Hello and welcome to the Consistency Project podcast. I'm Patrick Cummings here, as always, with E.C. Sinkowski. Every week, we simplify the principles and practices of nutrition, health, and fitness that will help you perform better, feel better, and live better. Thank you so much for tuning into the show. Hello, E.C. How are you?

Great. How are you doing?

I'm wonderful. I'm wonderful.

We're going to talk about something that I know nothing about, which is basically every other week at this point. But we're going to talk about peptides and the peptides craze that is taking over the wellness world, apparently. I didn't know anything about it, so I'm excited to learn about this. A couple of things we're going to talk about. we're going to explore what peptides actually are and how they function in the human body.

We'll examine specific popular peptides like BPC 157 and TB 500, analyzing

their claimed benefits versus actual evidence. And then we're going to talk about the real risks

and concerns of using injectable peptides without sufficient clinical research. Does that sound good? Let's do it. All right. So let's educate me and anybody else out there who obviously have heard the word peptides, but I've no idea what we're talking about here. So let's do a little bit of background. What are they? What are they supposed to do? Why we're talking about them? Another new wellness trend out there. I can't keep up. I think that's what's going on. Yeah, yeah, here we go. Another new wellness trend. One of our listeners, Jill asked about them. So here we have a podcast episode to address another one of these trends. And I think it's just going to be another one of these cases where the marketing hype is really kind of proceeding any clinical evidence. I think we've talked about that a lot with supplementing. I mean, gosh, we probably talked about that a lot with everything. I think capitalism

has some good things about it, but one of the downsides is that everything revolves around selling,

everything becomes a market. You know, selling and attention is where our focus is, not necessarily

accuracy or evidence. And so from what I can tell,

you know, the peptide marketing is really around anti-aging, healing, tissue repair, recovery,

and then, of course, just anti-inflammatory, because that's just a great sort of meaningless

catch-all for these wellness gimmicks. And what peptides are, they're just small protein-like molecules.

So we've talked about before that proteins are made up of these individual molecules

called amino acids, and proteins are really long chains of amino acids, say more than

a hundred.

But peptides are going to just be shorter chains, say less than 100.

And our body makes thousands of peptides. A well just be shorter chains, say less than 100. And our body makes thousands

of peptides. A well-known one is insulin. So insulin is a 51 amino acid-long peptide hormone. And of course,

that helps control blood sugar and store nutrients as we've talked about before. And then even something

like the GLP1 drugs that are so popular now, those are peptides. So they aren't

particularly new, but I do think they've, they're sort of new to the general wellness side of things,

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