I want you to think about the last time you saw a peptide post on social media. Maybe it was someone raving about how a glide changed their life. Maybe it was a before and after that seemed almost too good to be true, or maybe it was a biohacker injecting something into their belly with the confidence of someone who definitely Googled it first.
Here’s the thing. I’m not here to make fun of any of that because the curiosity makes total sense. Peptides represent something that people are genuinely hungry for. The idea that the body can be spoken to, instructed, optimize, and that idea, it’s not wrong. It’s actually. Kind of nice and beautiful from a biological standpoint if you think about it.
But the gap between what peptides actually do and what the internet says they do is pretty significant. And that gap is where people are getting hurt physically, financially, and metabolically. So today we’re closing that gap. No hype. No fear, just the science, the real clinical picture, and some things I guarantee you haven’t heard yet.
Welcome back to the Rebel Nutritionist Podcast. I’m Meryl Brandwein, and if you’ve been here before, you know my whole thing is all about root cause medicine, meaning we’re not chasing symptoms, we’re chasing the why. So today’s topic is when I’ve been getting asked about constantly from clients, from colleagues from my own family, who has suddenly become very interested in the injections they found on the internet.
So yes, we are talking all things peptides. I’m telling you, this is gonna be a long one. So get comfortable, grab your water, get your protein shake, because by the end of this episode, you’re going to understand why that matters more than you think. I’m gonna break this down so you can follow along and if you wanna go back, you can.
We’re gonna talk about what peptides are exactly. We’re gonna start at the beginning because most of the confusion in this space comes from people skipping this part. At the most basic level, a peptide is just a short chain of amino acids, and your body makes thousands of them naturally every day.
They are essential molecular messengers, right? They carry instructions from one part of the body to another. Think of it like this. If your DNA is the master blueprint, the master design, and your cells are the construction crew, the peptides are the foreman. The peptides are the ones who are doing the job.
They don’t build the house. They tell the crew what to build, when and how fast. So they are orchestrating everything. Now, here’s what makes them interesting. From a clinical standpoint, peptides are specific. So unlike, let’s say a hormone peptides tend to have very targeted receptor activity, which means in theory, there’s more precision, fewer systemic side effects. Again, in theory and why the in theory part matters. I say this not to be dismissive, but because we have to distinguish between what’s been studied in controlled research settings and what’s happening in what I’m calling the wild west of wellness right now.
And those are two very different universes. The peptides with the most robust human research behind them. Are the GLP one receptor agonists, those went through decades of clinical trials. The peptides that are popular in biohacking communities. Those have less clinical data behind them.
There’s, there could be many reasons why, which we’re not gonna talk about on this podcast, but most of the time we really only have animal data. Some human case reports, a lot of anecdotal evidence and a lot of ex extremely enthusiastic threads and commentaries. So it doesn’t mean that they’re dangerous though.
It means that it is uncharted territory. And I want you to understand that difference. That’s why we’re talking about this and what I find genuinely fascinating about peptides is they really do represent a shift. In how we think about intervention. Instead of adding something the body doesn’t recognize like a synthetic hormone or a foreign compound, we are giving the body a signal it knows how to receive.
So we’re not necessarily forcing biology, we are speaking its language, and that’s pretty powerful. But I can’t say this enough, speaking the right language in the wrong context. Still gets you into trouble. So let’s talk about why everyone is suddenly talking about this. Because peptides have been used clinically for decades, and all of a sudden I think it feels like they came out of nowhere.
Well, there’s a few converging forces, right? The GLP one explosion. Let’s talk about how we got here, because the peptide conversation didn’t disappear out of nowhere. It was launched into the cultural stratosphere. By one specific class of drugs. And to understand where we are right now, you have to understand what happened with the GLP ones.
Not just the science, but the moment because this wasn’t a pharmaceutical, wasn’t just a pharmaceutical development, it was like a cultural tsunami. Okay? Most people don’t know this. And I think it’s fascinating and you guys always know I’m into educating. So here’s something that I want to tell you, okay.
Is that. This discovery of GLP one receptor agonists started actually with the saliva of a Gila monster that is a large venomous lizard that is native to South America and Mexico. And in the 1990s endocrinologist, John Ang identified a compound in this lizard that was it was actually a venom and it mimicked human, a human gut hormone called.
Glucagon, like peptide one, GLP one. And so GLP one is something your body makes naturally in your small intestines in response to eating. It tells your pancreas to release insulin, tells your liver to stop dumping glucose slows the rate at which food leaves your stomach, and it signals the brain to tell you that you’re full.
The problem is, is that your body’s natural GLP one degrades within minutes. So what happened, what they discovered is the lizard, this Gila monster version was way more stable, and that stability was the key that unlocked everything. That followed from that discovery became they started with, uh, with the first GLPA bta the first glp one drug approved for type two diabetes, and that was in 2005.
Then there was liraglutide and then semaglutide and each iteration was more potent, longer acting, and more effective than the last. So for nearly two decade, two decades, these were diabetes drugs. They were used by endocrinologists, prescribed carefully and pretty much invisible to the general public. And then something happened in 2021 semi.
