All Things Peptides — Dr. Andrew Huberman

All right, Andrew, I want to ask you about peptides. All the rage. You look at Google Trends. Everybody and their brother has a peptide startup, but there seems to maybe be something there. I don't know if there's a there there. For people who have heard the word, don't know exactly what folks are talking about. I get texted every week multiple times from people asking about various peptides. And I'd say half the time, depending on what they're trying to do, I'm like, "Can't you just be a grown-up and inject testosterone or HGH [laughter] instead?" If you're trying to get there directly. But I would be very interested here. I know there's a broad spectrum of stuff that people are experimenting with. What are these things? And And what's what's your current thinking? >> I also don't completely disagree with you about like just be a grown-up and take cypionate and HGH. If you want to maintain fertility, take some HCG as well. >> Yeah. >> And I'm being facetious, of course. I I think there are risks to all of those, but it is the appropriate opening joke /reality, because if you're expecting cypionate HGH type results from peptides, you ain't going to get them. At least not with respect to like anabolic growth, feelings of well-being. Peptides are short chains of amino acids. Insulin's a peptide, etc. I cannot take credit for what I'm about to say next, but it's a very, very important principle. Like this is kind of the theme today, I suppose. Abubakr who's an MD came on the podcast, talked about peptides, and he said, "Look, for many, many hundreds, if not thousands, of years, but certainly hundreds of years in the context of pharma, people have been searching for medicines in plants. Isolating medicines from plants. Pharma companies still do this. Now, people are starting to look for medicines within the body. And peptides are a great example of that. GLP, for instance. The drugs that increase GLP do so to thousandfold levels over the levels of circulating GLP that you would have. And they result in, as we all know, robust weight loss. So, that's one category. I think we need to think about categories of peptides, but understand that peptides are all over They're made in your brain and body. Some of them may have benefits when made synthetically and delivered at very, very high doses, such as with these GLP agonists, Ozempic, Mounjaro. Retatrutide is one that we should talk about, made by Lilly. It's coming out soon. It impacts the GLP system, but also the GIP and the glucagon system. >> Careful with that one, kid us. >> A lot of people are going to be microdosing it. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, a lot of people are finding that microdoses can have similar effects, and that's an important kind of cost-risk analysis. Okay, so stepping back, peptides are made in your body. They at high concentrations made synthetically, they may provide benefits that are make them medicines. So, we can think of the weight loss peptides, the GLPs being the most prominent example. The GLP drugs that increased levels of GLP hundredfold were used to treat diabetes for a while. Still are. But they didn't induce much weight loss. The ones that raise GLP levels thousandfold or more, those lead to robust weight loss, including muscle loss, and so that's part of the controversy. Also, there's discussion about maybe increasing some apathy. They reduced craving for alcohol and perhaps cravings more generally. At the recommended dosages, in some people they can create nausea, which is why some people are taking less of them and still getting the weight loss benefits, but less nausea. There's a lot of stuff going on there, but to stay on the GLPs and weight loss peptides specifically, Lilly developed retatrutide, which hits the GLP, GIP, and glucagon system, leads to the most robust weight loss, seems to spare some muscle, perhaps. People should always resistance train anyway to offset that, but it's the most effective of those weight loss let's just call it GLPs even though it hits these other systems. The gray market is the quote unquote for research purposes only stuff that you can buy online. It's perfectly legal to sell for research purposes only not for animal or human use. And I joked on X a while ago like wow, all these home labs, everyone's buying this. Of course people are injecting them. The concern is about contamination with things like lipopolysaccharide or you're not getting what you think you're getting. So, many people are already taking retatrutide even though it hasn't been formally released because it's pretty easy to synthesize. And so it's being sold on the gray market. People are taking it. There's a second category and then I'll return to the kind of gray market issue. The second category would be things to increase growth hormone. So called growth hormone secretagogues, things like sermorelin, ipamorelin, tesamorelin. These are all variants on the theme of get the brain neurons that project down to the pituitary to stimulate release of growth hormone at night. Typically you don't need a couple hours before sleep is the idea. Probably good for sleep anyway. It is good for sleep anyway. Then you inject this stuff. Typically it leads to maybe a three to eightfold increase in growth hormone IGF-1. Some stimulate appetite quite a bit like MK-677, some don't. I've tried sermorelin very briefly. Dramatically increased my slow wave deep sleep, nuked my REM sleep. This is a common theme. Spiked my prostate specific antigen. I've never had any problems with PSA. I came off it, PSA went back to normal. No one's been able to give me a mechanistic explanation for that. I'm not about to run the experiment again. I didn't find that I got much fat loss from it, but I didn't use it very long. I didn't find I got stronger. You know, just didn't seem worth it to me given the PSA thing. A lot of people take these thinking they're going to get these really dramatic increases in growth hormone. They sound