Ozempic and Mounjaro are peptides. They are a silver bullet for obesity and orders of magnitude more effective than anything up to a gastric band surgery. Insulin is a peptide and keeps some 50 million people alive globally. You could go on and on.
The real question is: Should you be putting novel, poorly researched and dubiously manufactured substances (which happen to be peptides) in your body via injection? To that I say, to each their own but I'll wait for the pharma industry to catch up. I'm not that bored.
My take on the peptides craze is it’s like random people started injected insulin because they have a hazy idea of it being helpful for something or other based on the word on the street but they aren’t sure about dose and also can’t be sure what they’re injecting is actually insulin or uncontaminated. They also aren’t diabetic.
Most peptides don't seem nearly as dangerous as insulin, luckily. Injecting insulin without medical supervision is a good way to give yourself hypoglycemia and die - blood sugar regulation is not something you want to mess with!
People don't seem to be regularly dying from peptides, at least not now.
I'd love to be able to make that statement with such confidence, but you just don't know. Literally no one has any clue what the long-term effect of injecting BPC-157 or what ever stupid well-marketed bullshit is the flavour of the week is, is.
It is true. Because the short-term effects of incorrectly injecting insulin are far greater and known risks. I agree that the long term effects are unknown but considering you could basically kill yourself quite easily with insulin... its clearly far more dangerous.
I get the point but given we don't have any rigorous studies on these substances, the only thing we can say with any certainty is that they likely won't kill you now. It's ludicrous of course but we could have a 100% fatality rate over 5 years from a given peptide and we...just wouldn't know at this moment.
Don't take insulin if you can avoid it. Don't take other stupid shit if you can avoid it. You can definitely avoid this stupid shit.
Doesn't this suggest that all these "Chinese peptides" which Silicon Valley people are injecting are probably fake placebos or just ineffectual?
If these substances actually had substantial effects on the body, people using them without medical supervision would almost certainly be overdosing with some frequency, I think.
(As I understand it, it is very possible to overdose on Ozempic… the reason it doesn't happen is because the purity is controlled, and people are taking specific medically-recommended doses.)
It doesn't suggest that at all? There are a lot of degrees of impact between "directly affecting blood glucose uptake in cells for respiration" and "nothing burger placebo".
> The real question is: Should you be putting novel, poorly researched and dubiously manufactured substances (which happen to be peptides) in your body via injection?
on one hand: no, absolutely not, hell no.
on the other hand: these people are voluntarily doing human sperimentation. things like this are going to happen anyway so we might as well collect the data (samples, effect etc). it's not much different from the safe needles initiatives.
Except the data is completely useless. Especially given the extremely strong selection biases towards: status/image-obsessed; high-risk; low-intelligence; generally high appetite for a constellation of dubious interventions.
The data isn't entirely useless. It might be a good signal of areas to point legitimate research toward
Narrowing down areas into "Anecdotally many people say it works, we should check" does have some value, even if it does just wind up debunking the claims
In theory, maybe. In practice, there are far better sources of signal for far more valuable therapeutics to develop.
There are far more promising development targets than there is development resources. Self-reports from a bunch of the most drug-addled people in the world are not going to make it to the next-most-viable target.
So, chemical pollution and the destruction of our microbiome with excessive antibiotics cause a global obesity problem, and we pump more chemicals into the body to try to solve it.
Progress on making fecal transplants more widespread, less wide-spectrum antibiotics prescriptions and more targeted ones (it would help with antibiotics resistance, as a nice side-effect), investing more in bacteriophages as an alternative to antibiotics, and far stronger limits to chemical pollution, and cleaning up existing ones.
And for the remainder: go to your physician to get to a state where you can do healthy diet and exercise.
For the small part that remains is highly suggest getting an actual physician to give you treatment options, instead of self medicating with sketchy Chinese chemicals.
Peptides are basically protein chains. Proteins are instructions to certain things in our bodies, proteins can activate/deactivate certain processes in our bodies among many other things.
If you artificially inject the correct protein into your body to mimic a naturally producing one, it would do the job and in that way peptides works. However, most of peptides injected by people are hardly human tested for long term effects. Human body is remarkable at adjusting and maintaining a baseline and we don’t know what would be the unintended side effects of these peptides because the body would try to counterbalance it. At best it could be just a mild headache or stomachache and at worst it could be cancer
Clearly they have effects. Heck insulin is a peptide. And pretty sure it has a benefit for those with diabetes. Dismissing peptides outright is just as silly as thinking peptides are the solution to everything
"peptide" is just a category of chemical. Some of them do good things, some do bad things, some do nothing at all.
Anyone talking about "taking peptides" as a meaningful sentence is absolutely dismissible in the same way someone talking about "taking chemicals" is dismissible.
