Why Everyone Is Talking About Peptides

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0:18Hey, What's News listeners. It's Sunday, May 31st. I'm Alex Ossola for The Wall Street Journal. This is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news. On the show this week, we're talking about peptides, the drugs that have taken social media by storm for people who say they help them look and feel better. It's the sort of promise that people always want. Like you want to not get the sun exposure, but you want to look tan and glowing. But taking the drugs comes with more risks than some users may have bargained for.

0:54Peptides are having a moment. If you spent time online, you've probably seen posts from users who say the drugs can do everything from improve their skin to helping them get better sleep to simply just feeling good in their bodies. Hey, so I take peptides and I have since November and I have four kids. I have never been this confident, felt this good, looked this good. Not since I was at least 19 years old. Let's go over GHKCU, otherwise known as the Pretty Boy Peptide. This is known to give you the glass skin effect that everybody's been talking about. For the top five peptides, I'd recommend to get jacked and shredded before summer and flex on your ex, respectfully.

1:33But it's not just influencers who are into peptides. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has also touted their use and vowed to make them more accessible. Here he is on Joe Rogan's podcast earlier this year. Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of peptides. I've used them myself and used them with really good effect, you know, on a couple of injuries. Even the DJ and record producer Diplo was talking about them on stage at the WSJ's Future of Everything Festival earlier this month. I think I met 40 people yesterday that was talking about peptides at the MetBall after parties. But here's the thing.

2:07Many of the uses that people say peptides are great for are not scientifically proven and may come with side effects or dangers we don't know about. What's more, users are increasingly finding the drugs on the gray market, which presents its own set of risks. I discussed all this with Sarah O 'Brien, who covers the business and culture of wellness for The Journal.

2:29Sarah, I want to start with the kind of like bare bones definition of what a peptide is. Like if I were in high school biology class, what would I learn about what a peptide is? Peptides are short chains of amino acids. They act as signaling messengers that help your body regulate different functions. They might work in one part of the body and then signal things to other parts of the body as well. Insulin is a peptide. So insulin helps your body turn food into energy and manages your blood sugar levels. Now, if the body doesn't make insulin, that's where a synthetic insulin injection would come into play.

3:06GLP-1 is the next sort of obvious one. Now, GLP-1 is a peptide that exists in their body. It's also the basis for pharmaceutical drugs like Ozempic. And what it does, it just sort of triggers the feelings in your body of being full, and it shuts down your hunger signals. A synthetic GLP-1 drug like Ozempic is engineered to basically last a lot longer than the natural GLP-1 does that exists in people's bodies today. So that's why people tend to eat less, and they tend to stay full for longer when they are taking Ozempic or one of the GLP-1 drugs. So when someone on social media is talking about all their peptides and their peptide stack, do they mean something different?

3:45The term is very broad, as you've kind of alluded to. People are injecting peptides that they say are for everything from like muscle recovery to hair growth to making their skin glow, a lot of physical but also aesthetic benefits. But the ones that people are often talking about on places like TikTok and Instagram that they're injecting at home are unapproved drugs. So a lot of them are based on anecdotal evidence, but they have not gone through the same lengthy approvals that a drug like Ozempic has to go through, like the clinical trials and all of that to prove the safety effectiveness and the manufacturing process for the drug.

4:23Right. And just to clarify what unapproved means, there's off-label use for many drugs, and then there's using a straight up illegal drug. And there's a lot of stuff in between. Where does this fall? In 2023, under the Biden era FDA, a number of these peptides were banned. Compounding pharmacies were no longer able to legally make these peptides. And that sort of created this gray market online. Now, under the Trump administration, they have moved a lot of these peptides into this regulatory limbo area where they may soon become available for compounders to create again. There will be a hearing in July where they'll discuss the status of a number of these peptides.

5:06And many are hoping that this will become the beginning of making these widely available through compounding pharmacies again, which people see as safer because these are drugs that you're injecting into your body. So they need to be sterile and the ingredients need to be known and vouched for. Who is primarily buying these drugs and who's selling them? Who's buying them is a great question. And it's a broad range of people at this point. I just did a story talking to teenagers and young men who are buying these peptides as young as, you know, 18 and even younger, and then all the way up to senior citizens and people that have physical ailments maybe, and they want their muscles and joints to repair more quickly.

5:50And right now, because they are unapproved. They're in this legal gray area and many people are turning to online sellers. They're buying them from various websites that they're finding on places like Reddit or TikTok and they're being sold largely and labeled as for research use only, which is a legal loophole that sellers are using because they very well know that these are not approved drugs and that you cannot sell a drug without a prescription from a doctor on the internet. But because of the way that everybody else is buying them and talking about them, people know that this is how you get the peptide.

