Peptides are everywhere right now — especially in the wellness world.
How does 54-year-old Jennifer Aniston still look like she’s 30? Peptides.
How does Joe Rogan heal his muscles fast? A “Wolverine stack” of peptides.
But, most peptides are not Food and Drug Administration-approved. They’re being sold in what’s called a “gray market” — but that could be changing under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s federal health department.
So, are peptides the future of aging — or is there more we should know about them?
Will Humble, president of the Arizona Public Health Association, joined The Show to explain.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Will.
WILL HUMBLE: Morning. How you doing?
LAUREN GILGER: I’m great. Thanks for coming on. So you really see these peptides everywhere right now, especially in the wellness world, especially on social media. Where can you get them though right now?
WILL HUMBLE: So people are getting them in different places. A lot of people are going online and just getting a quick online assessment and then having the drugs delivered to them. The drugs will say "for experimental use only," so that’s one mechanism. People are getting them from their friends in the gym. They’re going to wellness clinics. Medspas is another place people are getting these things. And some people are actually going to their real-life doctor, who gives them a prescription that they take to a compounding pharmacy. ... And some people just go to Mexico.
LAUREN GILGER: Right, so there’s the description pretty well of the gray market we referred to, right? Well, what are peptides? Are they a supplement? Are they a vitamin? Are they something else?
WILL HUMBLE: Yeah, so most people should remember them from their high school biology class. They’re just —
LAUREN GILGER: I did not. [LAUGHS]
WILL HUMBLE: You didn’t? [LAUGHS] So amino acids are like the basic building block for proteins and a lot of the things that you need to have to work so your body can work. ... When you have a chain of amino acids together, that’s a peptide. If you have a bunch of those together, that’s a polypeptide. Eventually you get — long ones are proteins.
So peptides are chains of about between, say, 10 and 50 amino acids, so they’re short chain. But they don’t actually take part in the cell; they’re really signaling your cell. So you can think of peptides as like a text message to your cells to say, "Hey, do this."
LAUREN GILGER: ... Are they taken as serums, injections, a pill? What is this?
WILL HUMBLE: Almost all of them are injections. Some people squirt nasal spray ... if you take a peptide and swallow it, like in a shake or a smoothie or something like that, your stomach acid just breaks it down. So for it to actually do whatever people think it’s going to do, it needs to be injected or inhaled.
LAUREN GILGER: There is some crossover here, Will, with the very well-known and much talked about GLP-1 drugs right now?
WILL HUMBLE: Yeah, so those are peptides, but they’re actually licensed. So the GLP-1 drugs that you see on television for weight loss and stuff like that, those are legitimate peptides that are shown to work, been through the FDA trials. There’s dose responses. They’re tested for safety and effectiveness. So those, you know, work, what doses are there.
But all these things that Rogan and stuff are push, those are not licensed, they’re not regulated. And for the most part, there’s no clinical trials on them. There’s some animal studies on one of them, but like, this is really unregulated stuff.
LAUREN GILGER: What are they purported to do exactly? It seems like just a whole host of things.
WILL HUMBLE: You name it. ... So some people say it makes their skin look better, they’re more attentive and alert ... claims that if you’re injured at the gym lifting weights that you recover more quickly. And just general wellness. So that’s a very nebulous word on purpose, I think.
LAUREN GILGER: Right, but what does the research here actually show? You said there just isn’t a lot, basically?
WILL HUMBLE: No, no. If you look at — there’s no research on it. There’s a few animal studies on mice on one or two of these things, but for the most part, we’re in a giant, grand, uncontrolled experiment with the American people — and we’re not collecting the data even.
LAUREN GILGER: OK, so where does the FDA come in then, right? Like we talked about this gray market, the fact that you can still get these things basically wherever you feel like it and in wellness clinics, etc. But they are not tested for safety, they have not been tested for efficacy or effectiveness. What’s the federal government’s role here?
WILL HUMBLE: So the federal government’s big role is licensing drugs. Like the ... GLP-1 drugs, they went through the clinical trials, they licensed them. These peptides drugs are not licensed in any way that way.
But they still get away with it because there’s a loophole in federal law that says you can have experimental-use drugs that you can actually be a — it can be sold and mixed by these — they’re called compounding pharmacies, which have like jars of bulk materials that they then mix in a custom blend for people. And so it’s in this gray area. Is it legal? Is it not legal? For the most part, this stuff isn’t licensed, but it’s not an enforcement priority. And so it just has spread.
LAUREN GILGER: But the FDA and, you know, the Health Department under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be making some changes to that.
WILL HUMBLE: Right, so they had an FDA advisory committee that met last week. ... Kennedy got rid of the old people on the committee, put his people on the committee, then put up in front of the committee: Should we completely deregulate these things, move them from the gray market to an unlicensed OK market?
The committee disregarded the FDA staff, who said, "Don’t approve this, don’t" — it's not an approval — "don’t list this on the bulk drug list. It’s not tested." They disregarded that, and Kennedy still hasn’t made a final decision about what they’re going to do, but he’s made lots of statements that he loves this stuff. So I think we can expect in the next few months this’ll move from a gray market to a whiter market, I guess — but they’re still not going to be licensed.
LAUREN GILGER: ... OK. That is Will Humble, president of the Arizona Public Health Association, joining us to tell us a little bit more about the peptide trend. Will, thank you so much. Appreciate it.
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