If there were suddenly thousands of websites advertising "taking chemicals" as cure-all solutions, and a two-year fad where thousands of accounts advertised "chemicals" on social media, and vernacular use of "taking chemicals" meant "self-inject unregulated substances from unknown foreign manufacturers", then do you see how it would make no sense to make this pedantic point to dismiss any concern over the new "taking chemicals" craze?
Maybe I wasn't clear, when I say people should be dismissed for saying "taking chemicals," I mean that they don't get to turn the conversation into a battle of anecdata to try to make their arguments.
For the vast majority of these chemicals, there's no evidence they do anything beneficial. Until there is, you're an idiot for taking them and our regulators are idiots for letting them be marketed to you as if there are benefits.
The entire conversation is goofy because once there's solid enough evidence of safety and efficacy, we just call it a "drug" like any other drug, but somehow a lot of the voluntary lab rats in this craze trust a gas station kiosk more than a billion dollar RCT.
The terminology is all a bit loose. Proteins are peptides, but we don't usually call them that. But when a hormone is a protein, rather than a small molecule, then we call it a "peptide hormone". I suppose because we're making a chemical point, that the hormone is in the family of peptides rather than steroids or eicosanoids or whatever?
As you say, insulin is a fully fledged protein, albeit a small one, and i wouldn't call it a peptide myself. But then, insulin is 51 residues, whereas tirzepatide (Mounjaro) is 39; is that such a big difference? FWIW i think a lot of other "peptides" are even smaller, eg CJC-1295 is about 30 residues.
peptides (2-50 amino acids) are smaller than proteins (50+ amino acids)... it's impossible to call a complex protein a peptide, it fails to meet the definition.
Probably better people to explain it. First sentence on wiki ” Insulin (/ˈɪn.sjʊ.lɪn/ ⓘ;[5][6] from Latin insula 'island') is a peptide hormone produced by beta cells of the pancreatic islets encoded in humans by the insulin (INS) gene.”
peptides seemed to have popped up about 10 years ago.... now we've got probably over 100 common peptides that are used for various things, here is a sample:
1) PT-141 is a peptide that releases sex hormone into the blood and literally makes you horny, and its primary use is for premenopausal women that have low sex drive.
2) PNC-27 is a peptide that supposedly attaches to the cell membrane of tumor cells and performs cell lysis (death) of the tumor cell, and it's supposedly affects many different kinds of tumor cells: breast, pancreatic, lung, colon, ovarian, cervical, and leukemia
3) Epithalon is a peptide that is noted for extending telomers on chromosomes, leading to longevity benefits.
4) MOTS-c is it peptide that in animal studies is shown to boost physical endurance and mimic molecular changes associated with training/exercise.
Hormones control a lot of what you describe as "feeling like."
The drugs (coincidentally of shape "peptide") that have been through clinical trials are obviously measured against placebo, and they (like the approved GLP-related set of drugs) are outrageously effective beyond placebo. And have very little downsides compared to the downsides of being obese, which are far more immense than people appreciate.
Just because you wouldn’t like it doesn’t mean no social benefit. Going to mar a lago and watching the president put ketchup on a well done steak doesn’t sound fun for me, but could be very socially beneficial for a lot of people.
Sometimes it IS good food. Protein is peptides. Collagen is peptides. Eat hearty beef stew, Salmon and you're eating .. peptides.
Unfortunately many peptides break down in the GI tract. However there is some reason to believe eating protein, like collagen in meat does produce an outcome in terms of muscle mass and skin condition. I guess because those breakdown products make their way through the blood/lymph system to where they're needed.
All those people huffing Whey powder after Gym? peptides! Just enjoy a low sugar yoghourt at lunchtime guys. same-same
> what actually are the benefits of all this peptide ingestion ?
50 years ago it was cocaine, 40 years ago there was crack, 30 years ago it was heroin, 20 years ago we had bath salts, 10 years ago it was gas station drugs and meth, 5 years ago it was Ivermectin, this year it's SF techies doing their own research into peptides and taking some. Taking the latest drug (or peptide in 2026) is its own benefit.
Ah yes... Ivermectin, very much like the crack epidemic.
"It's for horses!!1!" "They do their own research!"
As with any substance, there can be use, and abuse. If you would have told people 30 years ago you use creatine, you would be stared at as if you inject steroids or growth hormone. Today it is in the supermarket, literally next to the protein bars. Throwing Ivermectin on the same pile as crack and heroin though.. :D
I am sure there are dozens (dozens!) of idiots who inject whatever they think it is for whatever reason, valid or not. Peptides is a craze, and it is also emerging here in the Netherlands, but as people have pointed out, lots of things are peptides, and lots of them seem to have significant health benefits, when used properly. Give it another 30 years... they will be next to the protein bars as well, once someone has figured out how to capture the profits.
