved drugs online, you don't really know what you're getting.

• 33:24Wendy Zukerman?

  It's just like a box of chocolates.

• 33:26Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly.

• 33:28Wendy Zukerman?

  Basically, in this unregulated market, these peptides are coming from factories where the quality control is not up to snuff. Now, this may change in the US soon. The FDA is meeting in July to talk about letting compounding US pharmacies make a handful of peptides, including Motzy and BPC157, and then sell them directly to the public. Of course, that's not going to make them effective, just less likely to have lead in them. But there is one more risk that we need to talk about, and that is around cancer. Like I mentioned, some peptides are supposed to work by encouraging blood vessels to grow.

• 34:10Wendy Zukerman?

  And this, in theory, could increase your risk of cancer because giving cancer cells a blood supply gives them the nutrients to survive and spread. I talked about this with Dr Cory Mayfield. I know anyone who would have had a scan for some weird thing in their body, one of the tests for is that weird thing cancerous is are there blood vessels around it or not?

• 34:32Speaker 04

  Correct. Yeah, that's the main thing we look for is, you know, is it getting blood? Is it new blood? It's like, is it pulling in its own blood supply? And that's what we worry about.

• 34:41Wendy Zukerman?

  We don't know for sure if this is a risk, or even if some of these peptides increase angiogenesis in the first place. But the thing is that if peptides actually do what people are saying they can, if they are modulating your body in all of these different and exciting ways, they probably will have some side effects. I mean, think about the peptides that we have good research on. So GLP-1s, for example, they work really well. But if you're losing a ton of weight, you need to worry about muscle loss. They can also cause nausea and diarrhea and rarely gut paralysis.

• 35:22Wendy Zukerman?

  IGF-1, like I mentioned, can increase your risk of cancer and heart disease. None of the doctors and researchers that you heard from in this episode, Drav, Corey, Keith and Hasi, inject themselves with peptides. I talked to Hasi about why he's not injecting Motzy.

• 35:39Speaker 04

  And let me say that I am. Coming of age and I'm very worried about my muscle loss, my sarcopenia. I'm worried about this. If Motzi was approved, I would take it right now. Will I ever take it? I don't know. At the moment, I'm not taking it.

• 35:55Wendy Zukerman?

  Why not?

• 35:55Speaker 04

  Because I don't trust, I don't trust the stuff that people are taking out there. I don't know where they're getting it, how it's mixed, how it's prepared.

• 36:05Wendy Zukerman?

  But you could, you could act, you're one of the few people out there that could actually get Motzi and know you're getting Motzi, but you still don't take it.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  It's true, it's true.

• 36:13Wendy Zukerman?

  Why not?

• 36:14Speaker 04

  Because I'm an old fashioned, traditional guy. And you know, when you're raised with values as a physician scientist, you know, all the supplement universe is something that you really disrespect. And the majority of supplements is a multi-billion dollar business. Almost all of them don't work. And I've always said to myself, why are people doing it? They don't know, there's no evidence. So I come from a place of a traditional, old fashioned physician scientist who believes there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it.

• 36:52Wendy Zukerman?

  And while I get the impulse to wanna be your best self and I know how frustrating it is when injuries take a long time to heal.

• 37:01Wendy Zukerman?

  And I also think that the potential peptide revolution happening in science land, it could be super cool. But at the same time, injecting yourself with stuff that some influencer or worse, podcaster is selling you online. As Hasy would say, it's the wrong way to do it.

• 37:27Wendy Zukerman?

  I guess I'm old fashioned like that too.

• 37:31Wendy Zukerman?

  That's science versus.

• 37:34Wendy Zukerman?

  This episode has 73 citations in it. And if you wanna see them in all of their glory, then you can look at the show notes and link to our transcript. It is a fully cited transcript. So if I said anything and you think, wait a second, go check it out for yourself.

• 37:58Wendy Zukerman?

  This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zukerman, with help from Rose Rimler, Aketi Foster-Keez, Meryl Horn and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell, fact checking by Diane Kelly. Video editing and sound mix by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munga and Bobby Lord. Thanks to the researchers that I spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Dana Liss, Dr. Pouya Faridi and Dr. Timothy Piatkowski, as well as the Australian Science Media Centre. Thanks for all the papers. A big thanks to Joseph Lavell Wilson and the Zukerman family. Science versus is a Spotify Studios original. We are also now on YouTube. Yeah, you can find us at Science VS Podcast. Come and say hello. We have no idea how YouTube works. We're podcasters, OG podcasters.

• 38:43Wendy Zukerman?

  Still, you can listen to us for free on Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us, like and subscribe. I don't know. I'm Wendy Zukerman. Back to you next time.

• 39:05Speaker 02

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• 39:35Speaker 03

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