Glide at a higher dose than what was in the diabetes Formulation was approved for chronic weight management under the brand Wegovy, and within two years it became one of the most talked about drugs in the history of modern medicine. Not because it was new, it had been around for many years, as you can see.
But because the weight loss data was unlike anything the medical establishment had seen before. Clinical trials showed an average of 15 to 17% body weight reduction. For context, the previous generation of weight loss medications pretty much topped out around five to 8% percent. So this was a huge paradigm shift, and then the celebrity culture got hold of it.
So we know what happened there. Not naming names Oprah entry, but the visible rapid body transformation in Hollywood. It created a before and after moment that no clinical trial could have manufactured. So suddenly everyone wanted to know what was in the syringe.
Ozempic became a household name. The Ozempic face thing became a thing that people actually Googled, and even Saturday Night Live did sketches about it. So the demand exploded so fast that even So the problem was, is people with type two diabetes. Couldn’t who the medication was originally developed for.
Couldn’t even get their prescriptions filled because the supply chain couldn’t keep up. Not necessarily with the medication, but really it was the pens. And so this is how significant. That movement is, was whatever still is, right numbers. Let’s talk about the numbers behind the explosion. So let me give you a sense of the scale here, because I think the numbers are staggering.
In 2022, glide prescriptions increased over 300% in the United States. That’s just the United States. By 2023, Novo Nordisk, the company that makes both Ozempic and Gobi. Became the most valuable company in Europe. More valuable than the Louis Vuitton conglomerate. More valuable than any luxury brand, any energy company, even the banks.
So a pharmaceutical company that makes a weekly injection became Europe’s most valuable business. Hmm. You wanna follow the money people? By 2024 analysts were projecting the GLP one market to exceed a hundred billion dollars annually by the end of this decade, like a hundred billion dollars. Think about that for a class of drugs that barely registered out outside endocrinology 15 years ago.
Crazy and compounding pharmacies, which are allowed to produce medications that are not commonly available or if they’re in shortage, started offering Glide and then the updated tirzepatide at a fraction of the brand name, price, which meant that access. To these medications exploded even further and suddenly this just wasn’t a drug for people who could afford $1,300 a month.
It was accessible in a way that it had never been before. This is the context in which peptides went mainstream. GLP ones didn’t just become popular. They literally restructured the entire conversation around what pharmaceuticals could do for body composition metabolism. And longevity. So here’s the science that got people excited, maybe beyond weight loss, and we’re gonna dive into this as well.
Okay? Because the GLP one story is significant bigger than just weight loss and I think that’s important that we pay attention to this. There was a surmount and sustained trial data study that showed cardio cardiovascular risk. Reduction in people with and without diabetes had a 20% percent reduction in major cardiovascular events.
That’s heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular death. And this was in high risk populations. So that’s not a metabolic set side effect. That is a primary outcome. And here’s the caveat to that though. We would expect if you go into this and you are obese and you have a lot of inflammation and. And plaque buildup that as you start to lose weight, as that inflammation, I think the inflammation is the main driver here.
As you start to decrease that inflammation, this is where we see the benefits. Okay? There’s emerging data on neuro inflammation that’s the, um, inflammation in the brain. And so we see specifically in areas associated with reward, satiety, and mood regulation. Early research shows potential applications in Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, and addiction.
Really more specifically with addiction. Because here’s what I’m gonna tell you is any of these gains, and I’ll say this now and I’ll say this again. Any of these gains will reverse revert back to where you were prior to baseline. If you start to gain back the weight, these are not. Long-term outcomes by just being on the medication once you stop and if the weight starts to come back, these things do go back to where they were baseline.
So I think that’s really important because these are not sustainable long-term if the weight loss itself has not been maintained. And so I, I think we’ve gotta be really, really clear. Clear on that. You know, we do see data on things like liver disease and kidney protection when we’re talking about like non-alcoholic liver disease and so forth.
But it is really, again, based on inflammatory markers across the board. So this can have the potential to jumpstart a metabolic and neurological intervention. But we really need to explore more of this. I think it’s still too early out of the gate to see the long-term or to really determine, right now we don’t know the long-term efficacy of all of this.
Okay. So we just really need to pay attention to all of that. Okay. And here’s the shadow side of that explosion. Okay? It’s. The explosion created a set of problems that the enthusiasm literally glossed over, and these problems are landing in practitioner’s office. I could tell you I see it every day. The first problem is the muscle loss crisis that nobody talked about.
There’s a landmark, it’s called step trial, that established glides efficacy. Now it showed effective and impressive weight loss numbers. And what got significantly less airtime was the body composition data. So studies consistently show that without deliberate nutritional and exercise intervention, 25 to 40% of weight loss on a GLP one medication comes from lean muscle mass, not fat.
