With gray market medical snake oil flooding the market and the head of the Food and Drug Administration smoking DMT behind the wheel, peptides are quickly becoming the go-to hack for just about any malady you can imagine. Yet for as popular as they are, they’re not necessarily safe to use — a fact many new users are starting to discover the hard way.
New reporting by KFF Health News revealed the story of Dylan Meetze, a weightlifter who bought an experimental peptide intended for laboratory research from a company called Researchem. Meetze’s peptide of choice was BPC-157, a synthetic substance derived from 15 amino acids and prized by YouTubers for its supposed ability to reduce inflammation and repair damaged tissue.
For Meetze, BPC-157 was a way to enhance his weightlifting performance. Yet after spraying the stuff up his nose for just three days, KFF notes the peptide user fell seriously ill.
“It was like I was underwater, like it took the most to do anything,” Meetze told the outlet.
Though he stopped huffing BPC-157 almost as soon as the side effects appeared, the weightlifter said he endured fatigue and anxiety, as well as eye and muscle spasms for months afterward.
“There are millions of success stories with these peptides,” he told KFF, “but no one wants to believe that this wrecks some of our lives.”
Another peptide user who combined BPC-157 with a naturally-occurring protein called TB-4 told KFF that his side effects also came within days of beginning the experimental treatment.
“My left eye started throbbing really badly, and the left side of my face became numb,” the man, identified only as Dominik E, told the publication. He went on to battle migraines for two months, calling the ordeal a “total nightmare.”
Certain peptides have become established treatments after passing clinical trials, like GLP-1 drugs for diabetes and weight loss.
But for the many other peptides that haven’t undergone clinical review, supporters in the medical research community are few and far between, despite what the chorus of pro-peptide comedians and health influencers would have you believe. Robust studies on their impact on human health remain exceedingly rare — making any use of unregulated peptides on the human body a serious roll of the dice.
“A lot of this pseudoscience stuff sounds deeply impressive — inflammation this and telomere that — but at the end of the day, none of it really matters,” former associate commissioner for public health strategy and analysis at the FDA Peter Lurie told KFF. “You’ve got to show clinical benefit in humans: does it work?”
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