dramatic, three to eightfold, but whether or not they're meaningful in terms of fat loss, it doesn't really seem they're that robust, especially given that you have all the GLPs now. So, the growth hormone secretagogues also include things like CJC, and there's some variants on these, which can lead to some insulin resistance, but maybe spikes GH a bit more. I don't [clears throat] know. None of those, to me, really seem worth it, personally. Just given the effects aren't that great. You know, if someone can afford it and they can get a script for it, probably better to just take pharma-grade somatropin or omnitrope growth hormone. And, you know, the bodybuilders would take like eight IUs a day or something crazy like that. But, the in the trials that have been done with metformin and GH, typically, it's people are taking one to two IUs five nights per week. That will dramatically increase deep sleep and probably sleep overall, and the effects on fat loss and just tissue repair, healing, and feelings of well-being, and just cognitive function, anecdotally, people and subjectively, people say like, "Wow, I just feel so great." This is the getting up in the morning and be like, "Wow, my joints feel good." and just being ready to like go, go, go. It's not anabolic as much as something like testosterone, etc. But, I'm not telling people to run out and do GH, but if you could get a good script a script for real GH and take a low dose versus taking a bunch of like unknown secretagogue peptides, that seems like an obvious one for me. Then, there's a category of things like BPC 157, body protection compound 157, which is a amino acid chain that is in gastric juice, but it's this isolated amino acid chain that seems to be the one that's most popular. And, at the same time, it's the one for which most people probably taking it for all the wrong reasons. I've tried it. I definitely feel like after a pain or strain, the recovery is faster. But, I can't do the control experiment cuz it goes systemic. So, it's not like you could have Let's say you hurt both biceps. You could You can't inject into one bicep and not the other and assume that it's just acting locally. It's going to go systemically. There are capsule forms of BPC that people claim are just as good. I don't know. Do you have to inject locally close to the injury? It seems that might be helpful. The animal data on BPC are really impressive. Cartilage regrowth, fibroblast migration, angiogenesis, nerve regrowth. It's a literature I've spent a lot of time with. There's not a single published human trial. Where I think the most interesting use of it perhaps is is I know someone recently, she wrote to me and she said that her dog had a spinal injury. And she said, "Does BPC work in animals?" I go, "Actually, pretty much all the data are in animals. So, if my dog, God forbid, had an injury, I'd be willing to give him or her [snorts] BPC. You have to work out the appropriate dosage. >> How would you source that? Hypothetically. >> So, you can get it from compounding pharmacies now. So, you need a doctor to write that script. Depending on your risk tolerance, you could go to the gray market for research purposes only. I wouldn't do that. Peptide Sciences shuttered their doors, windows, whatever. They closed a few months back. They they sensed the heat coming on and they're like, "We're out." They took their money and they're out. Smart move, Peptide Sciences. So, nowadays you can find doctors that will prescribe it. And there's also pentadecapeptide, which is just a different form of BPC. Seems to have same function. It's easier to find. And getting it from a compounding pharmacy, of course, compounding pharmacy is very in stringency, but is going to be cleaner than the gray market sourcing, of course. But, I've no relationship to these pharmacies, but for instance, Tailor Made, Upstate, Revive Pharmacy, these are kind of the better known and trusted compounding pharmacies. Compounding pharmacies were allowed to compound drugs that are still under patent during shortages. And can compound generic drugs. They'll also truly compound peptides. You could can get BPC with another one, the TB500. So-called Wolverine stack. I don't know. I've never tried TB500. I keep some BPC 157 in the fridge. If I have a a strain on a joint >> in for a second? Like the challenge with so much of this stuff is you can't do the control. >> Can't do the control. >> took the Wolverine stack after I had elbow surgery and I'm like Did it help? >> I have no idea. Frankly, I have no idea. >> You know what? I will say this, I've used it a few times, very short runs of it. I'm not interested in using it as a general recovery tool or every day or any I don't have any gut issues. Like so people have used high doses of BPC to resolve gut issues. That was the original use. You know, in this clinical trial they did BPC enemas at very high dosages. >> Sounds like an Austin party. >> You know, and supposedly, I learned this from Abood, Pavlov actually had a side gig. He was a health influencer. He'd give people gastric juices to try and resolve ulcers and things like that. And we know gastric juices contain a number of beneficial peptides. But I don't recommend >> they down those? How did they get them in there? >> How they down them and how they get them in there? >> Shots glass of gastric juices? >> maybe he had a cabinet of people with a you know, they're tapping them. Yeah, so they're rough. So, you know, people say should I take BPC 157? No, you shouldn't unless you have an injury or maybe in that case you get clean compounded pharmacy BPC and you inject it locally or you take it systemically. You try it, see if it helps. But why would you take it ongoing? That just doesn't make any sense to me. It doesn't make any sense to me, frankly. And again, you go back to your sort of half joke at the beginning, you really want to recover quickly from exercise? Take an IU or two IUs of GH every night before sleep and you will recover magnificently well.