Muscle. And so muscle is not just aesthetic. Muscle is your primary metabolic tissue. I have said this once and I will continue to say it. It is where insulin mediated glucose disposal happens. This is where, this is like the docking point of where glucose gets shunted into your body muscle. If you lose significant muscle mass it, you’re setting your body up.
For a harder metabolic balance on the other side of this medication, of coming off of this. So it’s really, really important, you know, to look at that. Here’s the compounding problem is that GLP ones suppress appetite so profoundly that many people aren’t even eating enough protein or enough of their nutrients to maintain or rebuild muscle.
So it is not just protein, it has to, you have to have other co-factors. You have to have vitamins and minerals and antioxidants to support the building of the muscle. And I’ve had clients on these medications who are eating 600, 700 calories a day, losing weight rapidly, feeling like the drug is working like this is miraculous, and they’re losing muscle at a rate that will haunt their metabolism later.
Here’s the other thing, the rebound effect that nobody’s talking about and nobody is prepared for. The data on weight regain after stopping a GLP one medi medication is pretty sobering. People studies show that within one year of discontinuation, most people regain the majority of the weight, weight.
They lost sometimes more. Why? Again, because the medication was managing the symptoms of metabolic dysfunction without really addressing the root cause of it. So if you go into these medications and you have metabolic dysfunction, there’s an underlying imbalance in the first place, guess what it, this is going to magnify it.
And so the appetite dysregulation, the insulin resistance, the hormonal drivers, they’re still there underneath the surface. So the drug was doing the signaling that the body couldn’t do for itself. But when you remove the, the drug, the body goes back. And so it’s not a failure of the medication and it’s not your fault.
I don’t want you to feel like it’s your fault. It’s a failure of how we’ve been using. And so the thing is, is this cannot be looked at as a standalone intervention rather than a bridge to a genuine, what I’m gonna call metabolic rehabilitation. And this is really, really interest. Interesting.
It’s important and it’s interesting, but what I can tell you is I’ve spoken to so many people who just. Don’t wanna hear this. They’re just like, I just wanna lose the weight. But the problem is, is they are not realizing what it is costing them on the other side. I am begging you to please pay attention to this.
The other thing that we need to look at is that there’s a sourcing crisis, okay? The shortage of these brand name, glides created an opening for compounding pharmacy. Some of them are great. Some of them are seriously problematic, especially if you are getting them from overseas like China.
The FDA has issued multiple warnings about Compounded Glide or TI, or now even the Red Atreides, right? Because they have inaccurate dosing information. They have contamination issues. This is a big one, and in some cases, many more than you think. There’s a completely different active ingredient than what’s supposed to be in there.
So people are injecting things they bought online without clinical oversight, without baseline labs, and without any understanding of what they are actually taking. So when things go wrong, like severe nausea, gastroparesis, which is the slowing of digestion, pancreatitis, hair loss, muscle wasting, they don’t connect it to the compound itself because nobody told them what to watch for.
And so if are getting, I’m gonna let you know if you are getting these compounds at seriously low at a low, low cost. Yeah, a hundred dollars, $150 like your antenna should go up. That is a sure sign that, it’s not the real deal. Okay. And then the other thing is the missing foundation.
And this is one I’ve talked about over and over, and this truly does keep me up at night because the GLP one conversation happened almost entirely outside of nutritional medicine. The prescribers, many of them not specialists, meaning they’re not understanding nutritional biochemistry, they’re not nutritionists.
They’re not even, some physicians just don’t understand the context in which these really need to be looked at. And so they’re operating through telehealth platforms that approve prescriptions in under 24 hours. So they’re not talking about protein targets or resistance training, or gut health or micronutrient status, or even nervous system regulation.
This drug is being handed over without the infrastructure that is going to make it work for you in the long term. I know it’s great to have these short term, beautiful side effects or benefits, right? But we are really looking, you know, we’re looking at the weight loss without metabolic healing, and we think that the numbers on the scale without.
The bodies to match it, the health to match it are genuinely better. Like the gap between what GLP ones can do and what most people are getting from them is a significant part of what we address in our work because there’s so much that’s missing. What is the bigger conversation? Why does this matter for the peptide conversation at large?
Because the GLP ones were the proof of concept. They showed, uh, the mainstream world that a targeted peptide. A compound that spec that speaks to specific respe receptors could produce effects that diet and exercise alone couldn’t reliably replicate for certain populations. And that proof of concept pretty much opened the door that is not closing so fast.
So the question now isn’t whether peptides have a role in functional medicine and longevity? They clearly do. The question is, which ones? For whom and with what foundation and with what oversight. That is the conversation that the internet is not having, but we’re having it right now and it’s really important.
The other thing we need to look at the biohacking movement, right? This is a force to be reckon reckoned with because the biohacking world was so early to peptides well before the mainstream. Caught on. And to understand why, you have to understand what biohacking actually is at its core. It’s not like tech bro, you know, the tech bros injecting things in garages despite what many of the memes might suggest, okay?
