403 ‒ Peptides: separating scientific promise from marketing hype

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host Peter Attia. >> [music]

>> Welcome to a new episode of the Drive. Today we're returning to peptides, a topic full of misinformation. So, we're going to do a concise version um of the topic and make our original AMA and the show notes that accompanied them several months ago free to everyone.

Uh peptides sit at this intersection of real science and rampant commercialization. Sold as cure-alls for everything from muscle repair to longevity.

Uh and look, I get why. If you're in pain, if you're exhausted, the promise of accelerated healing is uh understandably hard to resist. Uh most people using these things are not reckless. They're hopeful. Uh but hope has become a product and it's been attached to molecules that, you know,

quite frankly, haven't earned the claims made about them. Uh my goal in revisiting this topic isn't to promote or dismiss peptides, but to give you a framework because I think a framework or a scaffolding always helps you navigate complicated topics in life. So, what a peptide is,

where the evidence is solid, where it's absent. We're going to apply that to examples and then we'll look at sourcing, where the field is headed, and various other topics. So, the goal is that you'll leave this episode knowing when the answer to use of a peptide is yes, no, or simply not yet.

>> So Peter, I think as we get started, it'd be really helpful to first define what peptides are, right? So, a lot of people use the term and so what does it mean when we say peptides? And ultimately, what is your response if someone comes to you and asks, "Hey Peter, should I be taking peptides?"

>> Well, when people ask me about whether peptides work, my first response is is usually some, you know, variation on you're asking the wrong question. That's sort of like asking whether drugs work or whether surgery works.

A peptide is simply a short chain of amino acids. Some of these are among the most important drugs ever developed, like insulin and of course the now uh ubiquitously used GLP-1 agonists.

While others have essentially no credible evidence behind them. The word tells you almost nothing about whether a molecule is safe, effective, or even scientifically plausible. It's a chemical description, not a mark of quality. And one of the biggest marketing successes of the last decade

has been convincing people otherwise. Distilling this increasingly popular group of molecules down into a single word does a significant amount of rhetorical heavy lifting.

Peptide conveys sort of a naturalistic connotation, essentially conveying that it is safe and effective by default.