6:28They would be perhaps safer if they're produced from compounding pharmacies, although we still don't have the answers to the safety effectiveness questions. How much does it typically cost to buy these drugs off social media? Yeah, Yeah, it can cost anywhere from like tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars per vial of peptide. And then some of them are sold individually. And then there's also like peptide stacks, which is maybe a combination of three different peptides that is sold as things like a glow stack and a wolverine stack to kind of like brand them in an appealing way. And those might carry a higher price tag because they have multiple ones within a vial.

7:09Coming up, the risks that unapproved peptides bring and where they go from here. That's after the break.

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7:46I know that you said that the FDA hasn't approved these drugs for some of the things that people are taking them for. But that doesn't mean they don't do that. Do we actually know that any of these peptides, as ingredients, do some of the things that are promised? So they might do some of the things that they're promised, but they also might have unintended side effects as well. And that's kind of the scarier part, right? So there is one called MT2, which is known as the tanning peptide. And years ago, it actually popped up because people were calling it the Barbie peptide because it really just increases the pigmentation of your skin.

8:22So you just have this like natural glow and you look a lot darker. And it's the sort of promise that people always want. Like you want to not get the sun exposure, but you want to look tan and glowing. But because it increases the melanin in your skin, you might grow a lot more moles, your moles become more prominent. And there have been some warnings about case studies that have shown that it has increased the risk of melanoma. Now these studies are limited, but that's certainly concerning, right? So a lot of times people might be taking a certain peptide and And yeah, they're feeling good. They're looking good.

8:56And that's what you're seeing on TikTok. But you don't know what might come with that too. Not to fear monger, but there are some very real scary consequences to some of them. And others, we don't know yet what we don't know. Unintended side effects is a pretty big negative consequence of some of this. But are there possible other negative consequences that come with how people are acquiring these drugs? There's always a risk when you don't know much about who you're buying from, right? There's a lot to be said about the process that a pharmaceutical goes through to get to market, and that includes the safety and the manufacturing process.

9:32So certainly at the baseline level, you don't even know what the ingredients are in what you're buying. They might say that they have a certificate of analysis or certificate of ingredients, but do you trust that, right? Do you trust that this company that you've probably never heard of before is selling you what they say they're selling you? So not knowing what you're injecting could have all sorts of things, contaminants in it that could be harmful to you. The other thing is a lot of people are stacking peptides. They're not consulting with a doctor and they're sort of doing it on their own.

10:03And do you know what the stacking of certain peptides can do? Maybe one is fine for you, but maybe the combination of several is not great for you. There's so many unknowns. And because people are sort of DIYing this, you know, it could lead to very scary health outcomes. I want to zoom back out now for a minute because this is a particular moment in the sort of pursuit of beauty, the pursuit of perfection. But I would say pretty confidently that this is not the first, right? I mean, the rise of social media led to like this whole new revolution in the way that people are thinking about their physical appearance.

10:41And that includes GLP-1s, but it also includes stuff like Botox and all kinds of other aesthetic treatments. Is this different than some of that other stuff? I think it is a different symptom of the same cause. For a long time, people have been taking photos of celebrities to their plastic surgeons and saying, hey, I want to look like this. And this is another layer of that. We've become increasingly sort of used to sourcing health advice and beauty advice and all that from the Internet, from people that feel like our peers rather than from like the experts themselves. For a long time, the conversation around beauty and looks and appearances and like the drastic measures people will go to has focused on women, but that is spreading and young men are feeling that.

11:29And this is not to say that the young men are the primary cohort that is injecting peptides at home. They are a part of it, but so are middle-aged women. So are young women. So are post-menopausal women. Everybody is asking this question of like, huh, is there more that I should be doing that I could be doing. And part of it is that people are really focused on longevity now, like how to sort of live the healthiest and best version of their lives for as long as they can. And it's sort of like in these different buckets of aesthetics and longevity and wellness. And you'd be hard pressed to find a person that wasn't impacted by all that messaging.

12:05You mentioned that there's a hearing in July. What is the hearing for and what are you going to be watching to come out of it? In late July, the FDA is going to have an advisory panel meet to discuss whether it would allow some of these peptides that were restricted back in 2023 to be compounded again by compounding pharmacies, which would therefore make them much more widely available through doctors, through compounding pharmacies, through telehealth companies and all of that. A lot of people are starting to anticipate what that might mean for the peptide industry. Will we see a lot of telehealth companies get into this?

12:40Will we see a lot more doctors feel comfortable prescribing it? Will that take away the gray market research use only peptide marketplace? Even if some of these peptides would become more widely available, does that answer the questions around safety and effectiveness and all that, whether there will be more data presented to prove that case? That was journal reporter Sarah O 'Brien. Thanks, Sarah. Thank you. And that's it for What's New Sunday for May 31st. Today's show was produced by Dani Lewis with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Alex Osola, and we'll be back tomorrow morning with a brand new show.

13:14Until then, thanks for listening.

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