At its best biohacking is the application of a systems thinking to human biology. The idea that the body is an optimizable system that aging. Is a problem to be solved rather than a fate to be accepted and that we don’t have to wait for conventional medicine to catch up to what the data is already showing us.
So that philosophy attracted some pretty, pretty brilliant, deeply motivated people and those people. Found peptides early because they were looking in places most physicians and mainstream medicine weren’t. You’re talking about people like Dave Asprey, Andrew Huberman, Peter Attia, Brian Johnson. And it doesn’t matter your opinion about their approaches, right?
We all have opinions but they have audience audiences in the tens of millions. And when any one of them mentions a compound, the search on the internet volume, the search volume on that spikes within 24 hours. Like that’s not marketing. That is literally a new kind of influence that the healthcare establishment is still trying to figure out and figure out how to reckon with because, they, these are people who are not just citing anecdotal evidence, they’re citing research, running their own labs, sharing their own biomarkers, a lot of times their own stuff personally. So the transparency is pretty new. But again, you know how much actual clinic clinical data on some of these there is, is still, is still question enough questionable or enough clinical data to really make it significant, but.
Look for a population of high achievers or anyone who feels underserved by conventional medicine, that transparency can become intoxicating. People who are showing their own data, actually explaining the mechanism. This definitely hits different than, oh, just go ask your doctor about these things.
Okay. But here’s my honest assessment of where biohacking culture gets peptides wrong. And I do say this with all the respect for what the movement has contributed, but there is a significant gap between the early adopter who has gotten a full panel of baseline labs who works with a knowledgeable practitioner.
Who carefully sources pharmaceutical grade compounds and who meticulously tracks their response. It’s very different than the person who listened to three podcast episode and order something online, or worse yet asked a few people and ordered it online. The, the biohacking community normalized peptide use at the leading edge, which is valuable, but the cultural diffusion.
Doesn’t carry the clinical nuance with it. By the time the trend moves from quantified self community to mainstream wellness. The context that made it, made it reasonable, get stripped out. It’s like playing that game of telephone. You know, you start with one message and by the time you get to the end, it’s a totally different message.
That’s kind of what’s going on here. So what’s left is the enthusiasm without the infrastructure. And this is where people are getting hurt. Okay? Another thing to think about is this whole anti-aging hunger. Literally, to understand why peptides landed so hard in the anti-aging space, you need to understand the cultural movement we’re living in.
And I don’t think you really need to understand it. You all see it, right? We are the first generation in human history with both the scientific vocabulary to understand the biology of aging and. The technological tools to potentially intervene in it. That’s not an exaggeration. Like that’s where the research actually is.
The things of like hallmarks of aging, cellular senescence, mitochondrial dysfunction. We’re hearing that all over the place. Tele telomere attrition, epigenetic drift. These are no longer academic concepts. They are targets that people are shooting for and a growing segment of the population. Women and men in their forties, fifties, and sixties are refusing to accept the old model of aging.
They want, you know, they don’t want it to be a passive process. They want agency, they want data. They wanna know what’s actually happening in their biology. And what they can do about it. And look, the hunger could be vanity. Maybe it’s not vanity, but it is a legitimate, intelligent response to compelling science, right?
I mean, I look at it and peptides walked directly in that open door. They opened the door, peptides walked in. So the longevity space specifically has exploded in ways that have fundamentally changed how we think about biological age. Okay. Versus chronological age. So it’s our biological versus chronological, the concept that.
Your cells can be older or younger than your birth certificate says you are right. We measure this through epigenetic clocks like the Horvath clock or the grim age clock, or the grim age, excuse me. It’s made like aging feel actionable in a way that it never did before. So when someone learns their biological age is eight years older than their actual age, they.
Are not shrugging it and accepting it. They’re asking what they can do, and the answer increasingly involves compounds, including peptides that appear to influence every mechanism driving. Accelerated aging, so growth hormone secretagogues that support cellular repair and sleep architecture. For in architecture, for instance, BPC 1 57 that promotes tissue regeneration and gut inte integ integrity.
Epical is a, is a, a tetra peptide with genuinely fascinating data on telomere lengthening and pineal gland function. These are not just fringe ideas anymore. They’re being discussed in serious longevity research context, and people are paying attention. But here’s where the anti-aging space and predatory marketing becomes nearly indistinguishable, and this is where I need you to have your eyes open, right?
Again. I’ve talked about it coming back to the money, okay? The longevity industry is projected to exceed $600 billion by the beginning of 20. Well, so already, right? By 2025 they said, but. That is an enormous amount of money chasing a population that’s highly motivated, pretty affluent, and emotionally invested in the outcome.
You know, that’s that, that $600 billion, like, whoa. But it makes this population really, really vulnerable. The marketing in this space is sophisticated. And don’t forget, we’ve got all kinds of AI and you can’t tell sometimes what’s AI driven and real versus not. And it sounds clinical. It really does. And it’s, the problem is, is it sounds clinical, but it is not accountable to clinical standards.
