To Your Health?

Hi {{first_name|friend}},

Nothing will humble you faster than Mother Nature and the march of time. Once, you were a young person who spent your non-work time beautifying, fitnessing, or otherwise indulging yourself. Now, your daily “beauty routine” features at least three medicated products and you find yourself Googling things like “bursitis cures” and “thick heel skin.”

Every day we read another article about what people are trying to improve their health, and it’s just exhausting. Like all the frenzy around peptides — which we explain in this week’s feature.

This is an area where old regulations haven’t kept pace with new innovations. As The Washington Post explains, “Your favorite local restaurant or hair salon is subject to more inspections and oversight than the medspa down the street selling peptide injections.”

Per their reporting, “Several local authorities said in interviews that they feel powerless to fully protect consumers. They report schemes consumers may not be aware of — peptides being made within people’s homes, peptide labels claiming to come from manufacturing facilities that turn out to be empty office spaces, and medspas selling peptides that were never approved for human use.” Frankly, we’re too scared of melanoma to consider shooting ourselves up with a compound that’d make us tanner, or anything else that even whispers at an increased cancer risk.

The Economist traces the peptides trend to injection-friendly bodybuilding and powerlifting communities, whose body dysmorphic practices have spread far and wide thanks to social media. (“Stacking,” now popular in peptide circles, can be traced to steroid use.) A historic analog, they note, was a mixture of “strychnine, heroin, cocaine, and caffeine,” used for doping in both athletes and racehorses. Just look at how that turned out.

Bye,
Your friends at Gloria

Peptides are having a moment. They’re on your feed, in your group chats, and, increasingly, in unlabeled vials people buy from an obscure WhatsApp number and inject at home. The pitch is intoxicating: cutting-edge science is being shot straight into your body, helping you sleep better, build more muscle, lose weight, and slow the aging process.

Reality can be grimmer. In July, one physician told a local NBC station that he’d recently hospitalized a patient who suffered severe psychiatric symptoms after mixing a pile of vitamins and peptides. Which product caused it? He had no way of knowing. This is part of what makes the peptide landscape confusing. Celebrity, wellness influencer, and Silicon Valley biohacker testimonials can drown out the stories of people who’ve had negative health consequences.

I spoke with two experts to help sort out what peptides are, why they’ve exploded, and what consumers should know. 

So, what actually is a peptide?

“Peptides are small chains of amino acids that are put together to form an active component,” says Dr. Katrin Svensson, an associate professor of pathology at Stanford who directs the university’s Metabolic Core Facility. “These are made naturally by the body, and they act on a cell to induce some sort of physiological response.” 

Your body makes thousands of them, like insulin and endorphins. The most well-known synthetic peptides are semaglutide and tirzepatide, the active ingredient in GLP-1 medications Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, and Mounjaro. Biohackers are using a different set of injectables that are also synthetic. Some of the most talked about options are CJC-1295 (boosting metabolism), Melanotan II (melanin production), BPC-157 (wound healing), and TB-500 (muscle repair). 

If they’re “natural,” why all the fuss?

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that because some peptides are already made naturally in the body, they must be safe to take. But that is simply not true,” says Dr. Jessica Alvarez, an associate professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine. “How they’re taken, how much is taken, and for how long are all important considerations, even for ‘natural’ products.” 

Injectables enter the bloodstream faster and more intact than pills, which get partly broken down in the stomach. 

“Say that there’s lead or some other type of contaminant, you will get this directly into your bloodstream,” Svensson says. “You may get sepsis and die. Injectables have much greater risks.”

It doesn’t help that most of the unregulated biohacking peptides have never been rigorously tested in humans. Animal studies have shown that growth hormone related peptides — like CJC-1295, TB-500, and others — can cause cancer. There’s so much we don’t know about the long-term safety or biological effects. It’s unclear how or if the options coveted by biohackers will interact with medications, supplements, or even other peptides. 

Yikes. So why are people injecting them all of a sudden?

“A lot of the peptides that are used in the biohacking community are sort of inspired by the GLP-1 drugs,” Svensson says. “That was really the first time it was shown in humans that these peptides can be very potent.”

Semaglutide was approved for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes in 2017 and, at a higher dose, as Wegovy, for weight management in 2021. The results of those drugs reset the category. If one injectable peptide could do that, the logic goes, why not try peptides for everything else?

Alvarez also attributes the rise in peptide usage to old promises of miracle drugs for anti-aging, weight loss, and a “better” body being delivered through a new system. 

“What’s different now is the reach of social media, the rise of influencers, and the rate that people are being fed these promises. Peptides are often marketed as cutting-edge science and a way to control biology to get quick results,” she says. “Combine that with anecdotal success stories shared online or by friends, and safety concerns can be outweighed by perceived benefits.”

Why is it so easy to access them?

Because almost nothing stands between you and a vial. The peptides driving this trend are sold openly online under labels reading “research use only” or “not for human consumption.” That disclaimer allows vendors to ship unregulated compounds without a prescription and without oversight.

The supply chain is short, cheap, and active. These injectables, which are initially sold as powders, are manufactured overseas, largely in China, then sold on research chemical sites, through resellers, and promoted on TikTok, Telegram, and Discord. Buyers reconstitute the powder with bacteriostatic water, draw it into a syringe, and inject at home, following a tutorial from an influencer or, lately, via Custom GPTs. 

Is the FDA doing anything about this?

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TO WATCH Olivia Wilde’s really on a roll right now. Her indie film The Invite’s still in theaters, and it’s doing so well that she’s already signed a deal for a follow-up, titled Naughty, which will star Jennifer Aniston and Peter Dinklage. Somehow, she has another film coming out this week, a kink-focused comedy called I Want Your Sex.

TO LISTEN The aesthetes behind popular men’s style newsletter Blackbird Syplane have put together a decently long playlist for summer 2026 (here on Apple, here on Spotify). Long live the mixtape.

TO MAKE We’re always trying to find ways to get more beans into our diet and this bean salad recipe is our new fave. We like the sweetness of the roasted peppers paired with soppressata, and how a batch is good for a few lunches.

Why did it take so long for this convo about perimenopause? • Loved this essay about giving a tween a room of their own. • The discovery that ovarian cancer begins in the fallopian tubes could save a lot of women…now we need insurance to cover their removal. • A fascinating exploration of a relationship with a chatbot, but trigger warning, also. • We’re coining a term for this sort of post: nostalgia-fishing.

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