Are Peptides the New Snake Oil? What the Actual Science Says With Barbell Medicine

Dr. Spencer Nadolsky and Karl bring on Dr. Austin Baraki and Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum from the Barbell Medicine crew for a conversation that cuts through one of the most hyped and least understood topics in the health and fitness space right now: the research peptides that millions of people are injecting into themselves based on anecdotes, social media marketing, and the logic that short chain amino acids are natural so they must be fine.

In this episode they cover what peptides actually are from a basic biochemistry standpoint and why calling something a short chain amino acids does not make it a food or a supplement it makes it a drug with all the same questions around safety efficacy dosing and long-term effects that any other drug requires, why the explosion of GLP-1 popularity essentially normalized both injectable medications and the idea that if semaglutide works this well what else is out there leading directly to the current peptide boom, why BPC-157 has no randomized controlled trial data in humans and the three human trials that were started were all terminated early with results never published which is a red flag that would make people furious if it were a vaccine but barely registers in the peptide space, why TB-500 has wound healing data when applied topically but nothing when injected despite being universally marketed as a muscle and tendon healer, why MOTS-C has never been tested in humans at all and yet enormous numbers of people are currently injecting it, why the argument that big pharma would sell these if they worked is actually the correct argument and why most of these compounds were abandoned precisely because they failed in trials or showed harm signals, why biological plausibility is a dangerous standard to rely on given that suppressing arrhythmias seemed biologically obvious until the CAST trial showed it killed people and beta blockers for heart failure seemed obviously wrong until trials showed they were life saving, what a randomized controlled trial actually does that anecdote cannot and why thousands of positive experiences are not equivalent to controlled data, why a JAMA study on SARMs sold as research chemicals found that only 18 of 44 products actually contained what was on the label meaning people may not even be getting the compound they think they are getting, why the doctors on this podcast could have made millions of dollars branding and selling their own peptide lines and have specifically chosen not to, and what standard of evidence they believe should be the minimum before recommending any compound to another human being.

The Docs Who Lift podcast distills and simplifies the complexities of exercise, medicine, and weight loss. Subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.