So you’re gonna see peptide protocols sold with before and after, after testimonials. I’m sure you’ve seen them. You’ve seen selective citation of animal studies presented as human evidence. I’ve seen this. People are doing this, okay, and at price points that suggest pharmaceutical grade quality with zero verification that the product actually has what it says in.
Then we have the aesthetic of science, the lab imagery, the molecular diagrams, the confident dosing language. It’s all being used to sell products that have no business being positioned as medical interventions, and the consumer who is genuinely trying to take ownership of their health deserves better than that.
That would be you. Okay. What I want you to take from that is not skepticism towards the science, okay? Because the science is real and it’s moving fast, and hopefully there there’s more coming. The issue is, is that peptides are not. You can’t patent them because they are natural. And so there’s not always going to be research because there’s not the, uh, impetus to do so by the drug companies unless they can change it.
Unless they can find a way to change it. And then now it’s a pharmaceutical. But what I want you to take from this is to create a framework for evaluating what you’re hearing. You know, we we’re so, um, fan, it’s like this fantasy of, oh, this is what it’s like romanticized, right? Like, oh, this is what you can get from this and these promises, like that’s what social media is about.
So I really want you to evaluate what you’re hearing. Is this compound being discussed in the context of human clinical data or animal models? Like you need to understand this. Don’t just take someone’s word for it. And so important is the practitioner or influencer presenting it with the appropriate acknowledge acknowledgement of what we don’t know yet.
And is the influencer of do they have credentials? If you are just listening to someone based on their anecdotal information or you know, there’s their anecdotal, someone else’s anecdotal information, how can you trust that? How can you know that what they’re telling you is true? You need to look at, is there transparency about the sourcing, the dosing, and monitoring?
Like who’s monitoring you? Because, you know, the anti-aging hunger is legitimate. The desire to feel vital and resilient and fully alive is, you know, going into the second half of your life is one of the most human impulses there is. I know I’m chasing it. Okay. But it deserves to be met with honesty, not just enthusiasm.
And I really wanna get into it a sec with this chaotic influencing stuff, because social media has, while they’ve. Uh, democratized health information, right? We can get more information, but I think if there’s a positive and a negative side, people are asking better questions. Maybe they’re coming to their doctor appointments, more informed and more empowered and demanding more from their practitioners.
Like more than just, your labs are normal. See you next year. Like, that’s progress and that’s great. Okay. I always say you need to advocate for yourself, but there is a fundamental mismatch between. The format of what social media is giving and the complexity of peptide science, a 62nd reel cannot give you a clinically nuanced picture of whether a compound is appropriate for your specific biology, your health status.
Your medications or your specific goals, and yet people are making injection decisions based on Exactly that. I see it every day like, just give me the medication and the speed at which wellness trends move through social media has literally outpaced the speed at which clinical evidence has accumulated and, and you know, the peptides are the clearest example of the gap that we have seen.
And what makes this particularly complicated is that some of the most compelling peptide content online is coming from people with real credentials and genuinely good intention. So this isn’t just misinformation from bad actors, it’s over simplification from some well-meaning ones as well. So for example, when a physician with 800,000 followers shares their personal peptide protocol, the audience receives it as a prescription.
The nuance is that baseline labs, clinical context, years of medical training inform that specific decision for them. It doesn’t, that doesn’t make it into the caption. They just talk about what they’ve done. What makes it into the caption is the result and the result, stripped of context are just stories.
Maybe they’re super compelling ones, but they’re still stories nonetheless. Okay, so let’s talk about the peptide landscape and what’s actually out there. Okay. We’re gonna talk about some of the peptides that you’ve heard about. I’m gonna organize them into categories because if I just read you a list of names, your eyes are gonna be like, well, you’re gonna glaze over and then you’re gonna learn nothing.
So. Let’s go for the understanding, not just trivia on, you know, what can we name in the space here? Okay. First category are the metabolic and GLP one peptides. These are the ones you’ve heard of, the Glide, the Tirzepatide, uh, and now red aide. And it’s again, stands for glucagon like peptide one. Now the one Redit tide is going to target the liver and the storage of glucagon.
These drugs mimic a hormone in your gut that naturally is naturally produced. Like I mentioned, after you eat again, they actually slow gastric emptying, meaning that food moves more slowly through your digestive system so you feel fuller longer. They signal the brain to reduce appetite. They improve insulin secretion in response to glucose, and they have some pretty compelling cardiovascular and anti-inflammatory data that goes beyond weight loss.
What they don’t do is build muscle, fix your relationship with food. And this is a big one, and I’m seeing this tremendously. So now I, I almost wanna call it like the GLP one eating disorder. But again, that’s gonna be for another, another podcast. They don’t address the hormonal drivers of why you were gaining weight in the first place like this is.
Something that we have to pay attention to is that if you’ve gone into perimenopause and menopause, if you’re a woman or even a man as you’ve been aging, and let’s say you’re doing the same things that you were doing before this and you’re seeing weight gain without changing anything like this should be a flag that there is some other metabolic driver.
