Please don’t inject yourself with bootleg peptides |
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Please don’t inject yourself with bootleg peptides
Why Americans have gone wild self-experimenting with the hottest thing in wellness: Peptides.
Peptides seem to be everywhere — and there are more on the way. Adherents promise these tiny chains of amino acids can help you lose weight, keep your skin clear, and slow down the aging process. While a person who really wants to acquire peptides right now can do so fairly easily, they are not, strictly speaking, legal — which might be why a peptide “club” with a 300-person waitlist has popped up in San Francisco.
But access could soon expand: Peptides have support from the nation’s wellness influencer-in-chief, US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the Food and Drug Administration is expected to relax restrictions for a dozen peptides.
A newsletter for anyone trying to make sense of their health.
“Peptide” is maybe the buzziest word in health care right now — but, as usual, the social media mania masks a much more complicated scientific reality. Peptides are not inherently bad, but not all of the peptides being hawked by wellness influencers are the same. Here’s what you should know.
What the heck are peptides?
To be clear, you have peptides in your body right now: Peptides are naturally occurring groups of amino acids that regulate a variety of physiological processes. There is nothing inherently strange or shady about a “peptide.”
“They help our body work,” Dr. Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist at the University of Toronto who conducted some of the basic peptide research that helped lead to the development of GLP-1 drugs, told me. “They help us digest our food and absorb our nutrients. They send information to various organs to tell it how to utilize energy. They’re important for control of our heart and our blood vessels and our blood pressure and how our brain functions.”
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