This is not a calories calorie, calories in, calories out. This is not, I need to exercise more as I go into menopause. This is about understanding what has shifted metabolically as you go into menopause, or even for a man as you start to go through your fifties where we’re starting to see a decrease in testosterone and things like that.
If you’re working without nutritional support, oh gosh, people, this is a real problem. And the muscle piece is something I talk about constantly with clients. Studies show that up to 40% of weight loss on GLP ones, like I said, came from, come from lean muscle mass.
If you’re not eating adequate protein, and if you’re not doing resistance training 40%, like that’s not a little bit, that is, you know, bold headlines, people. And here is my bigger clinical concern. GLP one suppress appetite so significantly that so many people are undereating not just in calories like I said, but proteins, nutrients, and overall nourishment.
And if you’re eating 600, 800 calories a day and you think you’re thriving because the scale is moving. This is a pretty sorry story. And again, when you come off of it, there is a rebound effect that we are seeing. I am sure ] this is gonna make studies at some point someday because a faster and louder and harder rebound than I’ve ever seen ever before.
You are gonna suffer on that end, and then your metabolism isn’t gonna be able to support you. As you start to come off of it, and for those of you who think you can stay on it forever, I’m telling you, you can’t. You can, you could do some of the microdosing again, a conversation. I’m happy to have.
But this is not something that I think because at some point the body be, you know, body adapts. Maybe they keep coming out with new forms of this, but I don’t think the solution is to constantly stay on something that is, uh, so has such significant um. Limitations in the body. Okay.
Let’s go into category two, healing and repair peptides. This is where it gets interesting to me from a functional medicine perspective. Specifically things like BPC 1, 5, 7, TB 500. These are the most talked about in this category, I think. Right? There’s more that are coming, and again, we can update this, but.
For the most part, these are the ones that we’re hearing about. Um, more so BPC 1 57 is called body protection compound. It’s derived from a protein found in gastric juice, and it’s shown remarkable effects in animal studies for gut healing. Uh, specifically for things like tendon and ligament repair, angiogenesis, which is the formation of new blood vessels.
And nervous system protection. And the gut healing piece is what has practitioners, especially like me, paying close attention, because if you work in the functional space, you know that gut, gut integrity is at the root of just about everything, right? Inflammation, immune function, mood, hormones. The idea of a peptide that could support the healing of a compromised gut lining is genuinely compelling.
But I can’t stress this enough. If you’re taking BPC 1 57 while still eating inflammatory foods and drinking alcohol and taking NSAIDs, right, those nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories regularly, and you’re running on no sleep and your stress is through the roof, then you’re patching a pipe that has dozens of other leaks.
It’s like going into a rowboat with many holes. Like you can’t just bail out the water you’re gonna sink. Okay? TB 500 Thymosin Beta four is another repair peptide with a strong data in animals for tissue healing, cardiac protection, and inflammatory modulation. We know that athletes have been using this for injury recovery, and the research does seem promising, but again, here’s my honest take on this category.
I think these are some of the most interesting peptides from a root cause standpoint, but the human research. Is still catching up to the enthusiasm. So use caution work with someone who understands the clinical picture and don’t source these from a random online supplier. Category three, your growth hormone secretagogues.
These are the longevity body composition peptides, so things like CJC 1295. Ipa, Morelin, Tessa Morelin. These are often used together. Sometimes they’re mixed together and they work by stimulating the pituitary gland to release more of your own growth hormone. So they’re not, this is not synthetic growth hormone.
This is your own growth hormone, and that distinction matters both for safety purposes. And physiology because growth hormone declines with age. We do know this, and it’s associated with increased body fat, especially that visceral body fat. It’s associated with decreased lean mass, reduced recovery, poorer sleep quality and lower energy.
So the appeal of stimulating your own production is logical, but what to expect, like this is subtle cumulative changes over months. Not weeks, people, months, people have been, I’ve seen people on this. It takes four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, and sometimes cycling on and off. To really see the changes.
So it’s months, not weeks. We do see better sleep quality or although, but I will tell you some people yes, some people no. We see improved body composition with consistent training. You gotta be training, you gotta be doing resistance work. This is not gonna just put on muscle just because you’re taking it.
We see faster recovery, maybe some improvements in skin, skin quality, but this is not one of the more dramatic transformations. So all to be said that it’s a long game, okay? It’s not a short term quick fix. So if anyone, here’s a red flag. Anyone selling you a GH secretagogue protocol that has a dramatic before and after timeline, I’m telling you they are overselling it because the data.
Doesn’t support it for healthy individuals without documented deficiency of growth hormone. Okay, category four, cognitive and mood supportive peptides. So there’s something called clan and Cmax. These are neuropeptides that have been studied primarily in Russia, which means the research is real, but less accessible to western practitioners.
And the regulatory picture on this is pretty complicated. Okay. We know that clan has anxi anxiolytic effect, meaning it modulates anxiety and appears to work on what we call the GABA systems with excuse me, without the dependency risk of the benzodiazepines. So that’s interesting, right? There’s definitely interest here.
Um, and we know that Cmax has been used for cognitive enhancement, neuroprotection, and recovery from neurological events. So I’m gonna be honest with you, while this sounds promising, this is an area where I am most cautious. Not because the research is bad, but because the sourcing and dosing landscape is kind of murky here.
The brain is not a place to experiment reckless recklessly. So if you’re interested in cognitive peptides, you need a practitioner who genuinely knows this space and is doing the research, and that’s what’s super important. So again, I’m looking at the research, there’s some compelling evidence, but you gotta, this is definitely case by case.
Don’t just like throw this into the mix.
This is the part of the episode that I want you to share with every single person in your life. Who has asked you about peptides after seeing it on Instagram? Okay, so misconception number one is they’re natural, so they’re safe.
I think I’ve already addressed this, but I’m gonna go through it again because people say insulin is natural. Cortisol is natural. Estrogen is natural. Natural means nothing without, like I’ve mentioned, context, dose, and individual biochemistry. This is so important. Peptides are bioactive compounds. They do things.
Which means they can do the wrong things if they are used incorrectly. Okay? Misconception number two, what worked for her or him is gonna work for me. And I talk about this with clients constantly. Biochemistry is not a copy paste, protocol. Two people on the exact same protocol can have wildly different responsive responses based on genetics.
This is another thing that we look at, and again, I’m so excited about this area because I’ve been looking at genetics and with the GLP ones and how people respond and the before and after. So there’s a lot of. Cool stuff coming out on this that I’m gonna talk about, but looking at genetics, looking at gut microbiome, if your gut health, if your inflammation is so high, if your gut health is bad, if your inflammation is high, like you’re not gonna see these results.
So you’ve gotta get a a baseline. But people have different responses based on the genetics, gut microbiome, baseline hormones, stress load. See, sleep, quality and diet. So the person who’s lost 40 pounds on a GLP one, and the person who lost muscle and felt terrible were both quote unquote doing it right by the protocol, but their biology responded completely differently.
And this is why personalization isn’t a luxury in functional medicine. It is the whole point. Okay. Misconception Number three is that a peptide will compensate for a bad foundation. I think you guys all know my feeling on this. This is the one that really gets me because a peptide will not override a body that feels unsafe, right?
Again, if you aren’t fight or flight and your body doesn’t feel safe, then you cannot override that with a peptide. You cannot override a peptide if you are under fed or inflamed and exhausted. These compounds work with your physiology. They will not replace your physiology. So if you’re chronically stressed, sleeping five hours a night, eating ultra processed foods and not moving your body properly, a peptide is not your answer, and I’m gonna go further.
Adding a peptide to that scenario may actively make things worse because you’re stimulating a biological process in a system that doesn’t have the resources. To respond to them optimally, so that’s so important. Misconception four is the GLP conversation is the whole peptide conversation. Again, as you’ve seen, GLP are one category in a vast landscape, and that landscape is continuing to expand.
Focusing exclusively on them because they’re in the news, is like. Learning about cars and just only looking at a Tesla, right? It’s useful, but it’s incomplete. The repair peptides. The secretagogues, the neuropeptides, look, they represent a genuinely different set of tools with different applications, and some of them are super exciting and has nothing to do with weight loss.
Okay? So, keep that in mind. Misconception number five is I can manage this myself. Look. I get the impulse. I get that emotional driver like I can do this, but these compounds are accessible online and practitioners get expensive. I get that. And the DIY culture is so strong out there. But the risks of unsupervised peptide use are real contaminated products, incorrect dosing, contraindications with existing conditions or medications.
And pushing your biology in a direction that it’s not ready for can be dangerous. The fact that you can buy something doesn’t mean that you should use it without guidance. Look, that’s true of a lot of things, but really specifically here, so who is a good candidate and who isn’t? Okay, let’s get practical.
In my clinical experience, peptides can be me. A meaningful tool, right? For people. Here are good candidates. For people who have done the work, who have their diet dialed in, who are prioritizing sleep, who are managing their stress and paying attention to it, who are paying attention to their movement and are doing all of these things, that they are doing the resistance work, but they are finding they plateaued.
They’re not looking for a shortcut. They’re looking for an edge in a system that is already well supported. It. And if you have a specific documented clinical need, gut permeability, for instance, that isn’t responding to foundational interventions. So I bring in peptides on some of my more complicated cases.
I will tell you people with really severe inflammatory bowel diseases respond really well. Severe rheumatoid arthritis, right? But it has to be managed properly. If someone’s got serious and metabolic dispu dysfunction despite genuine lifestyle effort and validated labs, and someone who’s working with a qualified practitioner who, like I said, is doing the labs monitoring and actually paying attention to the clinical picture, those would be ideal candidates.
Not an ideal candidate. People who are chronically undereating people with any type of disordered eating behavior. And I will tell you this is rampant ’cause I’m seeing this all the time and nobody is screening for this. These doctors are not screening for anybody who has any kind of disordered eating behavior and it is scary what is coming out of this.
Okay. Adding a metabolic peptide to a body that’s already in resource scarcity. Scarcity is like pushing the accelerator when you’re out of gas. It [just it, there’s nothing that’s gonna happen and it become, becomes dangerous. People who are not good candidates are people who are burned out.
They’ve got high cortisol, they have a dysregulated nervous system. Your body is in survival mode. Like those things, again, those are the foundations. That have to be optimized first, because if you’re looking at this for a replacement, for a lifestyle change, there is no peptide supplement, drug or intervention that will replace sleep, whole food, nutrition, movement, and stress regulation.
Not one, not now, not ever. Okay. How to use them well. Well, if you’ve done your homework and you’re working with someone qualified, pep and peptides make sense for your clinical picture. Here’s how to get results. Okay. The non-negotiables protein indicate intake. This is not optional, especially if you’re on a GLP one or any kind of body composition protocol.
You wanna get a minimum of one gram of protein per kilogram of lean body mass, not necessarily per pound. What I am seeing is people are overloading on protein, especially women, and now it’s set setting their livers up. It’s just setting them up for a whole metabolic issue, so it’s one gram. Per kilogram of body mass.
If you wanna get kilograms, you take your weight and divide it by 2.2. Some people need more. If you’re doing heavy resistance training. Yes, if you’re in depletion mode, yes, you might need more, but this is where working with someone is gonna be so important. Okay? If you don’t have the raw material, your body can’t maintain what the peptides doing.
What I’m gonna tell you is if, if you have anemia, right? I see this all the time. If you have anemia, you gotta fix that first before going on to a peptide protocol, okay? Resistance training is the other non-negotiable. Here. You have to get into doing this because if you don’t affect your body composition, muscle is the organ of longevity.
You need to protect it aggressively. Okay? Sleep growth hormone secretagogues released, released most of their benefit during sleep. A lot of these, you know, they pulse, so they pulse during sleep. If you’re not sleeping, you’re not getting the return on your investment here. Okay. Nervous system regulation.
Now this is one again, if this gets overlooked all the time. If you have a dysregulated nervous system, uh, if you are constantly in fight or flight, if you’re constantly go, go, go, and you can’t quiet down and you can’t shut down. You are gonna create inflammation and this inflammation will blunt peptide receptor sensitivity.
It’ll just, it’s not gonna work well. So add in breath work, add in some kind of what we call parasympathetic practice. Even gargling singing out loud singing in the shower. Whatever works, you gotta do it. Okay? But bringing on a practitioner who can help you do this, super important, and you gotta monitor your labs.
You gotta do it before, during, and after. You gotta know your baseline. You need to know what’s changed because this is how you know what is working. Okay? So here’s what I want you to take away from today. Peptides are not magic. But they’re not poison either. Okay? They’re tools. They’re sophisticated, targeted, genuinely interesting tools.
And like all tools, their value depends entirely on the person using them. Using them, the context in which they’re used and the foundation underneath. The most powerful thing you can do for your biology is not find the perfect protocol. It is building the conditions that make any protocol actually work.
A well-nourished body, a regulated nervous system, muscles that are strong and supported, and a gut that can actually absorb what you’re giving it. Peptides can accelerate that work. They will never replace it. [00:56:00] Plus knowing how to cycle on and off, or even coming off the peptides completely. Look, that’s a whole other story into itself and we’re gonna get into that.
But you do need to know how to either, you know, maintain the gains you’ve had, how to cycle them and, and a whole other story. But, but working with someone who knows how to do that is gonna be important. So if you’re navigating GLP one medication and you’re not feeling like yourself, if you’re losing muscle, you’re undereating or unclear on what comes next.
Like this is the work we do at the Brande Institute, right? We don’t just hand you a protocol, we build you a foundation that actually holds. And, you know, paying attention to this, you could tell I’m so passionate about this because I’m hearing this and I’m seeing this and, and I’m seeing benefits, but I’m also seeing a lot of people just get hurt and people who have come to me who can’t seem to maintain the weight loss and are trying to figure out the struggle between, do I go back on, do I stay off?
And now there’s a whole psyche beyond this, right? I am gonna tell you that the fear that people have, what I am seeing is the tremendous fe. Fear of coming off of these, not wanting to come off of them, but wanting to come off of them. And so how do we manage this rebound weight gain? Like, these are things that we’re gonna be talking about more.
I’m excited to be, uh, launching our GLP one 12 week program, like it’s called Beyond the Shot. There’s a lot of things that are coming down the pike from us that I think can help you. But if this, if you found this helpful. Uh, or, uh, share it. If you know someone who’s working with with a practitioner, great.
If they’re not local to us, we can, work with anybody. But if it was useful to you, share it because this conversation needs to be louder than the hype that’s going along with it. So I hope you found it informative. I hope you found it helpful. Send us questions because this’ll be the first of many, but that’s it for now.
This is your Rebel nutritionist signing off. See you next time.
